10 communication tips and tricks for scientists
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
For scientists – and indeed other experts – great communication skills are useful for conducting occasional outreach and media activities. But they’re also vital in more regular tasks – like writing academic papers, sharing research online through blogging and social media, writing grants and even crafting effective emails.
No matter your task, your audience and their needs must be front of mind to be an effective communicator.
These were the key points I shared in a recent science communication session with early-to-mid-career researchers at the Future Industries Institute at the University of South Australia.
As part of my preparation, I revisited one of my articles from 2014: Ten Digital Media Tools for Science Communicators. I originally put the piece together after attending a Walkley Foundation Digital Media Bootcamp (the workshop featured many experienced media operators as presenters – hence the quotes and other advice shown below).
Here I’ve prepared a version of that piece with a few tweaks to suit 2019.
In a nutshell, to put punch into your communication online:
Get multimedia happening
Make the story king
Know how people read stuff
Get social. Right now
Flog that phone
Search with intent
Help people find you
Don’t publish and walk away
Develop your digital identity
Keep an eye on trends
Here’s what I mean.
1. Get multimedia happening
The potent mix of words, fixed images, sound and moving footage that made up Guardian’s story Firestorm resulted in a Walkey Award. With interviews, maps, and mountain fly-overs, The New York Times story Snowfall launched a new digital direction for that newspaper, which now invests heavily in its audiovisual production team. ABC’s Tracks Across Time is a more recent example, a moving story that shares the existence of rare, 95 million year old dinosaur footprints in Queensland.
These pieces require months of work from multiple staff members with diverse skills, and are clearly way beyond the means of most publishing houses (let alone freelance operators like me).
But that doesn’t mean you can’t do your own version of multimedia. Small commercial digital story producers, science writers and bloggers can feature layered content to add interest and depth.
Say you’re writing a story about a new museum exhibition. Use a stand-alone camera or your phone to take well-lit images — people are great, but unusual objects are also worth grabbing — and use them to break up your text. If you can’t take good photos, go online to find relevant creative commons images on sites like flickr (but do make sure you attribute the photographer somewhere in your article).
Be sparing with images. The impact is greater if they’re well chosen, relevant and enhance rather than distract from the story.
Madhvi Pankhania, former producer at The Guardian
What about some sound? Use your phone to grab an audio file that conjures up visions of noisy kids filing in and out of the museum, and immerse it in your article using a program like soundcloud.
Audiovisual content is also doable — borrow a friend (or even use the selfie approach) to capture footage of yourself walking around the exhibit, or do a vox pop with another person visiting the venue.
Perhaps use an app to make short, snappy, looping clips to add colour, movement and sound to your blog post. (See Item 5 below for how to get best use from your phone for capturing photos and moving footage.)
Online publishing platforms like Squarespace, Wordpress and Medium allow writers to easily insert many types of content to support their written material.
Try to get the pacing right. Ask yourself, ‘do the pictures fit, do they sit alongside the right block of text?’.
Madhvi Pankhania, former producer at The Guardian
Sound, audiovisual and photographic elements can also be added to any social media you create related to the article, and mean that readers are more likely to visit your article, read your article, share your article and hang around longer on your page (all of which improve your Google ranking).
2. Make the story king
As discussed in Item 1, the internet is full of audio-visual magic. Images, moving pictures, interactive graphs, surveys and sound overlays make digital content snazzy, catchy and eye grabbing. That’s all fine. But it’s close to useless unless underneath it sits a good story. No matter how many additional features you can squeeze onto your web page, the story is still key.
Multimedia journalism is still journalism — the choice of the story is critical.
Madhvi Pankhania, former producer at The Guardian
Isabelle Oderberg was the first social media editor in Australia, and now works in the not-for-profit sector in social media management, communications and high-level strategy. With extensive journalism and social media experience, she believes the following elements are critical for a good story:
→ Make people feel something
→ Speak in the right voice
→ Have a sense of humour (where appropriate)
→ Know context
→ Feed into existing trends.
Stories that have longevity are worth doing, so pick your topic well.
Madhvi Pankhania, former producer at The Guardian
It’s also worth remembering that stories posted online attract two types of interest (i.e. clicks) — an initial peak, followed by a longer tail that stretches into the future. Your content does not necessarily have to have an immediate news story-like impact to be worth doing — if you write a quality article that has longevity, it will be found and shared.
3. Know how people read stuff
We all complain we don’t even have time to read our emails, let alone delve into cool-looking articles we find online. You must assume your readers also have this problem.
As a science writer and publisher you must make your content not only accurate and relevant, but also easy to find, read and manage. Focus on:
→ Making the title explicit, and using appropriate key words (use tools like http://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner and http://www.google.com/trends/).
→ Inserting a meaningful subheading or leader paragraph in bold to entice your reader forward.
→ Breaking up long text with additional subheadings and labels.
In essence, writers must help their readers stay in control when confronted with long or complicated articles. This has particular relevance for science, when the content can be inherently complex.
Subheadings and tags allow people to scan the article quickly and go to the section that they want, and book-mark so they can return later.
Madhvi Pankhania, former producer at The Guardian
Writers must assume readers will open articles and perform an initial scroll up and down — usually on a smartphone — before they begin to read. Unless an article is well laid out into sections with subheadings, images and other points of interest, you may lose the reader immediately (see articles like this and this for more on this topic).
People immediately scroll down to see what the article looks like, to see how it’s formatted, to see if there are comments at the end.
Front-end Web Developer James Coleman
4. Get social. Right now
Social media shapes the way content is created, read and shared. In Australia, the most commonly-used social media platform is Facebook, with YouTube in second place, followed by Instagram, Snapchat, twitter and LinkedIn.
Social media is important not just because it allows you to send out your own material and to converse with people who read it, but because it allows others to share your stuff. And there are ways you can maximise the chances of this happening.
Surange Priyashantha (former SEO strategist and social media manager at Fairfax Media) said highly shareable materials includes:
Long form content
Content with images and infographics
List posts, or listicles (especially with 10, 23, 16 or 24 items)
Question format, as it drives better engagement: how to? why? what?
Articles with a byline, because it makes the content more believable
Content that is chosen to match days and times (eg video/image posts on weekends, and written posts on weekdays)
Radio National’s Tim Ritchie recommends you make short and snappy clips from audio files like podcasts and interviews to use in conjunction with media connected to the long-form content.
Find the ‘social duration’ — it’s short!
Tim Ritche, Radio National
As examples, the ‘social duration’ for a 10-minute audiovisual story could be a 3 minute YouTube teaser, or you might chose to extract 30–90 second grabs from a 50-minute audio documentary. These short clips can then be attached to Facebook posts and tweets to maximise rates of click-through and sharing.
Isabelle Oderberg recommends writers using social media need to think about when people are using their devices to access written content. Articles we read whilst commuting (when we have a large block of time available) are likely to be different from those read during work (when we snatch a couple of minutes here and there). You should think hard about when and how you send your content out.
The only way to know social media is to do social media. Go now. Get started — watch and follow others, think it through carefully, spend time and do it properly. And analyse how each experiment works out — we’re scientists, after all. Look at and apply the data.
Twitter tips from Flip Prior (formerly Twitter Australia’s Partnerships Manager, now at ABC):
→ Add images to your tweets to grab attention
→ Apply to have the Twitter Verification ‘blue tick’ placed alongside your twitter handle to indicate the authenticity of your identity or brand
→ Use Twitter analytics to see organic impressions, view charts of performance, access detailed engagement metrics and export files for reports
→ Try not to rely on scheduled tweets. Analysis shows that engagement increases when real people construct and send out tweets in real time.
5. Flog that phone
So we know we can jazz up our written material with photos and audiovisual elements (see Item 1). But where can we get such content? Actually, from ourselves. Most of us are carrying around a $1000-$2000 high quality camera in our pockets, and yet we don’t use it to its full potential.
Why is your phone so useful? It’s always with you, and it’s a good camera.
Tom McKendrick, Head of Audio and Video, Fairfax Media
Tom McKendrick (Head of Audio and Video at Fairfax Media) is full of fantastic tips on how to use your phone as a journalistic tool.
When to shoot
- At press conferences
- For pieces to camera
- To capture vox pops and witness reactions
- When you’re travelling
- If you witness incidents such as fires, explosions or natural phenomena.
Getting the most from your phone
- Turn on flight mode to eliminate audio interference
- Always, always, always turn the phone horizontal (‘landscape’)
- Don’t hit record until the view has settled into ‘landscape’
- Plug in a microphone if you can (this might just be a headset microphone, which you can loop over the shirt buttons on your interviewee to get good sound capture from the mouth and chest).
How to achieve good composition and effective framing
- Practice what looks ‘right’
- Get to know the rule of thirds
- Let movement happen within your shot, not by moving the camera
- If shooting a person up close, get their eyes in line with the camera, ask them to look into the frame (not out of the shot) and capture their head and shoulders (not whole body).
Getting the focus and the light right
- Outside is best for vision; iPhones love sunlight
- A bright overcast day is optimal
- Make sure there is no backlight (i.e. a light source behind the subject)
- Look for lights/lamps/reflection in front of the subject to throw light on them
- When setting up, use finger pressure on your screen to tell the camera where you want the primary focus to be (see this post from Mia Cobb, who has already explained this process very well).
Make sure sound quality is as good as possible
- Get as close as possible to your subject
- Do everything possible to reduce background noise, especially wind. If you can’t get away completely, turn your back to it or put your body in between the noise and the microphone
- Remember that some subtle background noise can add interest (eg traffic, roadworks or wildlife)
- Use a plug-in microphone for best quality. As an alternative, ask the interviewee to hold the phone, or you can use the phone headset as a microphone.
Fake it ‘til you make it
- Rule of three: get 3 different angles from the same location: one wide, one mid and one close
- Keep it steady: use 2 hands if needs be, pin your elbows to your hips
- Keep it straight: look at the horizon, and make sure shot is level
- Try not to pan! Compose a nice shot and let the movement happen within it
- If you do need to move, keep it in one plane, keep it slow and know what your start and end frames will be.
Most of all, practice! And invest in editing software if you’re really serious.
6. Search with intent
Most websites have a search function; that’s fine for basic stuff, and if you kinda already know what you’re looking for. But for detailed research-grade searching, you should be working within Google (or another search engine of your preference).
You can tell Google to search within a specific url, and to look for particular terms at that site. For example: if you type ‘site:www.abc.net.au/ intitle:dinosaur’ you’ll pull up articles on the ABC website with the word dinosaur in the title. More information on how to conduct advanced Google searches is available at Google help. A more general summary of advanced Boolean searching is available here.
Don’t think that just ‘cause you’re on the internet, searching is necessarily going to be quick. Good research takes time.
Isabelle Oderberg, Social Media Strategist
You can also ask Google to help you find content published on social media (http://www.social-searcher.com/google-social-search/) and to verify images (http://www.google.com.au/insidesearch/features/images/searchbyimage.html).
Tools such as Trendsmap can help you find what people are talking about in real time.
If you can tap into trending topics, you’ll more than likely attract readers. Sometimes this might mean re-editing or re-framing existing content as new moods and trends arise.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that differences exist within individual languages across the globe. In English, key words in Australia might be different from those in the USA (e.g. ‘bin’ versus ‘trash-can’ or ‘footpath’ versus ‘pavement’).
7. Help people find you
On the flip side of searching is being found. You can do many things to make sure that Google (and therefore readers) have the best chance of landing on your content. Your basic goal here is to make sure that your urls are amongst the top answers that pop up when people search for the kind of science that you write.
Surange Priyashantha (SEO strategist and social media manager at Fairfax Media) advises the following:
To make sure you’re found on the internet:
→ Use key words that match your content; find these with http://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner and http://www.google.com/trends/
→ Make sure your headlines and titles are carefully crafted
→ Insert relevant and useful links in your copy (links build your authority)
→ If you’re referring to celebrities/famous people, use their full names
→ Embed content like tweets into your article
→ Increase the amount of time people spend on your pages by making your content attractive (images and graphics) and engaging (put in a poll or a quiz)
→ Encourage readers to post comments
→ Maximise opportunities for sharing of your content through social media
Imagine a robotic human that is trained to find good stories, and that has a reasonably good capacity to mimic human reading and comprehension patterns: in essence, this is Google. Recent updates to Google mean that it incorporates semantics. Now searches occur with consideration given to the context of a term within the copy, and whether related terms appear in the same article.
Don’t put layers between you and your readers.
Isabelle Oderberg, Social Media Strategist
The bottom line is this: if you’re creating well-developed written material which uses key words but also more subtle indicators of your expertise, AND you include links to well-known articles and names in your field, then Google will find you.
8. Don’t publish and walk away
You spend days crafting an article or blog post, hours finding the right images and blood, sweat and tears getting the edit just right. Finally, you hit ‘publish’. Done, right?
Nope, not done. So not done. Your content is likely to get lost if you simply leave it to sit on your website at this point. Isabelle Oderberg recommends there are simple ways to ensure your content is found and is interesting over a long period of time (whether over the course of a day, a week, a month or a year):
How to prolong the life of your stories:
→ Choose the topic and related key-words wisely
→ Remember there may be a peak and then a longer tail of interest
→ Refresh the story over the course of the day by adding extra details, embedded tweets relating to the topic (perhaps from celebrities), links to other related content, new images
→ Send it out via social media many times: do it manually and with personality, and tweak your language and your hashtags each time
→ Find the ‘social flow’ by using social media usage data to work out the best days and times to post material (see Yellow Social Media Report).
9. Develop your digital identity
Whether you work in a research institution, for the government or are crammed into a tiny home office as a freelancer, you must develop your own digital identity. Nobody else will do this for you. Your reputation, your visibility and your own personal brand are in your control, and you can easily apply tools that help you to maximise this.
In the book-publishing world, developing your own brand and online identity is often referred to as your ‘author platform’. There are many online articles that address the pros and cons of taking this approach: check out this one from Allison Tait, and another from Brooke Warner.
10. Keep an eye on trends
Because we work in the science world, it’s tempting to just focus on the hypothesis, research and data side of things. But as communicators we must also stay in touch with cutting edge media trends. I believe science writers need to be able to ‘match it’ with other content generators in order to remain relevant and to maximise the chances that our online content is found and shared. Experienced media practitioners do see a place for science among other online content.
Isabelle Oderberg mentions two trends that journalists must be aware of:
Multi-screening — the idea that people are usually using more than one screen at a time. For example, TV watchers are often concurrently using their social media platforms to share and discuss content (think ABC’s TV Q&A and associated twitter hashtag #qanda). The latest data shows one in three people discuss the program they are watching on social media while viewing.
Phones are winning the screen race. For example, in Australia 92% of 18-29 year olds using social media do so on their smartphone. Nearly two thirds (62%) of those aged 50-64 access social media on a smartphone.
But why should you care? Let’s take the ‘move to mobile’ example. Imagine you’re publishing your content on a website that has been set up for viewing on desk- or lap-tops. That’s fine in an office. But when a reader opens this same page on her smart phone (perhaps whilst travelling home on the bus, in a queue at the post-office, or bored at work), the font size and width does not automatically adjust and she is left zooming in and out, sliding left and right to see all the words. If you don’t get the coding right for smart-phone viewing, goodbye reader.
Another trend many of us are already aware of is data journalism, or the use of numerical data to create content.
Want to tackle a little data journalism? You could try the following tools: (thanks to Jack Fisher, UTS Journalism): Infogram, Chartbuilder, Datawrapper or Timeline.
I attended the Walkley Foundation Digital Media Bootcamp with an Australian Science Communicators professional development grant. This post is an edited version of an article I prepared for the association. Thanks to Jim Plouffe at The Lead South Australia for his advice in preparing my application.