Effective Social Media for Scholarly Publishers

Social media is no longer a shiny new tool; if executed well, it can be a powerful channel within an integrated marketing strategy that supports an organisation in meeting its objectives.

Earlier this month, I delivered social media training on behalf of ALPSP in their Effective Social Media for Scholarly Publishers course. After 6 hours of online training, my head is still happily swimming with all things Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, strategy, and metrics. There were also fantastic discussions on crisis management in scholarly publishing, smart goals, and critiquing! 

If you couldn’t attend the course, I’ve got you covered! Here are key takeaways that will help to shine a spotlight on your current social efforts and, if needed, some tips to shake up your strategy: 

Platforms: 

According to a 2022 HubSpot survey, the biggest social media challenge that brands are facing is determining which platforms to place focus on. 

Tip: If you are at the beginning of your social journey, as a starting point research where your audience is. For example, check out relevant # engagement, undertake a competitor analysis and see what level of traction their posts are getting, and look at reach capabilities using paid social.

Paid social: Securing organic reach is increasingly challenging, especially on Facebook. Paid social is relatively inexpensive and allows you to apply an experimental approach to see which platforms best meet your objectives.

Tip: Paid social best supports the top of the marketing funnel (awareness) but retargeting via paid social can be a great support in the consideration and conversion part of the journey.  

Community: Think of your social media followers as your community and not your audience. Audience implies a hierarchy and a one-way conversation.

Tip: Be a good member of your community; understand your role in the community, and to do that successfully…you need to listen!

Strategy: Without a sound social strategy in place, you will face all sorts of avoidable hurdles, for example: securing buy in from budget holders; spreading yourself too thinly, which can result in burnout and lost productivity; not having focus; and the inability to measure success.

Tip: Set SMART goals; these should fall out of your broader company and marketing objectives and should not sit in their own bubble! Don’t fall into the trap of starting with tactics; start at the top and understand the business mission and objectives so the social goals underpin company goals.

Trends to watch out for in 2022:

Tik Tok: Excluding messaging platforms, Tik Tok is now the 4^th most popular social channel after Instagram. However, most businesses are reluctant to invest, with only 38% planning to increase investment in 2022 …is your organisation the rising star of scholarly comms on TikTok, and ready to take centre stage?!

Short form videos are now more accessible to brands thanks to the lower production costs, and the authenticity and lower production nature of video/stories/reels is part of the appeal to users. It’s listed as the most engaging social content type, so if you’ve not yet integrated short-form videos into your social strategy, what are you waiting for? 

Metrics:

Including social metrics to measure ROI not only holds you accountable but also showcases the impact and bottom-line results your social strategy generates. A Sprout social report highlights how only on 15% of marketers are using social data to measure ROI, and just 10% use the data to inform business decisions.

Tip: Watch out for vanity metrics! Think about followers...it’s meaningless having a huge follower base if they are not your target community. Make sure you choose meaningful metrics to track and if something isn’t working…stop doing it! Where possible, go beyond native metrics on the individual platforms and link it up with Google Analytics; this can really help to link social activity to hard metrics that matter most to the organisation–such as usage, submissions, and sales.

Oh, and one last point on metrics…you can’t measure success without a strong strategy in place (see above point on strategy)!

Tools:

There is a vast selection of tools to support you on your social media journey, ranging from scheduling, to listening, and analytics. Your choices will likely come down to the scale of your social presence, and as is so often the case, budget.

Tip: If undecided between platforms, sign up for free trials and compare tools to see which fits your needs. Don’t underestimate the power of the good old fashioned manual method, that can be customised to meet your requirements.

Booking for next year’s ALPSP course, Effective Social Media for Scholarly Publishers, will open later this year.  Contact Melissa Marshall for further information about this or other training courses.

About the author

Kelly Henwood, Senior Manager, TBI Communications

Kelly’s experience includes developing brand strategies, brand assets, and improving brand experience and engagement across multiple channels including digital, TV, film, and licensing.  At Oxford University Press Kelly led the Humanities, Social Science and Law Journals Product Marketing team driving results with diverse marketing strategies. She has also managed partner relationships and the marketing program for several leading society journals.  In previous experience, Kelly managed international brand and licensing programs for both the commercial arm of the University of Oxford and a TV production company.

Kelly is CIM qualified with a Postgraduate Diploma.

Follow Kelly's social channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-henwood/ 

Twitter: @kellyhenwood

Why is innovation a challenge for established publishers?

Charles Thiede, CEO of tech startup Zapnito (and former CPO of Nature Publishing Group and CTO of Informa Business Intelligence), explores the theory of the innovator’s dilemma. And what publishers can learn from it.

In a couple of weeks’ time, I’m going to be chairing an event with ALPSP entitled ‘Innovate or Perish? How to think like a startup’. It’s got me thinking on the challenges of innovation within large publishers - challenges I’ve seen from the inside, as well as out.

I asked Zapnito advisor Mark Allin, former CEO of Wiley and a speaker at the event, for his view on how innovative publishing companies are at the moment. On a scale of 1-10, he gave them 3 or 4. That’s not ideal.

So why is this the case? There’s no question that the publishing industry is full of talent and resources. Yet startups are often seen as having the edge when it comes to innovation. The ‘innovator’s dilemma’ - a term coined by Clayton Christensen in 1997, offers insight into why that is.

The innovator’s dilemma

The problem isn’t necessarily lack of innovation itself, or enthusiasm to try new ideas, but more the environment in which those new ideas are developed and nurtured.

The value from new innovations isn’t realised immediately. It tends to follow an S-curve (see the yellow line on the graph). Improving a product takes time and many iterations, and quite often the early iterations provide minimal value. That can prove the sticking point for many businesses.

Ultimately, the primary aim of most established companies is to keep and add additional value to their existing customer base and their current business models. This means new and innovative ideas can be undervalued, because they are applied and tested with existing customers or through existing models, rather than looking at new markets or models. 

It also means that if innovative ideas fail to deliver results quickly, they are seen as failing - the ROI is thought to be too low. In this case, often management acts ‘sensibly’, in what they view to be the company’s best fiduciary interests, and rejects continued investment in the innovation. 

This is why startups, usually with little or nothing to lose when they enter the market, are so much more successful. They find new markets to apply their innovations, largely by trial and error, at low margins. Their nimbleness and low cost structures allow them to operate sustainably where established companies could not. They don’t have the same responsibilities to, for example, shareholders or existing customers.

At the same time, especially with ‘bootstrapped’ companies, startups must survive on their own two feet. This means that if the initial idea doesn’t work, they can adapt and even pivot their models. We did this at Zapnito early on. In contrast, for an established publisher, the initial idea is often fixed and changing direction means failure. 

By finding the right application use and market, startups advance rapidly and hit the steep part of the S-curve, eventually entering the more mature markets of the established companies and disrupting them.

What’s the solution?

There is no one way to do innovation. But to me, the most vital change is a change in attitudes. Traditional publishers will need to think outside their traditional business models. Innovation does not need to be in context of existing ways of doing business. Too many media companies are organised around delivery models vs. solutions to a market. That leaves little room for innovation.

There’s also a need to start playing the long game and looking for ways to manage development processes so that it’s okay to change direction, or even to fail.

I also want to challenge the idea of innovation itself. Innovation does not mean invention. Most people think innovation and invention are synonymous. But Jeff Bezos did not invent ecommerce. Steve Jobs did not invent smartphones. The innovation happened in the execution of those ideas and how they were delivered to the market.

There are lots of potential ways for publishers to nurture more innovation within their companies. This could be through mergers and acquisitions (M&A), partnering with disruptive businesses, creating an internal ‘skunkworks’-style structure, or even separating out new innovations into offshoot companies.

These are all ideas I’m looking forward to exploring at the event. Hope to see you there.

The Innovate or Perish? seminar will take place on Thursday 15 November 2018. To find our more or to book your place visit: https://www.alpsp.org/Events/Innovate-or-Perish/60274

Brand Building the Scholarly Author – So what’s in it for the Publisher?

In this week’s guest post we hear from Jean Dawson, Product Manager at Charlesworth Author Services and member of ALPSP’s Professional Development Committee behind ALPSP programme of webinars.

It has never been more topical to develop academic authorship as a ‘brand’; this has been particularly emphasised by educational institutions that now often provide training sessions for their Early Career Researchers (ECRs, including PhD and Master’s students). These courses enable ECRs to understand how to build their online presence and the importance of starting to think of themselves as a ‘brand’ very early in their careers. Professor Stephen Hawking, for example, was not only an academic he was a ‘brand’, as are the TV personalities Dr Alice Roberts and Dr Brian Cox.  Although it is clear that not every academic can reach the same pinnacle of ‘brand’ as Professor Stephen Hawking, they can nevertheless be taught how best to present both themselves and their research to the online community effectively.  I have attended sessions at universities where ECRs have been tutored on how to write and present their LinkedIn profiles as a part of their extended curriculum vitae, create online social profiles, were reminded that prospective employers can search for you on Facebook, were given guidelines on how much of their research to reveal online (and where, as ‘online’ is a big place) and on which online communities to associate with. All vital life tools to assist in publicising your research at an early stage, job searches, promotions, and publishing contracts.

Advancements in technology platforms provide tools that directly assist academics to build their online profiles, understanding where their work is being read and cited, as well as how to build an ‘audience’ for their work. These platforms also encourage authors to be proactive in their research dissemination, rather than just passively waiting for citations. They shout ‘Get out there and sell yourself!’ As Charlie Rapple (co-founder of Kudos) will be pointing out in her presentation in ‘Brand Building the Scholarly Author’ ALPSP webinar, given an annual research investment of over £1 trillion by funders, and with over 2 million outputs published, it’s simply staggering to note that up to 50% of these outputs will never be discovered. No-one reads them, let along cites them.  Funding bodies have woken up to this huge issue and are looking to see activities that drive engagement with research. This puts the ball squarely back into the academics’ court.

So what is the knock-on effect for academic publishers? To paraphrase Cathy Holland (Business Development Manager, Digital Science), the second speaker on the ‘Brand Building the Scholarly Author’ webinar, “Social media has a huge impact on the way information is communicated today… No longer can the publisher or author passively just sit back and let content collect citations.” In the same way as authors now need to become active, publishers also need to be actively engaging online with scholarly research communities. Engaging is not enough and publishers must also now measure their social media efforts to successfully access their reach and effectiveness. As we have seen with the new social-media tool kits for authors to emerge, technology platforms provide Publishers with key measurement and online engagement tools.


Jean Dawson is the Product Manager at Charlesworth Author Services. Jean has over 25 years’ experience in senior management roles in publishing across the industry from academic publishing, start-ups, to publishing service providers. Commencing her career at Oxford University Press, she moved to form part of the Ingram UK Business start-up team. Prior to joining The Charlesworth Group, Jean worked as a consultant providing product development and marketing services to trade and academic publishers. Jean is also an active participant in cross industry membership groups.

The Brand Building the Scholarly Author seminar will take place on Thursday 18^th October 2018. To find our more or to book your place visit: https://www.alpsp.org/Webinars/Brand-Building-the-Scholarly-Author/56883

Spotlight on INASP - shortlisted for the 2017 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

In the third of our series of interviews with ALPSP Awards 2017 Finalists we talk to Andy Nobes, Programme Officer in the Research Development and Support team at INASP the people behind Author AID.

Tell us a bit about the work of INASP

INASP is an international development organization with the vision of research and knowledge at the heart of development. We work with partners in Africa, Latin America and Asia to support individuals and institutions to produce, share and use research and knowledge, which can transform lives.

Most research is published in the global North but many of the world’s most urgent problems are found in the global South. Early-career researchers in low- and middle-income countries face many challenges in communicating their work. These include: lack of familiarity with the global scholarly publishing landscape; lack of experienced colleagues who can advise them about publishing their work; inexperience of scientific writing; and often inexperience of writing in English. Other common challenges for researchers are: understanding plagiarism; choosing a suitable journal; and knowing the basic structure of a paper. They face all these challenges in addition to inherent biases in the global scholarly system, as well as particular challenges for female researchers and those from minority backgrounds or in fragile or conflict states.

Our AuthorAID project was started a decade ago to address these challenges. We work with partner institutions in Africa and Asia to embed research writing and proposal writing training into their curricula. The AuthorAID website also provides a free service for all researchers -  a database of free resources, an online discussion list, and a mentoring and collaboration platform. Over the last decade, our training has evolved from face-to-face training to online and blended courses, and most recently into our recent Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs).

What is the project that you submitted for the Awards?

In 2015 AuthorAID launched a series of free research-writing MOOCs. These have been run twice-yearly on the Moodle open-source platform and have so far attracted nearly 7,500 researchers from over 100 developing countries. We have also run the course in Spanish in partnership with Latindex, training 3,000 researchers in Latin America. These courses are particularly good at supporting harder-to-reach groups, including female academics and those in fragile and conflict states. Such support is essential for ensuring equity in global research.

The course is six weeks long and covers four topics: literature review, research ethics, writing a paper and publishing in a journal.  Participants learn via text-based lessons, weekly quizzes, a facilitated discussion forum and peer-assessed writing activities, as well as optional short video content.

 

 

Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it

Course participant Caroline Koech from Kenya

The AuthorAID team is small, and the MOOCs are run by just two core staff – I administrate and moderate the course from our Oxford office and my colleague Ravi Murugesan is the lead facilitator and Moodle expert, who is based in India. In order to manage groups of 1000+ course participants we rely on our team of volunteer ‘guest facilitators’. These are drawn from our global network of mentors and partner institutions, and we also promote ‘star’ participants to be facilitators on subsequent courses.

This facilitation model not only makes it possible to cater for large numbers of participants, across different time zones, but it also helps to pass on the skills to reduce the reliance on INASP. This is a key part of our sustainable development model.

Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

The innovation in our project is not so much in the technology – after all, MOOCs are becoming increasingly common in global education. Rather, it is the context, community and impact of the AuthorAID MOOCs that are uniquely innovative. Our courses are built on 10 years’ experience of training early-career researchers in developing countries, and our content is aimed at overcoming many of the practical problems that they face in publishing their research, such as writing skills and understanding the publishing process. The lessons are pitched at a basic, introductory level, presented in simple English.

The material is also designed to be used in low-bandwidth environments, as many of our audience have problems with access to reliable internet. The lessons are interactive text-based lessons rather than high-bandwidth video lectures which many participants find difficult to watch.  The strength of the course is in the interactive content and social interaction - the discussion forums, which are energised by our team of guest facilitators, are particularly active and we hear that many researchers make friends and research collaborators on the course.

The completion rate for the courses is around 50%, which is significantly higher than average MOOCs. Our courses include a high percentage (45%) of women researchers and we also reach participants in fragile and conflict-affected states, for example Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq and Yemen.

Follow-up surveys have found that at least 34% of course participants have published papers after the course. Feedback has also shown increased confidence to publish, and increased awareness of important ethical issues like plagiarism and ‘predatory’ journals. We hear again and again from researchers about the difference that participating in an AuthorAID research-writi

ng MOOC has made to them, their academic careers, their colleagues, and their ability to share their research findings clearly with a wider audience.

Global map showing the geographical spread of the course and the concentration in developing countries.

What are your plans for the future?

We want to improve both the scope and delivery of our MOOCs – for example, we are translating the course into French, and developing a social science version. We are also creating additional content that is important to researchers – for example training in communicating research to the public, practitioners and policymakers. It’s becoming increasingly important to make online courses mobile-friendly, particularly in developing countries, and we are further developing content to be fully mobile optimised, including downloadable lessons and exercises that can be completed offline.

In the long term, INASP is currently looking at opportunities for further funding for this work to ensure that more early-career researchers in the developing world can continue to receive the training and support that they need so that they – and their research – can contribute to global research conversations.

Our ultimate goal is to make this training truly sustainable – not only by growing our network of online facilitators, but also working with some of our partner institutions around the world to run online courses in their own institutions. This training has already started with partners in Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Vietnam. We have also helped grant winners to trial their own mini-MOOC version of the course.

Andy Nobes

Andy Nobes is Programme Officer in the Research Development and Support Team at INASP. This involves the management of the AuthorAID website, and the development of its online mentoring scheme and community forums. 
Before joining INASP, he worked for an academic publisher in journal e-marketing and library marketing.

Web: www.inasp.info and  www.authorAID.info

Twitter:  @INASPinfo and  @authoraid

Blog: blog.inasp.info    
Facebook: inasp.info   
YouTube: INASP   

See the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing Finalists lightning sessions at our Annual Conference on 13-15 September, where the winners will be announced. 

The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2017 are sponsored by MPS Ltd.