Now, as Anine said: web 2.0 services and tools are on everybody’s lips when talking about communication – including research communication. And she showed us a nice picture of an awful lot of icons for web 2.0 services. There are hundreds of them, and the vast majority of them are completely unknown – and completely irrelevant – to all of us. But a few web 2.0 services totally dominate the scene – and by the way we use several of them to support our web, diis.dk
I am going to talk a bit about some established facts within the web 2.0 discussion – some of them are listed on this slide – and because all of us have HEARD about Facebook and most of us are more or less acquainted with it, this will very much be about Facebook.
But what do we actually know about web 2.0 and research communication? Luckily some research has been made into researcher’s use of web 2.0 for research communication. A recent British study of "how researchers perceive and use web 2.0" and a couple of other investigations we have consulted agree that web 2.0 has huge potentials for scholarly researchers, and that a majority of researchers make at least occasional use of one or more web 2.0 tools in relation to their research. But frequent or intensive use is rare. And more surprisingly: contrary to what we may think, namely that the use of web 2.0 is of special interest to a younger ”Facebook generation”, the demographic variations do not conform to assumed stereotypes. As it turns out, high usage is positively associated with older age groups and more senior positions, not with their younger or more junior colleagues. Now, this might be a special British phenomenon, and DIIS might be different, so we made the survey that you have all seen and that 95 of us have answered (which is impressive!). Our survey does not contradict the British research results .
Let’s have a look our own use of web 2.0 services. This diagram illustrates our professional use of some common services. More than half of us use Facebook for professional purposes, but few do it frequently. The same goes for LinkedIn Half of us use YouTube professionally, but few do so frequently 3 or 4 out of 10 use Wikis or rss-feeds, but only 1 out of 10 frequently And frequent use of blogs is rare. Our use of other web 2.0 services is near to nothing. We filtered the answers to see if age makes a difference. It does, but very little: DIIS staff younger than 34 are slightly more frequent users of Facebook and YouTube for professional purposes than the average DIIS user, but for the rest of the services the use is the same or lower. The overall conclusion is that in spite of the potentials, web 2.0 is not very intensively used by researchers and students for professional purposes. Jacob will come back to that with some useful suggestions. And now over to DIIS on Facebook.
Facebook is beyond all comparison THE web 2.0 service with most users – >400 million people and organizations have a Facebook profile and the number is still growing! And people worldwide spend more time on Facebook than on Google. And we hear that the popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East are mobilized via social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Some even argue that the uprisings would not have been possible without these web 2.0 services. So it’s a logical deduction then, that we must all ”be on Facebook”, individuals and organizations.
This reminds me about this ad in magazines and cinemas when I was a kid. And these 100.000 housewives may not have been wrong. They chose the right curtains for their purpose. But I think we all agree that Gardisette curtains are not necessarily the right choice for all homes, for all screening purposes and at all times. The same goes for Facebook and Twitter, of course.
So, let me turn briefly to the issue of "DIIS on Facebook". DIIS went on Facebook, i.e. established an organizational Facebook profile on 11 February this year, and we soon got some 250 "thumbs up" or "likes" of DIIS on Facebook. This number has been rather stable for some time now. But we should not overestimate the importance of being on Facebook as an organization ! There proves to be a huge difference between individual/personal communication via Facebook and corporate or organizational communication via Facebook. The American research institute Useit.com headed by the Danish web usability guru Jacob Nielsen, recently made an investigation of corporate content distributed through social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. The report states that "the overwhelmingly dominant use of these services are for purely personal use, where users keep in touch with friends and family" and "it is rare for users to actively seek out companies and organizations on social network sites". And another investigation by the same institute into students' internet use (Austalia, UK, US, Germany) concludes that most students keep a tab permanently opened to social networking services like Facebook. But that doesn't mean they want everything to be social. Students associate Facebook with private discussions, not with corporate marketing. When students want to learn about a university, government agency, or ngo they Google to find the organizations official website. They don't look for its Facebook page. But this does not mean that we shouldn't use social media such as Facebook! DIIS has been very present in the Facebook universe for quite some time, namely since we 6 months ago introduced the SHARE-button on many of our web pages. Since then about 4.5 % of the visits to our website come from Facebook, and that's not at all bad! This is the result of people finding specific pages on our website interesting and therefore share them with their Facebook friends. This way they help us reach people that we are not necessarily normally in contact with. 90 % of us at DIIS have a personal Facebook page. But our survey shows that very few use the SHARE button on our website. So let me end my presentation by urging you to use this possibility go give your own quality stamp to DIIS web pages and share them and thereby communicate DIIS research via web 2.0 and reach new audiences. Let me show you how.
See the SHARE button? It appears on many of the pages on diis.dk If you find a page interesting and want to share with your networks, touch the SHARE button.
Then this menu pops up. Click Facebook or any other social software you use to communicate with your networks, and share the page the way it’s done with that specific service.
If you do so, you communicate research with web 2.0. And moreover: you help doing something about the Communication Strategy’s calling attention to the fact that ” DIIS’ presence in newer media, such as free newspapers and social internet media, is limited at present. ” So go ahead...
And remenber: there was a world before Facebook. But that is all history, of course. And there is a world beside Facebook. Jacob will say something about that.