In an era where the internet is a primary source of science news (second only to television) and has been found to lead to higher levels of understanding of science, every organisation that aims to communicate needs to have an online presence.
In addition to the ASPERA corporate website, ASPERA’s online outreach efforts started with the creation of the Astroparticle.org website in 2008. It is now the largest resource of information on Astroparticle Physics for non-experts. Facts and questions are simply explained using text, images, and animations - in several languages.
In parallel, ASPERA has taken advantage of Web 2.0 tools, since these enable wider, more effective and more interactive information-sharing. The two Web 2.0 tools that have mainly been used so far are Twitter and Facebook.
Astroparticle’s profile on Twitter, showing the progression in the number of followers (in red). Click to enlarge.
In 2009, ASPERA joined Twitter under the name astroparticle. Twitter is one of the fastest growing social networking sites. It allows “micro-blogging”: users are able to send and read messages of other users, called “tweets”, up to 140 characters long. ASPERA essentially uses this channel to redirect the last interesting press cuttings related to astroparticle physics. It was also successfully used for announcing events such as during the European week of astroparticle physics in 2009.
Since its profile was created, astroparticle has sent 386 such tweets. The average number of tweets per month is 20. The month with the most tweets was October 2009, which was when the European Week of Astroparticle Physics took place.
Number of Tweets per month (as calculated by TwitterStats). On Twitter, instead of adding other users as your “friends”, you “follow” them. Usually people follow those users whose tweets they find most interesting. Thus, each Twitter user follows a number of people and has a number of “followers”. The latter is usually used to measure the popularity of one’s user profile. What is really intersting in Twitter then is the fact that we can reach many more people than what we are used to with classical channels. If the ASPERA newlstter is definitely our first channel to the astroparticle physics community (sent to about 1200 persons), we go far beyond with Twitter, reaching also, for instance, journalists, and even perhaps sometimes decision makers. >>
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At the time of publication of this newsletter, astroparticle had 2,393 followers. Based on this number, astroparticle’s ranking, as compared to the 10 million users currently on Twitter, was calculated to be #45,287. It is also ranked as the 5th most influential twitting channel for the "physics"tag by the website "Wefollow". To compare, CERN has the 1st position with some 160,000 followers! And IOP Publishing has the 4th position with 5,000 followers.
Astroparticle’s followers have been increasing on average by 25 followers a day. Interestingly, they are not only Europeans, but live all over the world. The countries with the most followers are: US (557), UK (185), India (162), Brazil (162) and Spain (116).
Recently, ASPERA joined Facebook in March 2010. ASPERA’s profile on Facebook is updated at the same time as the Twitter account. The benefit of Facebook is that it allows more interaction amongst the followers: people that “like” astroparticle on Facebook are able to post questions for discussion, videos, photos, events, links that other people that like astroparticle will find useful. Astroparticle’s followers on Facebook are also growing fast.
Such tools open many possibilities. But there is still much to do. Astroparticle physics would greatly benefit from being present on Youtube, for instance, where we could gather existing videos. It is indeed the largest video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos, with 2 million visits per day. In 2008, ASPERA created its own channel in order to gather in one place all videos related to astroparticle physics. But it has been only a starting point and to make it alive would require a lot more efforts . The outreach group is also thinking about enhancing contents related to our field in the Wikipedia encyclopedia. Any help from the community is welcome!
Submitted by Ino Agrafioti (Demokritos - Greece)
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With the age of Web 2.0, new tools have been established that lead to more effective science communication. ASPERA is now the leading outreach online source of information in the field of Astroparticle Physics...
