New Media: The Class
New Media is a brand-new class this year, so we’re the first SciComm students to go through the course. Remember in my last blog post I mentioned Traditional Media? That class is what the program usually required, since it focused on traditional means of communication, like journal articles and podcasts. However, ever since the advent of the Internet, there have been many, many discussions on if print news is dying or if it will stick around. Regardless of the debate’s outcome, what is sure is that digital media plays a giant role in how people consume information, so we better understand how to wield the platform effectively.
In the class New Media, we focused on three things:
- What are the biggest social media platforms right now
- Tools to analyze content on social media
- How to produce content effectively for different platforms
*Specifically, these platforms work well for communicators looking to reach the general public. For communicators looking to network with other science communicators, Twitter is a great option.
New Media: The Final
The final for the class was the most ambitious thing we tackled: creating a social media communication plan for a science organization.
The organization my group worked with wasn’t really an “organization.” Rather, there are several different parties working to bring more awareness of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) to the Sudbury community. Our job was to:
- Recommend good practices for talking about FASD
- Give suggestions for how the various FASD groups in the area could better work together.
- Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)
- Partial Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (PFAS)
- Alcohol Related Neuro-developmental Disorder (ARND)
- Alcohol Related Birth Defects (ARBD)
FASD is a brain-based injury, and research has shown that the extent and location of neurological injury can produce a wide range of physical, behavioral, and cognitive symptoms. This means is can be very difficult to diagnosis. Originally, doctors focused on physical changes as a measure for the extent of FASD, like short height, low body weight, and small head size. But many people who have FASD do not have physical changes, and for the ones who do, the physical changes do not correlate to the severity of cognitive impairment. | Baby with fetal alcohol syndrome. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons. |
These are just a few of the things we needed to keep in mind when creating a social media communication plan.
Below is the final plan we came up with. If you look at Section 3, you will see we got to try making personas. Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different users who might possibly interact with your service or site. Once your service or site is mostly ready, you can run a hypothetical situation where your personas engage with the product, in order to better understand the specific needs of your target audience(s).