Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

If you are in Australia, or interested in Australian social media stats, Social Media News keeps them updated month by month.  For example this is a snippet of what they have for May 2012:

Social Media Statistics Australia – May 2012

1. Facebook – 10,968,120 Australian users/accounts (down 20,020) – 13 million UAVs according to Google Adplanner. The difference between the user numbers and UAVs may be users logging in from multiple locations – home, work, school etc.
2. YouTube – 11,000,000 UAVs (steady)
3. Blogspot – 4,030,000 (up 30,000)
4. LinkedIn – 2,200,000 (up 100,000)
5. Twitter – 1,800,000 (steady)
6. WordPress.com – 1,600,000 (down 200,000)
7. Tumblr – 1,200,000 (steady)
8. Flickr – 840,000 (down 80,000)
9. Pinterest - 560,000 (up 90,000)
10. Instagram – 423,000 (up 171,000)
11. MySpace – 420,000 (down 40,000)
12. Google Plus – 331,336 approx active users  (Estimated calculation below)
13. StumbleUpon – 150,000 (steady)
14. Reddit – 140,000 (steady)
15. Digg – 77,000 (steady)
16. Foursquare – 57,000 (down 6,000)
17. Delicious – 36,000 (down 7,000)

There is a ton of other stuff on there, including trends. So if you need stats for presentations, or want to see what the current state of play is on a particular platform, Social Media News is the place to go. Highly recommended.

Measuring the impact of publishing research via a blog has been a reoccurring theme here.  As part of my work with BodyInMind.org – a clinical research site which publishes on the topic of pain research – we are looking at whether dissemination makes any difference to the impact of published research.

Recently Campus Review interviewed Lorimer Moseley (the lead clinical scientist of BiM) about this topic.  It is an excellent article and worth reading the full report here: The blog rankings. A different way of measuring impact.

Lorimer is Professor of Clinical Neurosciences and University of South Australia’s inaugural Chair in Physiotherapy where he works as a clinician and researcher with a special interest in pain and brain sciences. We set up BodyInMind to look particularly at the role of the brain and mind in chronic and complex pain disorders. This website includes links to published articles, current projects, teaching resources for clinicians and lecturers, books, seminars and conferences and other info that the team thinks is ‘intriguing, important or irresistible’.

Here is an excerpt from the Campus Review’s interview with Lorimer:

“As a clinical scientist, what I am trying to do is change clinical practice, and one of the ways I am evaluated as a scientist is by my impact – and if I am trying to impact people who never write papers, my citation count is not going to reflect what we are doing, and in any case, writing papers will take ten years to get to the punters who use it on the coalface,” Moseley said.

So two and a half years ago, working with Heidi Allen, a digital publishing and social media specialist with an interest in public health, Moseley launched BodyinMind.  “We would try to tap into social media to disseminate information that was understandable, that got people interested and enthusiastic about research,” he said. “There is a huge gap that exists between researchers and clinicians… they are distrustful I think, and we were wanting to break that down.”

He is aided by a team of researchers, including postgraduate students, and the site now attracts patients along with clinicians, policy makers and industry representatives. But the bigger question is, how can the site’s impact be measured?  “I think it remains a bit of an experiment, certainly within the [National Health and Medical Research Council] system,” said Moseley.

“The idea that one’s impact might be measured in slightly less conventional ways is not an idea that I’ve come across before. I guess when I go for my next fellowship I will be taking the punt in including BodyinMind as a measure of my impact.” Part of the problem is that measuring social media “reach” is still a very new science. “It’s very difficult to work out what impact one has – we’ve got the conventional measures of followers and hit rates, but that doesn’t measure impact,” he said. Moseley has his team working a few experiments to measure affects on the blog on the dissemination of information, including randomised studies involving open access articles and their download rates.

“I don’t know of anyone who has really tried to engage with measuring it, and I see dissemination as a critical role of the scientist, and I don’t think it is done very well.” In some ways, this uncertainty has made the entire blog something of a risk. “I think there is a serious chance I’ll get a panel [at the NHMRC] that will say, ‘that’s not really a measure’ [of impact],” said Moseley.

“We’ve scoured the literature and no one can really prove what seems to be accepted, that social media is the best way of disseminating thoughts. Everyone quotes this nebulous idea that you have to have a social media evidence to get things done…. It’s intuitively sensible that it should be important but does it do anything? I don’t think anyone can claim to have evidence.”

Complied from Facebooks Ad platform, in January 2011, this slideshow give some interesting stats – check out slides 14 and 15 for example – slightly more male than females (which surprised me) but the next slide shows the distribution of said genders.  Quite a different picture, that said stats are difficult to compile and interpret, so always have a big pinch of salt to hand.

How do you engage teenages using social media in health. I’m not sure this is easy to answer. They are the SMS generation, not facebook. Any ideas?

This was a question I asked on LinkedIn How about this for a superb answer and case study from Jesper Nyholm, Copenhagen, Denmark

I have sucesfully engaged teenagers in online communities (social media) promoting healthy lifestyle.

I have concepted and implemented several health-campaigns for both Danish companies and Governments trying to reach the teenagers through social media.

(we have succesfully engaged more than 150.000 people in healthy campaigns via social media since 2005. some of the campaigns lasted 12 weeks and on average we have 80% of the participants completing the campaigns with daily interaction and with great healthy results)

my key findings are:

1. you need to make a story of the healthy issue – don’t spend to much time on talking health – spend time on encapsulating health into a relevant context for the teenagers.

2. you need to have a scoreboard and think in points and merits – look at all that is happening on facebook these days; farmville, mafiawars – or outside facebook; world of warcraft – these games are based on getting points and honor your effort.

3. When engaging teenagers, make sure that everybody can join your initiative at their own level – It is like playing golf; a bad player (unhealthy teenager) is able to challenge a pro player (healthy teenager) because of the handicap scoresystem in golf.

I know that this is a very brief introduction to our key findings. We are working on a book on the subject – and  have plenty of relevant cases to introduce you to if you need more inspiration?

Gotta love social media for providing gold answers.

And in line with how young people are using email, texting, PEW released this data on how young people communicate

If I’m lucky Jesper may expand on this answer in the future. It’s clearly a well researched project they have undertaken.  Here’s hoping.

but not as we were expecting. Defining the generations according to age and habits online is an ever movable feast (for example do you know what age Gen X is supposed to be?). What I do like in this report is that the generational divide is narrowing – there are some things that are becoming commonplace across all the generations, listening to podcasts for example. This is a good thing.

Here is the 2010 update from PEW

There are still notable differences by generation in online activities, but the dominance of the Millennial generation has slipped in many activities. Milliennials, those ages 18-33, remain more likely to access the internet wirelessly with a laptop or mobile phone. In addition, they still clearly surpass their elders online when it comes to:

• Use of social networking sites
• Use of instant messaging
• Using online classifieds
• Listening to music
• Playing online games
• Reading blogs
• Participating in virtual worlds.

However, internet users in Gen X (those ages 34-45) and older cohorts are more likely than Millennials to engage in several online activities, including visiting government websites and getting financial information online.

Finally, the biggest online trend is that, while the very youngest and oldest cohorts may differ, certain key internet uses are becoming more uniformly popular across all age groups. These online activities include:

• seeking health information,
• purchasing products,
• making travel reservations,
• and downloading podcasts.

Even in areas that are still dominated by Millennials, older generations are making notable gains. While the youngest generations are still significantly more likely to use social network sites, for instance, the fastest growth has come from internet users 74 and older: social network site usage for this oldest cohort has quadrupled since 2008, from 4% to 16%.

Update in response to Matthew’s comment here are ages of the different generations. It’s interesting to see how the generations are defined, for example, the Millennial generation are named after the turn in the calender and refers to those born after 1980 – the first generation to come of age in the new Millennium.

You can download the full Generations 2010 Pew Report here