How can Societies Leverage Web 2.0?
The prevalence of the term 'Web 2.0' should be some indication that it has begun to invade the sensibilities of even the most stubborn web user, but it's essential to look beyond the buzzwords and understand that the term encapsulates a degree of flexibility and end-user interaction that is shaping the way we view the web. Extended channels of communication, discussion and contribution offer a wide-range of benefits for forming and nurturing the community that exists around your publications. In this article we'll investigate some of the ways you can leverage these new functionalities to work for you.
Start a blog
What is a blog? A blog is a system of user-generated content with entries presented in a reverse chronological order in the style of a journal.
Websites that launch without a blog are few and far between these days. They’re increasingly seen as an essential asset to reaching out to customers and users and promoting products and content. In short they’re the latest marketing and publicity tools at your disposal.
Lots of University Presses now have blogs, for example, OUP and University of Chicago Press. They include items such as features, recent articles, reviews and interviews, editors picks, 'What we do', featured books and much more. The Royal Society have also launched a blog exploring their archives, including some video interviews online, hosted by Google.
Blogs are also being written by journal editorial teams who are finding them a useful place to publish material that is not well suited to the journal format, such as news reports and reactions,
Starting a blog doesn’t necessarily mean a large investment in technology or infrastructure. Many professional blogs are being hosted on TypePad which is a well featured blog hosting service. Creating a blog is relatively straightforward. Creating a successful blog involves some will on the part of the company to maintain the momentum of recent content.
There is often scepticism about how many bloggers are actually interested in academic research content, but a recent search on Technorati (which monitors a large number of blogs) resulted in over 17,000 blog entries linking to IngentaConnect. In the June issue of Information World Review the number of blogs being tracked by Technorati had hit 71.7 million.
Ingenta itself maintains a blog to announce service updates, report on technological developments, ruminate on industry issues and review events attended by Ingenta staff.
There's a great deal of information available on the web pertaining to the art of blogging, but a good catch-all guide can be found at Blogging for Beginners.
Provide RSS feeds
RSS feeds are a useful companion to existing email alerting services, that have some other useful properties. As a result of hosting your content with IngentaConnect, we already provide RSS feeds for your content.
Generally RSS feeds are read using an RSS reader. The reader can be used to monitor lots of different websites and blogs. Obviously not all users will immediately favour RSS feeds over traditional email alerts, which are likely to be around for some time to come, but RSS feeds have some advantages of emails - such as incorporating the metadata for your content into other websites.
CiteULike, the social bookmarking service, regularly harvest the feeds we produce on IngentaConnect to allow people to quickly search and browse content on their service. Ultimately all the traffic and document delivery ends up back on the publishers pages of IngentaConnect. Many libraries are using the same technique to pull together relevant data for their communities and to populate the information in their OPACs.
RSS feeds are not only a replacement for email alerts, but can also a replacement for traditional syndication of metadata.
Encourage Linking to your content
To get content used it needs to be visible and visibility on the web means having links to your content from other websites. The more links, the more likely someone is going to find the content and the higher the content will get ranked in search engines. As previously mentioned, blogging and RSS feeds are becoming a useful means to circulating links to your content.
In the interests of useability, you need to have simple, stable links to your content. DOIs enable this at article level, and (less well-used) at title-level. It's also important to understand the benefits of ensuring links remain stable during both journal transfers and platform changes.
There’s an increasing range of Web 2.0 services that rely on the stability of links in order to function. The main examples are social bookmarking services, such as CiteULike. These provide useful services to users allowing them to tag, rate and organize content they find as they see fit, which is automatically shared with other users. So, like search engines, social bookmarking systems are becoming key discovery tools on Web 2.0.
Recognize your community
The notion of community is an important part of Web 2.0 and yet, many Web 2.0 services have to struggle to build communities around their sites. Society publishers are in a unique position in that they already have a community, either of practice or of interest: the society members. Recognizing that community and the value of it - not only to you, but also your members - is an important point to consider.
Social networking, allowing people to connect together, is the key way that communities are built on Web 2.0. While sites like MySpace and Facebook are aimed at the younger market, or LinkedIn at business professionals, there’s a growing number of sites aimed at the academic audience, such as Nature’s Network Boston for researchers in the Boston area.
Societies can explore how to use this to the benefit of their member. Such tools could bolster membership numbers as well as providing forums for members to explore content
Again, there needn’t be a huge technology investment. Elgg is an open source system for creating social networking sites that’s targetted at the education sector.
Enrich conferences and Meetings
Conferences and meetings are another angle on community building. Many societies encourage meetings or organize conferences for members.
Web 2.0 functionality can be used to drive interest in the conference before, during and after the event. For example encouraging members to contribute to a blog during the conference, or to share slides from the conference encouraging usage, and interest, for much longer than the conference itself.
Journal issues containing conference proceedings could easily be enriched with supplementary data that covers the slides, audio or even video of the event itself.
Understanding the impact
Finally, while playing with Web 2.0 features and sites can be fun, there has to be demonstrable value. And that means being able to understand the impacts of using these tools on how people find and use content, and then adapting your site accordingly.
One of Ingenta’s publishers, Dental Protection recognised the potential here and created their own profile on Facebook with the objective to raise their profile amongst an audience of students, as well as increasing Dental Protection's familiarity amongst the dental community.
Facebook is an online social networking tool; a new age of relaxed communication, which has contagiously swept the University networks, as well as other online communities, "to Facebook" someone, is already a verb. It allows people to list their personal details online and communicate with other people through the website. It's how you advertise what you are all about; it’s also the perfect tool for networking and raising the profile of groups and communities.
With the help of Facebook, Dental Protection now has over 1000 online ‘friends’ to whom our publisher can post news and offers, as well as send messages to individual users.
Rebecca Lupton, Marketing Project Manager at Dental Protection, comments: "We are delighted with the interest with have received from young dentists in our Facebook page. It is a great, interactive way to communicate with our members, and we hope to see it continue to grow and that our ‘friends’ will continue to enjoy this facility."
Dental Protection have seen a significant increase to their member, and potential member base. It is now much easier, quicker and more convenient for Facebook users to communicate with Dental Protection, therefore making our client more approachable to their target audience.