EarthArXiv social media

Hi David! Thanks for your message, and for your huge efforts with the social media effort over the last few years; you've definitely helped us grow. Personally, I think it would be good to try and get a few people to handle this side of things, to reduce the burden on a single person. So, what's the best way to proceed? Should we send out an email to the ambassador's list? Chris

Agreed. I think having multiple people would be helpful. Similarly later this year we are rotating ~1/2 the council right? Maybe we should combine the call for advisor council nominations with finding people to handle twitter/social media?

So ESIP has the mailing list masters with the data on who is OK being an ambassador, and who is OK being randomly picked to be on the advisory council. We are looking, I would imagine, to ask if some (say, 7-8) of the current council members would serve another year to stagger the terms and add continuity. If a council member wants to provide text to send to the ambassador list to recruit one or more social media volunteers, I can get this email out. So, @danielibarra we were not planning on "nominations", as we have a list of people who have self nominated, and we have used (and will again, unless the council decides differently) sortition instead of election to pick new council members.

Makes sense w.r.t. to the council, sorry I had forgotten about the picking algorithm you had all used. Do we need to refresh/add to the list of ppl who have self-nominated? talking to some folks at EGU I think it would be good to do this because currently we have a good spread in career stage representation among the council members but geographic, gender and sub-field diversity could be improved. @geoda - from your text above we could easily create some text to send to the ambassador list for the social media volunteer(s), I'm happy to help out with that.

Chris put the google form sign-up link on the EarthArXiv twitter. Here it is too . Please send this link out to the EGU and elsewhere... I'll lard the new volunteer info into the database for the various email lists and council sortition...

David, can you describe for any potential volunteers what you do exactly? How much work is it, which sources do you check as inspiration for the tweets, etc.

Commonly, I invest between 40 and 60 minutes per day on Twitter, 4 or 5 days a week. When I’m stretched out thin with my projects or deadlines, as now, I might do more time but in a day or two.

Each time, I would check most or all of the following:

• Notifications:
  Go trough Twitter notifications (lately around 20-30 each log in), retweet the interesting ones
  Respond to questions from users (when I don’t know the answer, reach out via Loomio or to Chris, who’s always ready to be of great help!)
  Comment positively when someone refers to Earth ArXiv or tweets about making use of Earth ArXiv, even if only a line :)
  Search for #preprint and #postprint hashtags almost daily and others (#oa, #openaccess, #openscience) on occasion, and retweet if there's anything relevant/interesting

• Tweets:
  Check new preprints/postprints and announce them, often as soon as they are available. Almost always, this will not be a “template” tweet but a “personalized” one, where I thank authors for the upload and try to tag “@” tweeter users or agencies if I refer to them in the tweet.
  Check other postprint servers (such as OSF,  arXiv, BIOarxiv etc) activity and retweet interesting news 
  Remind now and then of already tweets done (for example. reminder of our moderation policy, of new features launched, of how to cite preprints, what preprints are and what are the benefits etc)
  On occasion: check postprints news in the media and post relevant articles etc
  On occasion: check on Earth ArXiv milestones (x postprints available, x followers, x tweets) and promote them
  On occasion: gather data on stories and users that are satisfied or happy with Earth ArXiv and how that has impact their research.

Last but not least: Use of fun memes and Gifs is encouraged :)

All this without taking into account what Chris does in periods where my activity is low or where he sees fit

I think with this alone, I qualify for a good spot on Heaven - pity I don’t believe, though! :laughing:

Indeed @geoda, you'll be skipped to the front of the queue!
First, RE: the social media 'director' position, we could handle this more informally, by asking on social media, etc, if there is anybody interested in being involved, perhaps directing them to a Google Doc containing the information David has provided. If we have multiple applicants, then fair enough; the more the merrier.
Second, RE: the Advisory Council, we are due to rotate in October-November. I agree that keeping half the committee on for another year makes sense. However, I am with @danielibarra here @bcaron: i.e. I think it might be worth refreshing the list of self-nominees, given people who self-nominated before may have moved on to other things, etc. Plus, in the last 1.5 years, we've become know to many, many new people, some of which are very passionate about what we're trying to do. It would be good to engage them, I think. Thoughts?

Always those queue jumpers!! :slight_smile:
David, you really put in a lot of work. No wonder the account has become so big. You deserve an angel choir.
Some overlap of the Advisory Council members sounds like a good idea to transfer knowledge.
I guess we have the email addresses of the previous applicants for the advisory council. Then we could ask them to apply again and put them in the pot together with any newly interested people.

Fantastic and enormous work, David! These are efforts very well invested: I learned from this slide deck https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/7381/1/Practices,_drivers_and_impediments_in_the_use_of_preprints_(Phase_1_report).pdf that "the key communication channel in the preprints arena is Twitter", for "preprint discovery, sharing" and feedback, and "its integration in preprints workflows and discovery should be considered carefully".

My two cents on things that may facilitate the work of the next EarthArXiv Twitteditor:
1. Send automatically to authors of each new preprint tips on how to disseminate their work via Twitter (+ examples) and how we can help (tweeting their graphical abstracts, RTing them, etc). This can shift part of the burden to author tweeps.
2. Encourage EarthArXiv community members to curate a topic or field, tweeting via @EarthArXiv about the recent preprints in their domain of expertise (or whatever scope they feel comfortable with). This may help scale up our twitter activity, which in turn may attract new EarthArXiv users.