Comparing the use of social networking and traditional media channels for promoting citizen science

Abstract

This paper examines how social networks can be used to recruit and promote a crowdsourced citizen science project and compares this recruiting method to the use of traditional media channels including press releases, news stories, and participation campaigns. The target studied is Creek Watch, a citizen science project that allows anyone with an iPhone to submit photos and observations of their local waterways to authorities who use the data for water management, environmental programs, and cleanup events. The results compare promotional campaigns using a traditional press release with news pickups, a participation campaign through local organizations, and a social networking campaign through Facebook and Twitter. Results also include the trial of a feature that allows users to post automatically to Facebook or Twitter. Social networking is found to be a worthwhile avenue for increasing awareness of the project, increasing the conversion rate from browsers to participants, but that targeting existing communities with a participation campaign was a more successful means for increasing the amount of data collected by volunteers.

Characterising volunteers' task execution patterns across projects on multi-project citizen science platforms

“…Also, a new project tends to recruit more volunteers to the platforms than it inherits from them, but such inherited volunteers are more engaged than the recruited ones. One reason for this result is that recruitment campaigns put into practice by the owners of new projects usually consists of a broadcasting campaign in social networks [25]. This kind of campaigns have the potential to attract many volunteers, but most of them are just curious and do not exhibit long-term engagement [19].…”

Learning and Collective Knowledge Construction With Social Media: A Process-Oriented Perspective

“…The idea of using social media for collaboration has been adapted in several other contexts, such as in knowledge management (Levy, 2009;Matschke, Moskaliuk, & Cress, 2012), politics (Etling, Kelly, Faris, & Palfrey, 2010), marketing (Sashi, 2012), or citizen science (Robson, Hearst, Kau, & Pierce, 2013). Collaborative social media are also causing changes in formal learning settings, for example, where a class of students sets up a Facebook group for distributing course-related announcements, sharing documents, or the like (see, e.g., Wang, Woo, Quek, Yang, & Liu, 2012).…”

Social Media Effectiveness for Public Engagement

“…For instance, Robson et al [23] used Facebook and Twitter to promote a citizen science project, but the contribution of these sites to the effort was less than that of face-to-face communication.…”