As all you happy neuroscience geeks know, the annual Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting is fast approaching! Sci wishes desperately she were going, but right now it looks like only the powers of the science gods could get her that coveted late-breaking abstract, for the science doth not smile upon this young post-doc.
But that won’t stop me now! Last year, Sci was lucky enough to be picked as one of the ten SfN Neurobloggers for the 2009 meeting. This year, if Sci goes, she’ll do her bloggy best, but in the meantime, I wanted to throw some suggestions out there for those planning the meeting. With a little help and a little work, this could be a GREAT year for neuroscience outreach, and a great year for getting neuroscientists to read and blog like never before!
Of course Drugmonkey has been there before me and posted some of his excellent ideas. Sci would like to reiterate some of them, and start a few of her own.
1) Wifi: SfN is a BIG meeting. A VERY big meeting. We’re talking 5 days of poster sessions, each with several thousand posters. 30,000 attendees. Miles upon miles of thin carpet covered concrete. In previous years, there has been wireless internet in the meeting rooms and in the main concourses, but none on the poster floor. This, my dears, sux. You can’t tweet if you can’t hook up! You can’t BLOG unless you and squeeze in and parallel park your butt on the floor in the main concourse, where 5,000 other people are trying to do the same. If we are going to increase online outreach of the meeting, and if we’re going to get the word out, we NEED us some good wireless. Sci recommends SignalShare, the guys who did ScienceOnline 2010. They were killer, and my connections were lovely.
2) Twitter: There are several subheadings to this. First, as Drugmonkey knowingly suggests, SfN people need to be tweeting. If SfN tweets the latest Neuro headlines, the latest papers from the members, oh yes, people will follow. Secondly, Drugmonkey is VERY right, a Twitterwall would be AWESOME. Here are the reasons a twitterwall is awesome.
Exhibit A
Guy sees Twitterwall: “dude, what’s twitter?”
Reads the wall
“…HEY…that’s MY POSTER!!! COOL!!!”
Sends link to friends not at the meeting to look at his poster.
Grabs Twitter, checks out the link to his own poster and the coverage. Gets his own Twitter.Exhibit B
Person sees Twitterwall: “huh, look at all that stuff…oh hey! A poster I should look at! ”
Hies self off to previously unexplored poster.
Exhibit C
Girl sees Twitterwall: “Hey, I didn’t know people were tweeting this meeting!”
Starts tweeting herself. Her 1,300 followers start seeing the latest stuff from SfN.
You see where I’m going with this. A Twitter wall would get people interested in Twitter, get people interested in online outreach for neuroscience, and also help them see things they hadn’t seen before. Not only that, many of the followers on Twitter won’t be at the meeting, but will be able to see how things are going from the Twitter wall. Not only that, you could recruit people to officially Tweet the meeting!
3) Blogging: Last year there were 10 Neurobloggers, selected from a pool of applicants. This is cool, and made Sci feel all prestigious, but there needs to be MORE. Sci dreams small and would be willing to start with 20. With only 10 Neurobloggers, you just can’t cover all the meeting has to offer. Especially when there’s no wireless on the floor, I can’t immediately blog something I come across, I have to wait until I get outside or back to the hotel (true story, I wrote two of last years blog posts in a bar, one from a coffeeshop, and one while sitting in my hotel bathroom so I wouldn’t wake up my roommates. I leave you all to guess which posts those were). This means I would blog less than I would otherwise. More neurobloggers (and WIRELESS!) could help you get more coverage. There is definitely room on that poster floor for 2-3 bloggers in each research area.
4) Promotion: This is the big one. I would tell people I was blogging the meeting, and they all went ‘huh?’ Many of the people at SfN didn’t even know it was going on. There were links to our blogs, but they were hidden away and didn’t get good coverage. Sci can honestly say she didn’t get any traffic boost from the meeting last year at all. That’s not nice. We can SO do better. All we need to do is promote! Get the blogs and Twitters for this year listed in the official program! Get them on the SfN meeting frontpage! Links don’t take up a lot of space, all we need is something small in the top right or left corner. Not only that, there are TONS of signs all over SfN every year, pointing to things, announcing things…what if there was one that said “FOLLOW SfN ON TWITTER AT…” and one that said “SEE BLOG COVERAGE OF THE MEETING AT…”. People would see them, and with smartphones (and WIFI!) people would look.
5) Booth peeps!: This is a contingency. If you CAN’T get wireless a the meeting, maybe we could set up a booth where you CAN! This could be the blog and twitter booth, right out with the other SfN promotion stuff. Put it right next to the IT guys. Give it a wireless hotspot, and even a couple of laptops where people can check their email, which ALSO happen to have the people blogging and tweeting the meeting at front and center. If it’s got wireless, they will come, and they will look.
6) SWAG! This would also be a great thing at a booth! Promote SfN Twitter with mugs or shirts or pens. Promote the neuroscience blogs that have swag and have them give out some of their stuff (*cough cough…keep and eye out for something soon from Sci!…cough cough*). This would not only make people curious enough to check out the links they keep seeing, it would ALSO promote the blogs and SfN outside of the meeting. With people wearing and carrying your stuff around, more and more people will check it out, especially if you can make a fun, interesting slogan or design.
7) Stuffed mice: ok, I guess this could go with swag. And it has nothing to do with blogging. But dangit, Sci has ALWAYS wanted one of those Jackson labs stuffed mice with the magnetic feet. They were out the one year I went to get one, and now they don’t HAVE THEM!!! The tragedy of my LIFE!!!
So that’s what I’ve got. Now I open it up to the Neuro-geeks! Does anyone else have any suggestions?
