Go Fungal!

If you’ve seen us on a stand in 2018 there’s a good chance you’ll have also seen this, our 8 page booklet on social media. It was the first attempt at an on-stand handout for Botany One. Instead of promoting the site, we tried to promote the idea of social media. There were one or two limitations.

The first was the booklet was written to coincide with the State of the World’s Fungi symposium at Kew. I thought it best to try to fit in with event, so chose Go Fungal over Going Viral as title. One of the elements I like about the title is that it emphasises the connection element of Social Media. Instead of purely pushing your message out, the value of social media is what you can also get back.

The second limitation is that the booklet was written to a very short deadline.

We’re done with conferences for a little while – which gives more time to decide what worked and what didn’t with the booklet. The next version will probably have a different title and more pages. And that leaves us with a PDF template we’re not planning to use. Because of image licensing we can’t release this as a Creative Commons publication, just as a free file from this site.

For the next version the draft features altmetrics a bit more. I think there are some problems in focusing on the number in an Altmetric score, but I also think altmetric.com can be a valuable tool in making connections with other people. It’s definitely worth looking past the digits to see how people are talking about a paper.

We’d also like to promote some non-altmetric-scoring forms of social media – like Instagram. There are people who are effectively running blogs and vlogs on Instagram that get little attention in the wider world as the app is a bit of a walled garden. It’s a pity because some of them are stunningly good.

I’m not sure what conference the new handout will make its first appearance at. I’m sure the next round of conferences will come faster than I expect.

Download the PDF of Go Fungal here.