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Outreach and Marketing Strategy
Talking to people one on one about your work and sharing it via your personal network is key to getting the work out there. As Cory Doctorow notes, comments, replies, emails, and discussions about the work mean more than clicks. See the Additional Components section for more thoughts on how to measure use of your work.
Social Media
Social media raises awareness about your work. It may not get people to directly read or use your publication, because social media platforms are not designed to encourage sustained attention. Some useful places to share your DIY academic work are LinkedIn and the Fediverse/Mastodon. People look for new information in their field on LinkedIn, and it connects your work to yourself if you have a LinkedIn profile. Mastodon and other Fediverse applications are not algorithm-based. The success of any social media platform depends on first building a network to ensure visibility. Tag co-authors to increase engagement and awareness when posting. Depending on the platform, co-authors can re-share the announcement.
De-center social media digital marketing that relies on algorithms in your outreach plan. It’s great to post on as many communication platforms as possible, but it may not serve you to pay for visibility on those platforms or optimize for them.
Plan for a Press Tour
Consider holding a launch webinar. You can coordinate with a community of practice or allied professional association working group/committee to co-sponsor an event for their members that shares your resource. For a more lowkey approach, you could ask for time on relevant group agendas to present your work at their next meeting. If you have a launch event date determined before sharing the publication, you can include event registration details with the publication announcement.
If your group has the resources and capacity to present the work at an upcoming conference, do it! You will reach your target audience in person and get quality feedback on the work.
As you brainstorm possibilities for your press tour, it’s great if you come up with activities that are far in the future. After shipping the publication, you can get the group back together periodically to further use your work in the community. Slow outreach will ensure your publication or resource is used over time.
Ship It
You have a list of groups to contact from community review outreach (see Appendix 9 for a template). Use this list as the base for your publication announcement list. Your publication announcement list should include:
- New audiences identified since the community review process
- Audiences you want to share the publication with that you did not engage in community review
- Individuals you know to be interested in the topic
- Individuals you cited in your work
- Everyone who commented during the review period
- Co-authors can send to their institutional team members and close colleagues
The outreach coordinator should split up assignments to reach different audiences, providing tools such as a communications template and any special instructions on how to present the announcement. It might be scary for some team members to hit “send” on that big listserv message, but it’s good for people to see your name associated with the work!
Share the work on selected social media platforms, and interact if anyone comments.
Rest again!
Congratulations, you’ve made something and put it out into the world! Even if you feel energized to keep working on it, try to take a break from the project for a month or so before starting your press tour.
Track usage
Track engagement over time to measure the impact of your work. Many repositories track downloads or other engagement measures. Linking your publication’s DOI to your ORCID account can help you understand a bit about usage. Favor non-commercials ways of tracking engagement that do not require purchasing or selling/releasing personal information.
You want to know are people using your work. Understanding usage helps you express the value of your work to bosses, future employers/clients, and other people who care about your impact. Usage information drives work improvements and can guide future projects.
Consider a light reuse tracking plan. You could follow up with your community of practice in a year to ask for stories about how they have used the document. They could fill out a survey, or you could meet one on one with people and hear about how they used it. If you commit to usage tracking, you can mention your plan in a front matter section of the publication.
For an example of a usage study, see the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s series on how their community of practice uses the “Levels of Digital Preservation.”
