CNRxEXPO Social Media Strategy
Report by Maria Vittoria Ponzanelli during the DiSBA–CNR annual conference.
POST EXPO: Lessons learned, Milan, 24th – 25th November 2015.
The CNRxEXPO Project
Francesco Loreto, DiSBA/CNR Director
Giambattista Brignone, URP/CNR Director
Maria Vittoria Ponzanelli, Digital PR CNRxEXPO
The “CNR for EXPO” social media strategy was focused on online engagement to increase the presence of the National Council of Research of Italy on the internet and to create a community of readers interested in research topics.
Engagement, you know, is the ability to hold the attention of an individual / or to induce an individual to participate in some sort of activity.
I read online an appropriate description of online engagement: it is “the gravity that holds an audience in orbit around a brand”. This description clearly explains what happens.
Starting from the official site, CNRxEXPO, we created a satellite blog, CNR Expo Lab, designed as something easy to use to facilitate the researchers to manage alone the publication of promotional articles for their events. The purpose was to valorise the scientific content offer the readers new tools for understanding.
Above all, a blog where it was possible to take advantage of SEO optimization techniques to produce the greater spread possible of the topics of the National Council of Research of Italy events at the Expo, on the internet and in the media.
Along with the blog, we created 30 Twitter accounts specific to each event, sometimes managed by the same researchers.
These accounts were interconnected with the Twitter profiles @cnrxexpo and @cnrexpolab, which were the hub of CNR for Expo news dissemination on social media.
30 Twitter profiles mean 30 voices, 30 scientific topics and 30 hashtags that worked together to disseminate information about the scientific events at the Expo and built a network of readers interested in science.
As well as #VivaioRicerca, the hashtag created by the Italian Pavilion to index on the internet the scientific partnership with the National Research Council of Italy, there were added 30 hashtags more specific for each event.
In some cases, the results have been surprising because it’s through the hashtags that it was possible to observe and monitor the reader’s engagement during a conference and after on the web.
The internet offers a many free tools to disseminate information. Social media is just the tip of the iceberg of a communication system based on the exponential multiplication of data.
That’s why the communication strategy of CNR for EXPO on Social Media bet on Twitter. Because Twitter, more than any other social media, allows unfiltered dissemination of information from the news to the reader, who is at the same time the producer and the consumer of the information.
