Earlier this week Steven Hamblin wrote a blog post requesting help as he develops a presentation on social media use in Academia. This has prompted me to put a presentation up on Slideshare; one that is related closely to this topic. This presentation was something I put together back in March, and looking further back, it evolved from discussions with my PhD student Crystal Ernst, and from a presentation given at the Entomological Society of Canada’s annual conference last autumn. It’s far from perfect, a bit outdated now, but hopefully contains some useful information. Enjoy! (and please share and comment!).
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Arthropod Ecology 
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I really like this presentation. I completely agree with the importance of having content ready before launching your blog. I started blogging about my research interested in September of 2011, but it wasn’t until early 2013 that I finally got into consistent and regular updating and readership engagement both popular and scientific skyrocketed with constant posts.
But I thought a few things were missing from the presentation. It would be nice to see a discussion of G+, I think it has a more science-oriented community than Twitter (and definitely more so than Facebook) and is a good ‘entry-blog’ with easy communication that can easily be integrated with blogger blogs if you want to switch to a more long-form content later. It would be nice to discuss specific tools for reaching scientists: [researchblogging](http://www.researchblogging.org/), [scienceseeker](http://scienceseeker.org/) and popular audience: reddit. There is also a category of interactions that was not mentioned Q&A sites. In particular, there are 3 research level or friendly websites that I am familar with: [academia.SE](http://academia.stackexchange.com/), [cstheory.SE](http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/users/1037/artem-kaznatcheev), and [mathoverflow](http://mathoverflow.net/). Of course, there are ones for fields relevant to this blog’s audience, like [biology](http://biology.stackexchange.com/users/500/artem-kaznatcheev) and [bioinformatics](http://www.biostars.org/) but the first is non-academic and the second I have no experience with.
Finally, I really appreciate your efforts in encouraging students to blog! I think it is especially important for undergraduate students starting in labs, it is important to blog since it gets them writing about science and prepares them for eventual publications.
Thanks for your comments! I agree – a lot of things were missed. I’m relatively new to Google+ and haven’t yet fully explored its potential. And I certainly should have mentioned scienceseeker & researchblogging in the presentation – they are both excellent. I’m not as familiar with some of the other links you posted – I will look into them.
I guess the problem is that the talk was only supposed to be 50 minutes long – just not enough time to add everything I should have (perhaps I’ll have to work on a follow-up presentation..)
Again, much thanks for the comments! Always appreciated.