A few weeks ago, we announced our intention to celebrate SpotOn NYC’s 2nd birthday with our biggest event-related series of blog posts yet: curating a collection of case studies of how scientists and science communicators have been using social media for science outreach.

There were several reasons why we thought this was a much needed resource: we’d heard discussions at conferences such as SpotOn London, ScienceOnline and the AAAS meeting about how those already using social media often found themselves trying to explain its benefits to others. We’d heard how some scientists wanted to persuade their colleagues to support a new social media project for their lab or department but didn’t know of resources to help them get sign off. And we also heard lots of questions about how to measure the outcomes from using social media.

So, we decided to ask scientists and science communicators to contribute their experiences by answering a standard set of questions so that we could create a series of comparable case studies. We’re sharing them this week and next as follows:

Tuesday: multimedia projects – using tools such as podcasts, videos, G+ hangouts and tumblr

Wednesday: blogging for a research institution or other science organisation

Thursday: blogging and using social media as an individual scientist

Friday: using Twitter – at conferences, for journal clubs and more

Monday: one-off social media activities – such as raising awareness of another project

We know that there are some gaps in the series – we’re short on examples of the use of Facebook pages for science outreach, for example – so if you’d like to contribute your experiences, do get in touch (SpotOn@nature.com). We may revisit the series in a couple of weeks with another round of case studies. We’ll also be continuing these conversations in other ways on the blog in the coming weeks, so make sure you add it to your RSS reader!

All of the case studies will be listed here, as they’re published, and you can also join in the discussions using the #reachingoutsci hashtag.