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Social media such as wikis, blogs, social bookmarking tools, social networking websites (e.g. Facebook), or photo- and video-sharing websites (e.g. Flickr, YouTube) facilitate gathering and sharing of information and resources and enable collaboration. Social media is a new form of communication that is changing behaviour and expectations of researchers, employers and funding bodies.

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Our research has shown that researchers and supervisors are using social media tools for research discourse related to six functions:

Formal dialogues with team members: these constitute formal supervision or project meetings, and for communications between meetings

Informal interactions with peers, team members and broader research community

Documentation, authoring, exchange of documents with team members and for document storage

space for reflection, working with ideas and the process

engaging with the community at large

keeping informed about resources, conference news, funding calls

This is how formal conversations and research meetings happen.

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We found that these are some of the technologies that are being used for formal dialogues with supervisors.

Email is the most important tool

Even though there is a widespread adoption of social media technologies, email remains the most important tool for both researchers and supervisors. Email is used for having discussions, for scheduling meetings, for sharing documents, and for sending quick and informal updates. Several participants in our research mentioned that because of the variety of tools for the calendar function that colleagues use (e.g. within Microsoft’s Outlook, or the Google Calendar, or the iCal on the Mac), they prefer arranging the meetings by email; as one of them said: “you always check email; so it is easier to set up meetings by email”.

This is one of the ways in which informal interactions occur with peers and research team members.

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These are some of the technologies that are being employed for informal interactions.

This is how we used to store our research papers and maintain our personal libraries.

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These are the some of the ways in which documents are now stored and shared with the supervision team and the research community.

This is one of the ways of working on ideas with fellow students and research team members.

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These are some of the technologies that researchers use for working with ideas, for reflection, for connecting ideas, and for sense-making.

Conferences and workshops are great venues for networking.

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Social media and other online technologies can facilitate networking and dissemination.

Visiting the library is one of the ways to keep oneself informed of the latest papers/articles.

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You could keep yourself informed through various online technologies.

3D virtual worlds such as Second Life are now being used for meeting with part-time PhD students who may not be able to visit the ‘real’ campus often.

Research events in 3D virtual worlds provide an excellent platform for networking with colleagues from all over the world.

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This is a profile of a PhD student using technologies for research dialogues.

The profile is authentic, but the name has been changed.

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The key to successful application of technology in research dialogues is fitness-for-purpose. The challenge for researchers and supervisors is to leverage the right social media for their purposes.

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We found that researchers are conscious about separating the personal and professional lives in social media, less in the PhD stage and more at the post-doc stage. Some PhD students mentioned that although they post photos of family or news about their personal lives on Facebook in which they have professional colleagues as ‘friends’, they are careful about sharing only those ‘fun’ aspects that they would anyway do in informal settings with their colleagues. However, researchers at post-doc level mentioned about declining (or ignoring) requests from professional colleagues on Facebook and instead linking with them with LinkedIn or Academia.edu.

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A social media strategy for research dialogues is about achieving communications, business or organisational goals, for example, informing the community about an innovation or invention, or raising the profile the project team, a research group, or an institution.

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In developing a social media strategy, a social strategy and a digital strategy need to be considered.

Developing a social strategy implies deciding with whom, what, how and when you would communicate to share, learn, and create and enhance relationships with others. A digital strategy implies choosing the technologies to achieve the social strategy.

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It would also be useful to keep a track of the quality:

how many useful connections that you have made each month, or the number of ideas that you have developed as a result of online communications through social media, or did a tweet on Twitter lead to an invitation to speak at a professional conference, or did one of your connections offer a consultancy project, or did you become aware of a funding opportunity that you wouldn’t have if not for a discussion on a LinkedIn group?