Letters from Mars: how NASA talks about space in social networks

Photo: NASA

The American space agency NASA has 510 accounts on 14 media platforms, through which they try to explain complex research and inventions in a language that is commonly understood.

Three people manage the agency's online communication from headquarters in Washington, and each NASA center has its own separate team for working with social media, writes The Verge.

Ten such teams daily provide the audience with scientists, engineers, researchers and other specialists.

About how this all works, the leaders of the SMM-department of NASA - Jason Townsend and John Embrick.

About NASA and ordinary people

John (D. E.): It seems to me that now the agency’s activity is at the peak of its popularity. People can access our news just by subscribing to Twitter or Facebook. And we can communicate with the audience as never before.

For example, the operation of the Hubble telescope can be monitored via @NASA_Hubble on Twitter. If you are generally interested in our news - you can subscribe to the main pages of NASA. Even a robot with the MKS "leads" its own Twitter.

Jason (JT): People connect to projects and practically personally participate in each mission. Thanks to all social tools, we get a huge user involvement. This is completely different from the traditional but outdated publication of a press release about the launch of the space mission. Social networks truly personalize communication, provide interactive participation in the activities of the Agency.

D.YE .: If before people were just watching NASA, now they themselves take part in what we are doing. You can ask questions that we try to answer as extensively as possible. There is a constant interaction with the Reddit audience and communication with the ISS astronauts, who answer questions from Twitter. We conducted online communication sessions between people from every corner of the planet and members of the mission in Earth orbit using Google Plus Hangouts. Nobody could even dream about such closeness between NASA and ordinary citizens 10 years ago, and today we have already done it. And we are very proud of it.

Another important area of ​​our activity that helps to engage the audience is the NASA Social Program, where subscribers from social networks can get behind the scenes of the Agency, we organize meetings with astronauts, administrative staff, invite participants to real laboratories and show projects in work.

About working with scientific data

D.YE .: When you keep so many accounts, including publications on behalf of the robot, it may seem from the outside that we treat scientific data with a fair amount of creativity. In fact, it all depends on what is published and in what context. Just look at our Curiosity rover, on whose behalf we often refer to phenomena and terms from pop culture.

But there is a lot of serious news - here you really have to show creativity in order to draw attention to the scientific research conducted by NASA. You can not just copy the title of the article on Twitter, post a link - and expect a huge audience involvement. We need the user to linger on the publication, view it, follow the link and read the material. The extent to which we will be able to attract the reader’s attention depends on the overall perception of the whole Agency by ordinary citizens.

About experiments with new platforms

JT: Recently, we have been experimenting a lot with new tools for ourselves: we joined Snapchat and did the first live broadcast from space using Facebook Live. According to the founding documents of NASA, our responsibility is to facilitate the widest dissemination of information about the work of NASA, to respond to the results and consequences of such distribution. Therefore, we are constantly introducing new tools for interacting with the audience, assessing how effective certain methods are, whether we can use them to highlight the activities of the Agency and to gain a new audience.

D. Ye.: We want to be everywhere where only people get new information. There are a huge number of users who no longer read newspapers and do not even go to media sites. For example, in Snapchat we find those users who are not subscribed to our channels on Twitter or Facebook, but on this platform they like our content. We see interest in materials about the work of the Agency, space missions, technology development.

Photo: NASA

We have an impressive library of sounds - and we broadcast them through Soundcloud, because there you can find a completely different category of users. These are music lovers who previously did not come into the view of our SMM specialists, but now also show interest in NASA. Whatever the media platform, if users come there in search of news - we should also be there.

About communication inside NASA

JT: In order to be closer to the audience, we track comments and adopt words that are used by the readers themselves. As soon as we publish something rather specific - in response, we immediately receive a lot of clarifying questions. When we first began to carry out active work on behalf of NASA in social networks, we wrote a lot about work in outer space, that we plan to cover the output of astronauts beyond the limits of the ISS. But we called this process EVA (from English extravehicular activity), and all other users on the Internet - spacewalk. We quickly realized that we need to switch to the language of communication of our public. If people read about the "space walk" - we will be happy to write about it.

About astronauts personal pages

JT: Some of the astronauts, for example, Scott Kelly have become real Twitter stars with their own army of fans. The agency does not control the personal online activity of our employees, including those in space. There are no requirements for what NASA astronaut can publish on his personal page. Stories, photos and videos that real people share are read at times more interesting than official accounts (even if on behalf of a robot). But in general, both the personal pages and the channels of the Agency contribute to the development of user empathy for our work, provoke additional interest in the industry as a whole.

Iberian Peninsula from space
Photo: NASA

In case someone from the team asks for help in working with new media, we have representatives at the Training Center in Houston. They explain how and what to publish at different sites, give advice. We conduct short training, and while astronauts are preparing to be sent into space, they are also practiced in working with the Internet.

As a rule, when an astronaut enters the ISS, he does not have time to be active in social networks (or the Internet connection is not always at the proper level at the moment when he wants to publish). For such situations, we have employees with access to personal pages of astronauts, but be sure: on behalf of a specific person, we publish only what he gave us via electronic communication. And the literal text, and photos.

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