One of the purposes of iGEM is to spread the knowledge of synthetic biology and connect scientists and the society. The general public does not always accept the tools that synthetic biology uses and their products. Most of the times, this is simply due to a misunderstanding of basic concepts. To help improving the situation, you can interact with people from your area by doing events, or use the social media to reach a greater number of people. Managing the social media wisely is not a hard task but it is important to keep in mind how important they are.
In the team iGEM Paris-Bettencourt 2014, we were active on twitter, facebook pages, and google. We also had a separate mail and twitter account for our Practices & Policies project, the MOOC iGEM HS.This was sometimes hard to manage, so we used the online tool IFTTT to plan and manage interactions in our social media accounts. IFTTT allows you to create triggers and connect events between your accounts. For example, you can program facebook posts or tweets according to your google calendar, or send an automatic response if someone send you a mail and you are unavailable. However it is very important not to rely only in these tools and provide new and fresh material everyday. The secret to create a community online that follows your progress is actively looking for people that may be interested in your team and interact with them everyday. Upload pictures of the lab, and post about all the funny moments or thoughts that come to us everyday.
In iGEM, interaction with the general public and community building is really appreciated. This encouraged us to focus partially on that during our Practices and Policies project. In MOOC iGEM High School, we created several Genius pages that were able to host a community of annotators. This annotators were able to interact between each other, like or dislike their annotations, and leave written feedback. We could track the best annotators and directly send messages to them commanding their work. The best annotators won a prize and were mentioned in the website.
In a more formal way, you can also post in blogs or create your own. Some team members wrote articles for the website of our sponsor research institute, or posts for the PLOS synthetic biology community page. This actions will help your team connect with specialists and experts from the field or with people that share interests with you.
Remember that you can use social media and google as a way to get figures and data as well. For example, by measuring the number of interactions to certain material or questions, and by that identifying which topics and content are more interesting for the general public. If you do a good job, you will be able to see an increase in the overall activity by the end of the project. You can use social media and google search results and its statistics to showcase the awareness and the social unrest toward a specific issue. Imagine, for example, the increasing number of searches of “ebola” on google during the ebola crisis of 2014.