Monday, August 16, 2010

The LFTR Advocacy Community's use of Social Media

Dan Yurman sent and email yesterday to participants on a "social media" list of nuclear power supporters. Dan's email called attention to a presentation by Robin Fray Carey, CEO of Social Media Today, on the use of social media to communicate business messages. After viewing Carey's presentation, I recognized that it nicely demonstrates the extent to which the LFTR advocacy community is already making effective use of Social Media. Not only do we have active blogs,
http://energyfromthorium.com/
We have a discussion forum,
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/
We have done outreach to The Oil Drum readers,
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/
We have done outreaches to the Energy Collective,
http://theenergycollective.com/TheEnergyCollective/48416
we have several Facebook pages,
http://www.facebook.com/EnergyFromThorium
We have a presence on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
we have a presence on twitter,
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=thorium
we have numerous YouTube videos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk
We have reached out to scientists and engineering professionals through media articles in professionally oriented journals.
http://www.americanscientist.org/my_amsci/restricted.aspx?act=pdf&id=36745203226947
we have reached out to technically sophisticated young adults in a Wired article published in January.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/
We also are using social media sources that are not mentioned in the presentation, for example a page in the How Stuff works site.
http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2009/12/01/how-a-liquid-fluoride-thorium-reactor-lftr-works/
Have we been effective? You bet ya. No one had heard of the LFTR 4 years ago, because the term had not been yet coined. Today, lots of people have heard of it, and the LFTR has taken a life of its own on the Internet, quite apart from the core community of LFTR advocates. Even Bill Gates has mentioned the LFTR in a televised speech, and James Hanson mentioned it in a letter to President Obama.

3 comments:

Meredith Angwin said...

Hi Charles

As I noted on the list, the LFTR social media use can become a model for many people.

LFTR supporters use social media in two ways:

- Research Collaboration (exemplified by the Forum)
- Outreach (Google talks, Facebook pages, etc. Reaching people who are not involved in research.

Great job documenting this!

Meredith

Jason Ribeiro said...

Charles, maybe you can kick this post up a notch by making the links real links. Google loves links, especially ones that are grouped with relating words to other relating sources.

Anonymous said...

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2139398

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2149491

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