A few weeks ago a friend, who’s a postdoctoral research fellow with a passion for polar science, asked me a few questions about scicomms. It was fun to think about this, and I’m posting my responses here in case they can help anyone else who’s wondering the same things.
I would love to know how you went about setting up a website.
What was important to you?
For my personal website, I wanted something tidy and beautiful, which was easy to build and maintain. It started as a place to put a few of my favourite photos, and has grown gradually over the past few years.
For the Antarctic Shop, it was kind of similar. I was mostly driven by wanting to create an aesthetic platform that was easy to navigate. It mostly experimental - and I wanted to practice using the new Wordpress block editor! Now though, if I decide to try to grow the Antarctic shop, I think I'll take a different approach which is much more focused on building an audience, and making it easier to shop through the website.
What software you used/help did you employ?
I built them myself. My personal one is on Squarespace and the Antarctic Shop is on Wordpress.
There are lots of online forums and tutorials to help people get the hang of building websites, but I actually found the software extremely intuitive, and figured it out through a bit of trial and error.
How often do you maintain/update it etc?
Not much at the moment! The Antarctic Shop is pretty much on hold while I focus on paid work (I started it during the pandemic when I had no work).
My personal website is pretty static at the moment as well, it’s basically a brochure website, but I know I can always go back to it and add / amend things when new things happen, or when I'm looking for new work (which is usually when I update it).
Similarly for your blog
What do you write about?
It totally depends on what I'm trying to achieve :)
On the Antarctic Shop blog I post detailed responses to questions from customers and friends (and their kids!), because the main goal of that blog is to connect with the broader public who know very little about Antarctica, and get them interested by responding to their specific questions. (Also to encourage a kind of relationship by asking people to send their questions in). I was quite psyched on this project, and have lots more questions I'd like to answer, but am focusing on other things for now.
For the blog on my personal page, I've just put a few writing samples. I could definitely do more with this but it's not a focus right now.
Do you monitor your engagement, if so what seems to affect it?
Not at the moment, although I would if I was updating the blogs regularly, and trying to achieve something with them. I’ve spent a lot of time monitoring engagement with socials like blogs for work though, and there are a few things that usually affect engagement:
How widely I share it (eg. if I do a blog post and don't publicise it on social media, almost no one will visit).
How widely other people share it - if I publish it on socials and people find it interesting and share, it will get a lot more hits.
There are lots of other things that tend to affect engagement, like the size of the audience, effective use of tags, whether the post is endorsed by businesses, organisations or institutions, shared in popular media for some reason, and so on.
Hyperlinks to reputable sources within the text can also help. (Backlinks from reputable sources to your post help more!)
The other thing that helps with engagement is posting frequently, and posting quality content. Building an audience takes time, but if your content is good and enough people see it, the audience will grow on its own through word of mouth.
Your book would be especially interesting to hear about.
What inspired you to write it?
I actually contacted AusGeo to pitch a couple of magazine articles early last year, around the bicentenary of the first sighting of Antarctica. They already had some articles ready for that, but a few days later their book editor contacted me to ask whether I'd be interested in editing a book about Antarctica, published 25 years ago, for re-release later that year. I said yes, but as soon as I saw the old content I realised it would need to be re-written from scratch. I proposed this to the editor and she was happy for me to run with it, so I wrote the book.
How long did it take?
About 4 months. I was fortunate that I’d already done most of the research while preparing for my work in Antarctica over the previous 5 years , so it was mostly a case of clarifying the brief and writing it.
One area that was quite new for me was the impacts of climate change in Antarctica. I got to spend a few days in Hobart interviewing climate scientists from the University of Tasmania’s Institute of Marine and Antarctic Science (iMAS), the CSIRO and the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD), which was awesome, and very enlightening.
Did you have an editor?
Yes, AG has an in-house editor
How did you get it published, etc?
It was already a foregone conclusion. It was more of a freelance writing job than your conventional 'I wrote a book!' kind of moment.
While I was free to plan, organise and write the book as I chose, it was very much in an 'in-house' style, with specific topic areas (and topics within areas) they wanted covered.
There was a bit of scope for originality - I wanted to make sure women and climate change figured prominently, and they were supportive of that - but it definitely didn't feel like 'my' book.
I do have a new Antarctic book idea in the pipeline at the moment, which I'm quite excited about, so maybe I'll be able to answer these questions differently in a year or so :)
And further on your creative writing
How did you "get into" freelancing?
My first freelance writing job was with a landscape photographer who was looking to update his web content and reach more people with his photography courses. My boss at the time, who basically 'plucked me from obscurity and taught me everything I know', had recommended me for the job. I was still working as an employee, and continued to do so for many years, with little freelance contracts here and there. In fact I still work as an employee for one of my clients.
What training did you have?
I did a Bachelor of Arts in English literature, which included subjects in politics, psychoanalysis, French, Chinese history and lots of other things.
I'd also completed many writing courses, trained as an English teacher (I had a Cambridge Certificate of English Teaching to Adults - CELTA), and was trained as an adventure guide, focusing on roped activities like rock climbing and canyoning (which, funnily enough, led me to the job where I first started working in communications, for an adventure guiding company!).
What experience did you build up (and how)?
I was lucky to have a boss who saw value in my work, and wanted me to get better at what I did. I started out editing his grant applications and high consequence emails etc, then started advising him on more substantive, strategic matters.
He ended up taking me to several courses in marketing theory, and constantly sent me emails and videos about communication. He helped me to see that marketing didn't have to be the evil commercial behemoth I thought it was, but that it could also be used for extraordinary good.
After a while I started pursuing this knowledge on my own. I found several jobs through my work with him, and clients started recommending me to new clients. Eventually I was in a place where I felt comfortable pitching to clients. Very recently I've started to have some exciting people approaching me about work.
Do you promote yourself on social media (and if so, any advice?)
For me professionally, LinkedIn and Twitter are where I have the most interesting and stimulating work-related conversations, and keep abreast with what's happening across the polar sphere. I don't consider this promotion as much as connecting, sharing ideas and finding inspiration.
I have a Facebook page too, which is probably more for 'public outreach' but I don't use it much as it's not a focus for me at the moment. It's mainly there so people have somewhere to land if they go looking. And if people do like and follow the page, which would be great, it means that when I DO have some news or something to say, I have someone to say it to :) So I do try to post things there from time to time.
My advice would be, if you’re thinking about sinking time into social media, start by getting really clear on what you’re trying to achieve and why, and who you’re trying to speak to. Learn a bit about the different platforms, what they excel in (eg. photos / videos / short text / longer text / link sharing), and who tends to hang out there.
You’re not going to connect with the youth of today on LinkedIn. And there’s no point trying to network with like-minded professionals on SnapChat (well, this may depend on your industry!). I know it sounds obvious, but it’s really helpful to approach social media quite deliberately, in quite a strategic and structured way, with specific goals in mind. Otherwise you risk waking up one day, twelve years older, wondering where all that time went!