Research About Listening

First thing, over the past few weeks, I have decided to create a far more active web presence for my research. While the studies have been available for individuals to participate online, the blog web address was not simple enough. So the move was made to purchase an easier to remember domain.

Luckily with Brian's web knowledge, I discovered I could purchase http://www.researchaboutlistening.com and still use the blogspot application to avoid having to code a new site or pay for hosting. So that's been a better success.

After doing that, the press release came out in the Metro paper, but sadly no one else picked it up. And to make it even worse, the sentence at the end about participating in the research with the link was absent. So that did not help me get any participants. Because of that, i spent a lot of effort hounding people through facebook to participate.

Then it became an effort to get people on campus, only it was right after everyone finished the semester. That led to going to the library in town (absent of people) and the train station-- from which i got asked to leave/stop. So again, a bit of a strike out.

Then, after speaking with a lady from Edinburgh Beltaneabout needing to promote my work to get more participants. She asked me about whether i was using twitter. This i had not been doing. But now i am. Feel free to follow @StudyListening (https://twitter.com/#!/StudyListening) via twitter. The trick becomes now that i need to increase RAL's following (currently up to 47 folks, yay) by hashtagging and re-tweeting things that relate to my work. All in the hope that it gets people to click the link to my research and then in turn click a link to actually participate. It's a lot of work.

After prowling around twitter for people (radio stations, record labels, tech blogs, musicians, etc) to follow and discussing this idea with Brittany, I made the choice to do the trifecta... and create a facebook page for Research About Listening. Please go ahead and 'like' RAL's page if you happen to be on FB (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Research-About-Listening/104798916280932). Admittedly, this is the least developed of the trio, but i suppose eventually it'll get there.

Oh and then there's the youtube channel. I did register that as well - but really i have no content to put on that. Maybe one day i will, and, therefore, i now have the dedicated youtube channel for StudyListening (i'm not even going to put that link here yet, but if you do have a channel, please subscribe to follow me anyway, it'll pay off in the future *i hope*).

Needless to say, building a web presence is not easy. But i see the value in it. And it'll only continue to grow. It's just a lot of work.
And so there was the writing of the chapter one draft, meanwhile i graduated, and then took a trip to india, and then trained for and skated an inline marathon, and then dealt with a failed press release data collection situation, which brings us up to about last week, when the decision was made to quickly create (from the ground up) three entirely new research projects to launch in august when the Fringe festival brings lots of people to town (who will hopefully not be annoyed as i ask them to take part in my research).

Hopefully the web stuff will grow and translate into lots of people.

Oh and at some point i made the decision to make business cards. So that when people ask me what i do, i can not only tell them about it and try to get them to remember to take part but i can physically hand them the website address. It's just too bad i did that before i created that logo, but still. Hopefully it'll all go together.

Then again, i still need people to take part in that first study. I still haven't hit the quota yet (but i am a lot closer... still... tell your friends)!