From: "Secretary, ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety" <secretary**At_Symbol_Here**DCHAS.ORG>
Subject: Re: [DCHAS-L] Question
Date: February 11, 2013 3:01:28 PM EST
Reply-To: DCHAS-L <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**MED.CORNELL.EDU>
Message-ID: <5564F9EDC11C09468EE5DAF02B5CB30F1A266748**At_Symbol_Here**BL2PRD0410MB374.namprd04.prod.outlook.com>

We are on LinkedIn. Ralph posts much of this religiously. I am the group administrator.

I thought I would add some information to this:

Last year, in follow up to the CHAS web site upgrade that took effect in August, I began exploring various options of Web 2.0 outreach for the Division. I loosely define "Web 2.0" as Internet tools beyond e-mail and web sites.

The challenge for those of us raised on the 1.0 version of the Web is to understand the value added by Facebook, Linked-in and Twitter. After a few months of tracking the three, I believe that they are distinct from the opportunities provided by e-mail and web sites.

With the help of a local 20-something consultant, I have set up Twitter feeds and contributed a variety of stories to the division Facebook and Linked In pages. (These stories are web stories I come across incidental to the events that are summarized at the pinboard site and via e-mail 3 times a week.) They tend to be related to CH&S and academic laboratory science, rather than reports of specific incidents. These items often come from other Twitter feeds.

My observation is that Linked-in and Facebook provide outreach beyond the current membership. Linked-in is able to present the topics discussed to a more technical audience than Facebook, but it also requires additional effort to visit the Linked in page and understand how it works to pursue discussions. I think of Twitter as a headline service and Facebook as an outreach tool for the general public.

With this in mind, I send the various items of interest I find to the various outlets listed below based on my sense of each medium. This month, we also began a pilot program of advertising the Division and its national meeting workshops through Facebook and Google. This has resulted in more traffic to the division's Facebook page and web site, although whether it will result in more division members or workshop registrants remains to be seen.

Anyway, I expect that the DCHAS-L list will continue to be an important feature of the Division for the foreseeable future, although we don't want to neglect the audiences that other media provide access to. People whose curiosity has been piqued by the above discussion should visit the various sites listed below to see what they look like. People who are content to stick with Web 1.0 technologies will see the service continue. If you need to control your Inbox load from DCHAS-L, let me know and I'll be glad to set your subscription to DIGEST, which means that you'll get one summary e-mail per day from the list.

Let me know if you have any questions about this.

- Ralph

Ralph Stuart
secretary**At_Symbol_Here**dchas.org
Secretary
Division of Chemical Health and Safety
American Chemical Society

Twitter feeds:
**At_Symbol_Here**acsdchas lab environmental health and safety news and issues
**At_Symbol_Here**labsustain laboratory environmental sustainability news and issues

Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/ACS-Division-of-Chemical-Health-and-Safety-DCHAS/184981281569450

Linked in:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4036726&trk=hb_side_g

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