A crucial component of running a journal is increasing readership. The importance of providing engaging online content and having an active social media presence cannot be overstated. How well prepared are you to take advantage of these features if one of your articles were to go viral? How can you be ready to capitalize on the buzz?
“Fortuitous encounters”
If all goes to plan, your marketing efforts will keep your regular readers coming back. But, during the recent ISMTE virtual conference, presenter Todd McGee of Highwire Press, Inc. suggested that journal staff should be prepared for what he calls “fortuitous encounters”: those moments when the planets align, a journal article is shared through popular mass media, and the subsequent clicks are then heard ‘round the world.
He provided an example of an article about the coronavirus that was published in 2007 in the American Society of Microbiology’s Clinical Microbiology Reviews. The article was shared on Bill Maher’s show in March 2020, and it trended worldwide. The article went viral—with nearly 400,000 full views in March. The question is: Was the ASM prepared, or did they lose the bigger opportunity by not capturing the “next click”?
Clinical Microbiology Reviews does have a dedicated journal website that promotes active Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts, as well as podcasts and a YouTube page, so I think they’re capturing those clicks just fine. However, the site where the actual article can be viewed and downloaded is a different story.
On that article’s page, the potentially useful “Related Articles” column located just to the right of the article text is empty.
Sure, there’s a PubMed link and a Google link to outside articles, but how many other articles specifically published by the ASM could have been getting clicks from this column? It doesn’t appear that anyone seized the opportunity to link related articles that readers could have viewed, shared, and re-shared from this page. That’s nearly 400,000 “Related Article” opportunities missed.
McGee says, “If you aren’t planning for these types of events, you are planning to miss them.”
The ASM’s viral 2007 article is a prime example of how covering all your bases, or not, can mean the difference between a good spike of clicks for one article, or a family-tree of clicks that keeps the momentum going.
Ultimately, the key is for journal support staff to find and keep a solid team of marketing, social media, and technical associates who are always on the lookout for useful ways to capture that next fortuitous encounter and keep it going. Sometimes that encounter can be there, just to the right of where everyone is looking.
We’d love to hear from you! What can you see potentially becoming your journal’s “fortuitous encounter”? How is your editorial team preparing for it? Let us know in the comments below.
