How NASA Uses Social Media to Bring Space to Everyone
By: Belinda Lanks
Tags: Social Media, Space, NASA, Mars, Science

Social Media Lead Stephanie L. Smith outlines her best practices for using social media to further the agency’s mission — sharing science with the greatest number of people possible.

NASA sent a robotic spacecraft called Phoenix to the north polar region of Mars. The solar-powered lander’s mission was to explore the planet’s habitability and history of water. Its landing on Mars was big news, but news that fell on Memorial Day weekend, when most science and technology reporters were more likely to be at barbecues than at their desks. So Veronica McGregor, the agency’s news and social media manager, made a radical decision: She announced the event on Twitter.

“Twitter was a really new thing at that point, and she thought, ‘What the heck. It doesn’t cost anything. I’m going to give it a whirl,’” says Stephanie L. Smith, the social media lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). As a rule, NASA headquarters breaks its own news, and McGregor saw to it that her blow-by-blow tweets of Phoenix’s Mars landing followed the agency’s policies and procedures for the release of information. Since McGregor’s pioneering mission onto Twitter, social media has been one of the principal ways that NASA communicates with the media and the public around the world. Today, the agency has more than 700 social accounts distributed across 10 U.S. field centers.

Smith is the chief liaison between social media at JPL in Pasadena, California, and the social media team at NASA headquarters and other NASA centers. Together, they advance the agency’s mission of sharing its science investigations, engineering marvels, and space activities with the widest audience possible. Smith follows strict rules, a feature of any federal entity, but she also abides by her own playbook for telling compelling stories that will grab readers’ attention. Here, Smith details her strategy for keeping NASA fans engaged and trolls at bay.

Stephanie L. Smith, Social Media Lead,

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Match your tone and timing to the subject matter and audience.

This is Communications 101, right? Know who your audience is and the message you’re trying to communicate, then let your word choice and your timing and the tools flow from there. We would never have the kind of light-hearted fun that we do on a Curiosity tweet from Mars that might have song lyrics in it or a reference to some awesome ’80s movie if we’re talking about a natural disaster that’s led to loss of life and property. Veronica learned quickly that the audience on one of our accounts, @AsteroidWatch, is very different from the average space fan. These people are worried about low-flying asteroids headed for planet Earth. (Note: There are no known asteroids headed for Earth.) At one point, I believe a period for applications was closing, and Veronica started her tweet with “Hurry.” The followers freaked out. They said, “Please never ever ever start a tweet with that word here.”

Social media is a two-way conversation.

Before venturing onto social media, we would only get national and international pickups if something was launching, something was landing, or something blew up. But the kind of day-to-day operations of science and engineering wasn’t something the average assignment editor was going to pick up and use to greenlight a story. Social media gave us a chance to start pulling back the curtain a little bit and showing what incremental science and exploration looks like on a day-to-day basis.

That said, the nature of the medium is to be a conversation. Nobody wants to talk to someone at the party who only talks about themselves and then walks away. We try to listen as much as we speak.

Don’t feed the trolls.

That’s the number-one rule I tell my team, and that’s what I tell people at JPL when advising them on their use of social media. When you get down into the muck, nobody wins. That said, it’s always worth testing that relationship, because sometimes someone might phrase something in a way online that you’re not sure if they’re trying to troll you or if they have a legitimate question. But pretty soon into the interaction, you can figure out the level of earnestness. One of my favorite things to do is to explain something to somebody that maybe they didn’t get before, or they just didn’t have access to the information. Then you can feel the light bulb go on when they get it.

A well-timed AMA (short for “ask me anything”) can be a beautiful thing.

I love doing AMAs (a subreddit for question-and-answer interactive interviews). We don’t do them often. We do them when we have really big news to share. My favorite timing for them is maybe one to two hours after major news has broken, when headlines are starting to circulate and people are seeing it in their feeds, and they have just enough information to be able to formulate some really good questions. That’s when we’ll show up in an AMA and say, “Hey, we’re scientists and engineers from NASA to talk about [insert news of the day].” We did this when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter had evidence of liquid water flowing on Mars. And we did this after the discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 system, the seven Earth-size planets about 40 light-years from Earth. Those conversations were incredible, because people had just heard about it, and then we were with the actual experts to be able to take on the questions.

Over more than 14 years, Oppy transmitted 217,594 images, including a selfie.

Don’t be a robot — even when you are one.

With credit to David-Michel Davies at the Webby Awards for that one, which is what he said after he interviewed me and Veronica about the work that we do here, and then put together a report for the Webbys. It’s absolutely true. We do have a lot of accounts in the first person, like the Phoenix and Curiosity accounts. It’s easy to anthropomorphize a rover because we always have stereoscopic cameras on them, which means it looks like they have eyes. From eyes, it’s easy to imagine a face. There’s this natural human response to look at these little robots almost like Wall-E and feel a personal connection to them. Then, when they’re tweeting in first person and telling you what they did at work today, it’s easy to cheer for them.

Recognize a story’s epic potential.

The Opportunity Mars rover lasted a really long time and far longer than it was expected to last. It was made for a 90-day mission, or 90 sols, really. A sol is a Martian day, which is 24 hours and 39 minutes long. But both Spirit and Opportunity were only designed to be up there and working for about three months. Spirit lasted more than six years, and Opportunity was active and moving on the surface for more than 14 years. That’s a really long time to be out there in the news, to be sharing science and pictures — such beautiful pictures from the surface of Mars. Opportunity showed us sunrises and sunsets and clouds moving and dust devils. These are pictures that would come in a raw feed directly from the spacecraft to the mission website.

Opportunity’s demise was very operatic in its scale. Your hero can only be as great as the foe they’re facing. In Opportunity’s case, the dust storm was the baddie. So we’ve got this intrepid rover that has lasted many times over its original-design life facing the worst dust storm in recorded Martian history. It was incredible, and it was epic in the formal sense of those words. If we had to say good-bye, I think that it was a fitting and awesome thing to be the final chapter for that very storied mission.

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