Describe any relevant past experience in marketing. With reference to other projects you have managed, describe how you promoted the service to the main stakeholders. Also, highlight what marketing strategies worked well, and what approaches were less successful.
COS is a technology and culture change organization. COS’s mission is to increase openness integrity and reproducibility of research. It has succeeded in a global communications campaign to shift interest toward openness and reproducibility with media-intensive coverage of evidence for the challenges of openness and reproducibility and promotion of solutions such as OSF OSF Preprints and OSF Registries for researchers and TOP Guidelines badges for open practices and Registered Reports products for journals funders and institutions.
Example: In 2015 we published the results of our Reproducibility Project: Psychology that highlighted challenges of reproducing a substantial portion of 100 published findings in that field. Careful planning helped manage a story prone to misunderstanding that was covered globally in almost every major media outlet and market. Ultimately this was named one of the biggest science stories of the year. Our consistent messaging coupled the challenges of reproducibility and the opportunity that openness provides for addressing those challenges.
We have similar experience with our ongoing Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology and with other initiatives highlighting the challenges of openness and reproducibility and the solutions that OSF preprints TOP Guidelines and other initiatives provide. The combination of our mission research products and communications strategy has helped COS become a prominent credible voice for open science. This leadership position and communications strategy will easily integrate efforts to advance The Commons via well-known marketing mechanisms.
Earned Media: Our community team press contacts and influencer channels provide means of spreading thought leadership case studies and referral campaigns. COS’s status as a mission-driven non-profit driving research culture-change and technology initiatives provides unusually strong access to high-viewership science (e.g. Nature Science) and general media outlets (e.g. NY Times WaPo Atlantic 538).
Shared Media : Inexpensive, transactional, conversational–shared media has been a primary driver of growth in COS traffic, user base, customer service responsiveness, and consumption of COS content. With shared media, we react quickly to customer needs and changing conditions. We also use social platforms to drive referrals via our Ambassador program, an international group of researchers that amplify our marketing efforts in their communities.
Owned Media: Training content marketing events and email are some of our more successful growth strategies. We provide OSF training webinars and onsite workshops throughout the community several times per month. These have immediate transactional impact are easy to measure and adjust and are relatively inexpensive. Thought leadership in the form of papers infographics and case studies can be married with specific calls to action. Our blog features case studies tips for using our products to increase research efficiency and open science news. Finally because COS is partly an academic research organization it has unusual access to leading or participating in scholarly meetings and giving academic lectures and symposia (STM NAS AAMC AAAS NIH NSF DARPA disciplinary meetings).
Paid Media : Paid media supports transactional product marketing and lead generation tactics such as e-commerce. On its own, we have found that it takes multiple touches using paid media to get results. Searches tend to be more about short-term needs and specific product or service requirements. In the context of The Commons, we expect that paid media will be effective as a complement to a community-based effort promoting awareness and support for preprints.