2014 ASHS Annual Conference

Most researchers and students will publish the results of their research in journal publications, books or at a professional conference.  However, the most effective way to deliver content and research impacts to the general public can greatly depend on the audience who is being targeted.  Extending our research impacts regarding the safe production and handling of fresh produce, our target audience has always been the grower, field worker and consumer.  In today’s technology driven world, we determined that, it’s most effective to spread the impacts of our research and grower recommendations through short, modular training videos and social media.

       Currently, 2,326,347,842 people use of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube combined.  From within that group, 32.3% of those people use Facebook, 43% utilize Twitter, 3% use Pinterest and 21.7% make use of YouTube.  Within this social media platform, people typically share among a variety of topics including opinion, humor, stories, and current events, each containing subgroups of wide arrays of personal interests.  However, our previous work suggested, that social media provided a niche in areas covering fresh produce safety outreach and specifically lacked a collection of bilingual training videos whose focus was on the safe production of specialty crops.  As a result, social media has allowed us to provide our original video content, to a public seeking clear and concise information.

       We typically upload our edited video materials onto YouTube and then subsequently share them on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  Since 2012, 28.3% of our social network ‘likes’ us on Facebook, 53.6% ‘follow’ us on Twitter, 14.6% ‘follow’ us on Pinterest and 3.5% ‘subscribe’ to us on Youtube.  The data suggests that specific material like our Fresh Produce Safety content, is accessed by the general public differently from how the world views social media. As people typically use social media to connect with friends and relatives and for entertainment purposes, other people use social media as a way to educate themselves and to learn about a specific subject. We find that using multiple social platforms has enabled us to have an audience base that has an alternative structure than that of a general populace.  Moreover, we continue to work towards ways to exploit the social media alignments to best meet the needs of our grower clientele base.  We believe that one of the many effective ways to do that in a high speed world, is through videos and social media.