Socialmediaworx

On the heels of watching Obama reach out to new voters during the campaign and expectantly hopeful that his administration is setting a new tone for partnering with the American people comes a great story from GOOD about NASA‘s use of Twitter during the MarsPhoenix Lander adventure.

Some 37,000 people regularly follow the first-person, often-poetic MarsPhoenix Twitter feed. From 35 million miles away, they ask MarsPhoenix questions about life on the red planet. They celebrate its intrepid mission. And now, they mourn the robot’s slow demise due to the onset of an unforgiving Martian winter. (Twitter user laura47 recently lamented: “MarsPhoenix *cry* I don’t want to lose you!! so far away, and yet so close.”)

Of course, the robot itself is not Tweeting across the universe. In fact, its Veronica McGregor from the news office of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It’s a testament to the power of social media technologies that an organization as habitually detached as NASA can make significant inroads with a public it’s kept at arm’s length. Give McGregor’s astute understanding of the power of empathy and narrative a lot of the credit; it makes following MarsPhoenix compelling in a way that no standard-issue press releases and dry updates from the NASA website ever could be…

Hopefully, the success of this experiment will lead to a sea change in the way people interact with the research community (and vice versa). By reaching out to the public, scientists can keep people apprised of their groundbreaking work—and even offer some interesting lessons, as well. Take for example McGregor’s MarsPhoenix dispatch that informed her readers that the star that looked like it was directly above the moon wasn’t a star at all–it was Mars. “I got a lot of responses from people saying they actually went out and looked; they got very sentimental about it because they never knew that was Mars,” she says. “It’s great to think that people are learning.”

Perhaps like Obama’s powerful online narrative bringing in new voters, the MarsPhoenix social media strategy is an excellent case study for the power of story to breathe new life into a once overlooked agency.