You’ve published a paper written an article or…

You’ve published a paper, written an article or launched a new Web site. So you wish to promote it. But how do you know if people are accessing the resource and what they may be saying?  If you own the Web site you may have access to the usage statistics – but if the resources is hosted elsewhere it might not be easy to access usage statistics.  And finding out what people may be saying does appear to be difficult.

Using Twitter, however, it may be possible to get some partial answers. Earlier today an article of mine on entitled “Openness should ‘go deep’” was published in Research Information and, as illustrated, was featured on the home page of the magazine. However I have no access to the statistics for the magazine (which will probably be commercially confidential).

However JISC, who invited me to write the article (and who supported the writing of the article) sent a tweet when the article was published:

Go beyond open access, Brian Kelly of JISC-funded @UKWebFocus challenges universities http://bit.ly/kZMVmz

It should be noted that the link to the article was provided using the bit.ly link shortener.  This service also provides usage statistics which can be viewed by simply appending + to the bit.ly URL. So clicking on http://bit.ly/kZMVmz+: and then looking at the full range of statistics for all bit.ly links which point to the same resource I find that  54 click to the resource since the bit.ly URL was first minted 3.5 hours ago.  In addition to the statistics (which includes details of the client used, location, etc.) the page also gives detail of the tweets which contains the bit.ly link:

I can’t help but feel that when new services are published there should be an attempt at monitoring the initial impact using this type of approach.