Laboratories are at the forefront of research and analysis. But when it comes to communication, they are followers rather than leaders and can be very slow to adopt innovations. The use of social media is a case in point, as a recent survey of nearly 200 lab managers revealed. There are six good reasons for labs to explore the opportunities offered by the social media.
Imagine the following situation: An analyst has grave doubts about the accuracy of GC results and suspects a technical fault. She quickly composes a short message describing the problem, accompanied by a spectrum chart of the characteristic peaks, which she produced on her mobile phone. She adds a hashtag such as #labpros and “tweets” it into the ether. Within a minute, she receives the first response, quickly followed by six more. Two make the same suggestion: “Check that the injector isn’t clogged with septum particles.” Bingo! Problem solved within ten minutes.
Experienced GC users will know that this is not the first time that output has been distorted by a contaminated injector or column. And experienced Twitter users know the power of the hashtag! Your message reaches thousands, possibly millions of other users within seconds, and it would be a very esoteric problem that didn’t attract countless useful suggestions. So, Twitter is part and parcel of lab practice, right? Wrong.
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