143rd Annual Meeting of the American Fisheries Society

September 08 - 14, 2013

In less than a decade social media has revolutionized communications with the incarnation and proliferation of weblogs, social networking, community media sites, Wiki’s, microblogs and supporting mobile applications. The net result of this communication shift is that information is exchanged more quickly, more often, and consumed by more people, in more ways than ever before. The majority of fisheries professionals just touch the edges of this vast new resource and along with other scientists and the global community are still learning daily about the potential uses. The objective of this symposium is to share ideas and provide examples of how social media is being used by fisheries professionals to effectively communicate within their professional community and with the public.  The benefit to participants at the AFS meeting will be to stimulate ideas for how they can utilize social media and why they should consider using social media outlets.  We intend to have speakers discuss how they or their agencies/organizations are using social media to communicate to the wider public audience.