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Managing an Online Presence: Familiarity, Consistency and Engagement.
11 April 2011
By David Alexander Ellis
What do Facebook, Academia.edu and Twitter have in common ?
Apart from being free, they can also help you publicise your research. On the other hand intelligent, hard working people can be made to appear lazy, disorganised and unreliable to thousands of academics and recruitment agencies!
In my quest to avoid looking like an idiot online, I try to remember some basic rules, which have served me well (most of the time).
1. Familiarity.
Before engaging with any social media that is in the public domain make sure that you understand fully what it actually does and what will happen to any information you place online. Googling the phrase ‘what is Twitter’ might be a good start, but understanding Facebook’s privacy settings should also be high on your agenda.
2. Consistency.
Let’s assume that someone has enjoyed your conference talk, gets home and proceeds to Google your name. They initially stumble across your Twitter feed because your recent tweets seem interesting, relevant and in keeping with your professional presentation. You gain a new follower. Great! Then they hit your Facebook page and learn about your recent iron stomach award. They proceed to view several blurry photos that appear to show you lying unconscious. You immediately lose that new follower and possibly any future contact. While sounding a little egotistical, it is worth occasionally Googling your own name to check that you are represented in a way that fits in with your work ethic.
3. Participation.
You will only build up a useful online presence by actively engaging with the community that already exists. Setting up an academic.edu profile and leaving it to vegetate for the next 3 years will not give the best impression to someone who arrives at the page only to find it was last accessed in 2008. Similarly, having a Twitter account and following a few hundred people is unlikely to get you noticed or integrated in what can often be a very helpful community of postgraduate researchers.
Of course, this is by no means an exhaustive list so feel free to add more….
John Igoe11 April 2011 at 10:51 AM
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David,
You make some great points about the value of engaging with wider audiences online and the risks associated with exposing elements of your research. You clearly highlight and understand the dangers of engaging online, and the value of being knowledgable about the risks vs. benefits of utilising social media in a research context.
On the subject of participation, I think that tapping into already existing communities of researchers has clear advantages - notably the ability to engage in peer review, be referred by people to potentially valuable information elsewhere on the web, and to make best use of what is increasingly a digital domain.
With all of these social networks, what you put in is often what you get out - and the reciprocated openness of information that is perpetuated on the web is often seen as somewhat risky.
Having a clear understanding about how to manage information in a public domain, control privacy/profile setting, and to only publish what you want people to see is something that is very important in terms of engaging wider audiences (e.g. Public engagement) and protecting your valuable research (IPR).
David Alexander Ellis11 April 2011 at 09:12 PM
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John,
I think this also raises some important issues regarding practice and public engagement. Managing an online presence often forces people to communicate complex ideas in a very concise and easy to understand fashion. This is a skill in itself. If nothing else, I suppose it will always come in handy when faced with the inevitable... 'so tell me about your research' :)
Shemaiah Weekes13 April 2011 at 02:51 PM
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A very relevant post David. I think an online presence is becoming one of the key ways to stimulate interest in your research and to engage the public.
The internet is unique in that anyone can reach a potentially huge audience very rapidly and with great ease.
Blogging is a particularly effective medium - blogs generally feature very highly on search engines and as John said, the experience of communicating complex ideas in a simple way can be very valuable.
Naomi Jacobs15 April 2011 at 11:23 AM
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Great post, David. I think it's important for any PhD student who uses twitter, blogging etc to have a seperate 'researcher' online identity which doesn't get too personal. I have two twitter accounts, one for my life as a researcher and one for the rest of my life. (I have two blogs for the same reason!) This doesn't mean never posting a frustrated tweet from your researcher twitter account, but it does mean considering everything you tweet/blog/etc from that identity, particularly in light of how it will reflect on you, your research and your institution (if you identify it).
Amy Cutler07 May 2011 at 12:42 PM
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Interesting; I've never quite managed a personal Twitter account, for just such reasons. I have a Twitter account related to one of my academic projects, which means I've trained myself to rather fraudulently use the word 'we' instead of 'I'. Except for occasional slip-ups...
David Alexander Ellis10 May 2011 at 11:01 AM
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I think those last two comments highlight the difficulty when it comes to striking a balance between engagement at a professional and personal level. Part of what makes Twitter great is that it does allow people to engage with an individual and not just a faceless name or research group, but an over personalised account is no longer a useful tool for publicising any research!
I suppose an extreme way of separating those two aims is to maintain two separate accounts, but followers may well end up following both feeds and if they don’t, does the message miss its intended target?
John Igoe12 May 2011 at 10:18 AM
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I guess in many respects it is more than possible to use 1 account for both personal and professional. It all depends what you use the account for, and what kind of posts you make - I use one account for all and have established boundaries for what I post. If you are using 2 accounts, it is possible to have 2 sets of boundaries?