Online presence: Assessing and shaping the digital you

Sarah Goodier

24 October 2012

Main points

– Do you know how you appear online?

– Take action!• Separate professional and personal presences• Be consistent• Be aware of your privacy settings

How do I appear online?

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Why should you care?• A Pew study revealed that 7 out of 10 people

who use the internet have searched for information about other people

(Pew study results available at: http://pewinternet.org/)

• Scholarship is increasingly ‘going digital’

(From: Google y la reputación en línea del usuario; available at:http://blogs.eset-la.com/laboratorio/2012/08/13/google-reputacion-linea-usuario/)

PRESENCE

Extent to which you as the scholar are

visible to others online

GROUPS

The extent of your

engagement with

communities

SHARING

Extent to which you allow users to exchange and distribute your

informationIDENTITY

The extent to which others can

identify you online as a

scholar

CONNECTIONS

The relevance and appeal of your work to

others

CONVERSATIONS

Extent to which others engage with you and

you with others

REPUTATION

Your online standing and the extent to which you influence

others

Building Blocks of the

Networked Scholar

ADAPTED FROM

Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social mediaJan H. Kietzmann, Kristopher Hermkens, Ian P. McCarthy, Bruno S. SilvestreBusiness Horizons (2011) 54, 241—251*Read the article here*

• The honeycomb of building blocks can be used to assess your level of online connectivity as a scholar.

• They are not exclusive and neither need all be present.

• They are constructs that allow us to make sense of different aspects of a networked scholar.

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What is your digital

footprint?

What is your digital

shadow?

The content you create

The content created about

you

Photo by: Sarah Goodier

• Know what information (both footprint and shadow) is out there

• Take control!– Control your footprint– Minimise your shadow– Be aware of your privacy settings

What can you do?

Am I making an impact?

Can I be found online?

Consider

• What do you want your digital footprint to look like?

• What kind of online presence do you want?

• What do you have time to manage effectively?

What do I want?What can I realistically

achieve?

The process

How?

• Regular Google searches

• On-going Google alerts of your name

• Measure your digital footprint

Example

Analyse the results

• How many of the results are relevant?• What types of results come up? – Are all of them from your institutions? – Publications? – Online profiles?– Facebook photos?

• If the results are obviously nothing to do with you, would that be obvious to someone else looking for you?

• Consider what you would like to appear

What can you do?

• 3 main areas to focus on:– Your profile as an individual– Improving the availability of your outputs– Communicating and connecting

Your profile as an individual• Profiles – Academia.edu– Facebook(?)– Your institution– Google Scholar– etc.

• Decide on a main profile - Update, improve and maintain it; link the others to it

• Separate professional and personal online presence• Be consistent!

Personal Professional

Improving the availability of your outputs

• Put journal articles you can online– Check out Sherpa Romeo for publisher archiving

policies (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/)• Archive– in repositories– In subject portals

• Publish in open access journals• Open everything – all scholarly output

possible (teaching, popular, etc.)

Is my research making an impact?

Can it be found online?

Communicating & connecting

• Social bookmarking– Share links relevant to your subject (blogs, papers, etc)

• Microblogging – Twitter– Many academics & researchers tweet

• Blogging as a scholarly activity– Create and write a blog for colleagues, community

and/or students• Comment: Start and join in discussions on e.g.

Mendeley, Academia.edu, etc.

Thank you

• For more resources, please see the OpenUCT Delicious bookmarks tagged ‘onlinepresence’: http://www.delicious.com/openuct/onlinepresence

• All screenshots and company logos used purely for illustrative purposes• Some slides used and/or adapted from: Laura Czerniewicz’s presentation ‘Academics' online presence - assessing & shaping visibility 2012’: http

://www.slideshare.net/laura_Cz/academics-online-presence-assessing-shaping-visibility-2012

Excluding images, screenshots and logos and/or unless otherwise indicated on content