In our digital world, if you use the web, you have an online presence. And academics are no exception. Universities have webpages profiling their staff. Academic networks, like LinkedIn, Academia.edu and more, are used by researchers around the globe to keep in contact with colleagues and collaborators. And social media are everywhere you turn.
As an academic, you want your research outputs to be found and read. Making a difference and having an influence is almost a job requirement. Nowadays, the expectation is that you can be found online. So, what can you do to be aware of how you appear online? And, what can you do to increase your visibility? This presentation was part of a session for academics wanting to find out how they can review their existing digital footprints and shadows, make decisions about what kind of online presence they would like and plan how they can achieve it.
Several different possible ways of increasing their visibility as well as the visibility of their research and their outputs are discussed.
2. IDC Report: The 2011 Digital Universe Study: Extracting Value from Chaos, June 2011
http://www.emc.com/collateral/demos/microsites/emc-digital-universe-2011/index.htm
Slide 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
3. Why should you care?
• 7 out of 10 people who use the internet
have searched for information about other
people (Pew study results available at: http://pewinternet.org/)
(From: Google y la reputación en línea del usuario; available at:
http://blogs.eset-la.com/laboratorio/2012/08/13/google-reputacion-linea-usuario/)
4. Why should you care?
• Scholarship is increasingly ‘going digital’
– Universities staff profiles
– Academic networks connect researchers
around the globe
– Journal articles online
– Social media
• The expectation is that you can be found
online
5. http://www.slideshare.net/laura_Cz/academics-online-presence-assessing-shaping-visibility-2012
Slide from Laura Czerniewicz’s presentation ‘Academics' online presence - assessing & shaping visibility 2012’:
Building Blocks
PRESENCE
Extent to which
of the
Networked
you as the
scholar are
visible to others
SHARING
online
CONNECTIONS Scholar
Extent to which The relevance • The honeycomb of
you allow users and appeal of building blocks can be
to exchange and your work to used to assess your level of
distribute your others online connectivity as a
information IDENTITY
scholar.
The extent to
• They are not exclusive and
which others can
neither need all be
identify you
present.
online as a
scholar
CONVERSATIONS REPUTATION • They are constructs that
allow us to make sense of
Extent to which Your online different aspects of a
others engage standing and the networked scholar.
with you and you extent to which ADAPTED FROM
with others you influence
GROUPS others Social media? Get serious!
Understanding the functional
The extent of
building blocks of social media
your engagement
Jan H. Kietzmann, Kristopher
with
Hermkens, Ian P. McCarthy,
communities
Bruno S. Silvestre
Business Horizons (2011) 54,
241—251
Read the article here*
7. What is your
digital footprint?
The content you
create
The content
created about
you
What is your
digital shadow?
Photo by: Sarah Goodier
8. What can you do?
• Know what information (both footprint
and shadow) is out there
• Take control!
– Control your footprint
Am I making an
– Minimise your shadow impact?
Can I be found
online?
10. Consider
• What do you want your digital footprint to
look like?
• What kind of online presence do you want?
What do I want?
• What do you have time to What can I
realistically
achieve?
manage effectively?
12. How?
• Regular Google searches
• On-going Google alerts of your name
• Measure your digital footprint
13. 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
14. Your profile as an individual
• Profiles
– Academia.edu
– Facebook(?) Personal Professional
– Your institution
– Google Scholar
– etc.
• Update, improve and maintain it; Decide on a
main profile - link the others to it
• Separate professional and personal online
presence
• Be consistent!
15. Profiling Academics Online: Online Profiling Toolkit
Improve your profile
Van Schailkwyk, F Profiling academics online
http://www.slideshare.net/scap_uct/pao-scap-toolkit
24. 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/)
Is my research
making an impact?
Can it be found online?
25. Check out Sherpa Romeo for publisher
archiving policies
(http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/)
26. Improving the availability
of your outputs
• Archive!
– in repositories
– In subject portals
Is my research
making an impact?
Can it be found online?
34. Open advantage!
• Open access publishing increases visibility,
opportunity for use and possible impact
• Increase in citations arising from open
access:
– Of the 35 studies surveyed, 27 have shown a
citations advantage (the % increase ranges
from 45% increase to as high as 600%), 4
showing no advantage
Swan A (2010) The Open Access Citation Advantage: Studies and Results to Date. Available at http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18516/
35. Improving the availability
of your outputs
• Open everything – all scholarly output
possible (teaching, popular, etc.)
Is my research
making an impact?
Can it be found online?
38. Maximise your discoverability
Take metadata seriously
“Well said! "metadata is a
love note to the future"
from @textfiles talk
via @nypl_labs &
@kissane
http://t.co/FjvCLVUZ
48. Some Twitter guidelines
• Get into a routine
• It is legit to retweet your tweets especially if
rephrased
• Provide updates from special events
• Use hashtags
• Follow others / reciprocate
• Promote your Twitter profile through your email
signature, business card, blog posts etc.
• Being careful with Twitter
• Tweet about each new publication, website update or new
blog that the project completes.
• Ask for feedback
• Link to a URL of publication, presentation, podcast etc
• Tweet about new developments of interest
• Retweet interesting material
• Use Twitter for ‘crowd sourcing’ research activities
Mollet, A; Moran, D and Dunleavy, P (2011) Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities, LSE Research Online
49. Communicating & connecting
• Blogging as a scholarly activity
– Create and write a blog for colleagues,
community and/or students
50.
51.
52. Communicating & connecting
• ‘The verdict: is blogging or tweeting
about research papers worth it?’ (http
://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/04/19/blog-tweeting-papers-worth-it/)
• Publicising the research made a big
impact on access and downloads:
‘The papers that were tweeted and blogged had
at least more than 11 times the number of
downloads than their sibling paper which was left
to its own devices in the institutional repository.’
55. Excluding
images,
screenshots
and logos
and/or unless
otherwise
indicated on
content
Thank you
http://openuct.uct.ac.za
@OpenExpl
• For more resources, please see the OpenUCT Delicious bookmarks tagged
‘onlinepresence’: http://www.delicious.com/openuct/onlinepresence
• All screenshots 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,
Editor's Notes
Why IDC Report: The 2011 Digital Universe Study: Extracting Value from Chaos, June 2011 http://www.emc.com/collateral/demos/microsites/emc-digital-universe-2011/index.htm
Adatpted from Alfred Hermida The Networked Scholar University of British Columbia, Worldviews Conference, Toronto, June 16 2011
Sarah Goodier photo July 2012 The amount of information that individuals create themselves (digital footprint) is far less than the amount being generated about them (digital shadow)
Magnifying glass image (top left) by Tall Chris available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tallchris/14288135/ under CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en) Academic image (2 nd from the top right) by Tim Ellis available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tim_ellis/2269499855/ under CC BY-NC 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/deed.en)
As of 2 August 2012, LinkedIn had 175m + professionals from around the world, 44m + of these members from Europe, Middle East and Africa (as of February 17, 2012; http://press.linkedin.com/about ) As of the end of June 2012, Facebook had 955 million monthly active users. Approximately 81% of these users are from outside the USA and Canada ( http://newsroom.fb.com/content/default.aspx?NewsAreaId=22 ). As of 31 August 2012, Academia.edu had 1,794,003 academics have signed up to their service ( http://www.academia.edu/about ).
Decide if this is valuable. Wikipedia.PeerIndex is a London-based company providing social media analytics based on footprints from use of major social media services (currently Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Quora). Part of an emerging group of Social Media Analytics providers[2], PeerIndex helps social media contributors assess and score their influence and benefit from the social capital they have built up. PeerIndex currently tracks ca. 45 million Twitter profiles, making the company one of the leaders in its sector. PeerIndex was founded in 2009 by Azeem Azhar, a former journalist and Reuters executive, Ditlev Schwanenflügel, a former McKinsey consultant and Bill Emmott (the former Editor-in-chief of The Economist) backed by a number of internet investors.
Thanks to Sam Gross’ New Yorker cartoon
Jason Priem, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (@jasonpriem) Dario Taraborelli, Wikimedia Foundation (@readermeter) Paul Groth, VU University Amsterdam (@pgroth) Cameron Neylon, Science and Technology Facilities Council (@cameronneylon) http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/ 26 October 2010
Academics need their work to be available and read in order to make this impact, read and citations are the measure of this
As of December 2011, Vimeo attracts 65 million unique visitors per month and more than 8 million registered users.[8] Fifteen percent of Vimeo’s traffic comes from mobile devices
Mendeley is not just a reference management tool, its also an academic social network. Similar to CiteUlike, in that you can manage your papers and citations online, Mendeley goes a step further with its desktop software. You can organise your research papers on your computer by dragging and dropping them into Mendeley Desktop, which will extract all the relevant citation information automatically, and you can sync this library with Mendeley online so you can access it anywhere. In Mendeley you can annotate and highlight points of interest in your pdfs. You can also collaborate with others online, through groups (public or private), and discover new research. Mendeley even has an iPhone app, so you can access and read your papers anywhere.