1. Building your Online Identity
PdOC Society
DR HELEN WEBSTER
RESEARCHER DEVELOPMENT

2. Slides
Slides are online: Slideshare
http://www.slideshare.net/drhelenwebster/

3. Social Media in Academia
Enhancing or changing practice?
 Publishing Models: Open Access Publishing
 Quality Assessment Models: Altmetrics
 Funding: Collaboration, consortia and large projects
 Pedagogy: digital classroom, ‘pedagogy of
abundance’
 Conference ‘attendance’ – livestreaming,
liveblogging, podcasting
 Impact: narrowcasting online and digital resources

4. Current levels of engagement
Knowledge
Engagement Refusal
Ignorance

5. Current levels of engagement
What do you currently use, and how?
 Your profile:
 Tools
 Personal, professional or mixed?
 Your use:
 Static
or evolving?
 Consume or participate?
 Broadcast or interact?

6. Aims
maximum Research
Admin Professional
and service activities
Impact and
Teaching public
minimum engagement

7. Where to build your online identity?
Proprietry/free
The Academic The Open
Web Web
Password/open

8. Postdocs and Online identity
 You currently belong to an institution, a discipline
and a profession. All these may change, and your
webspace and contacts associated with them.
 Any open web platform you use may be removed or
changed.
 How will you ensure longer-term online
stability?

9. My identity?

10. Level: Minimum
Passive, static broadcast model
Visibility:
 Remaining completely invisible online takes effort
 Pros and cons of keeping a low profile these days
Identity:
 To what extent is it possible to keep personal and private separate?
Control:
 If you don’t, someone else will …
 Previous employers, universities, websites you register for - all out of
date and out of context
 OR ‘friends’ may share personal material outside your own preferred
circles….

11. Level: Minimum
Visibility
Visibility:
 Think about your metadata and keyword search
terms
 link to ‘authority’ sites and have them link to you
 update ‘regularly’ and at peak times
 Complete profiles as much as possible

12. Level: Minimum
Invisibility
Invisibility:
 Google yourself regularly (set up Google alerts) and check for
information put online by others
 Check privacy and permission settings carefully
 Use pseudonyms and abstract profile pictures
 Different platforms for different purposes
 Have a policy on ‘friending’, ‘following’ etc and add a clear statement
of your intentions
 Avoid logins and synching with Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn etc
 Don’t let your computer ‘remember’ your login

13. Level:Minimum
Collate and disambiguate yourself
Dr Jonathan Barnard, Prof. Denys Turner,
Cambridge University Medieval Studies

14. Level:Minimum
Building a static profile
 Your Department or Faculty webpage
 Your own website (tip: use a blog platform e.g.
Wordpress)
 Creating profiles and ‘online cvs’ on networking
sites:
 LinkedIn
 Facebook
 Academia.edu
 Google+ profile
 Google Scholar profile
 ResearcherID and ORCID
 Consume social media

15. Level: Minimum
presenting yourself
 Use your real name
(Namechk)
 Grab variants if possible
 Use a recognisable photo
 Use a consistent, concise
‘strapline’ summing up
who you are and what
you do
 Think about keywords,
tagging, search terms
and metadata
 Link everything

16. LinkedIn

17. Level: Medium
active participation and networking
Participatory, networked, interactive, pull not
push
 Network:
 Types of connection, types of network
• Interact:
o Feed, respond, ask, share, curate, comment (and ‘like’)

18. Level:medium
Building an online network
 Draw contacts from other accounts
 Search engines: Google, Social Media search
engines, built-in search boxes in platforms
 Listorious
 Socialmention
 Technorati
 Keywords, people’s names
 Snowball- see who well-connected people and
institutions are connected to
 Use suggestions…

19. Level: Medium
Maintaining an online network
 Updating - what might you share?
 Profersional tone
 Validate their interactions – endorse, like, retweet, comment, ask
 Don’t just offer self-promotion! Reframe it.
 Pass on resources, links and contacts as well as your own
information
 Frictionless sharing
 Genuine, mutually meaningful networking
 ‘Regular’ updates and interactions

20. Level: Medium
Sharing digital offcuts
 Documents: Scribd, Issuu
 Slides: Slideshare
 Images: Flickr
 Livestreaming: Ustream, Livestream
 Various formats as PDFs: Academia.edu
 Bibliographies: Mendeley
 Research
data and outputs:
DSpace@Cambridge
 Creative Commons Licensing

21. LinkedIn

22. Level: Maximum
 You as ProdUser – create, not just consume
 Offcuts, ‘collateral damage’ from research, admin,
teaching etc
 Create spaces to network and present
 Create and administrate a group
 Blogging
 Video and audio
 Group rather than individual?

23. A Strategy for Building an Online Identity
Approach:
 Be as ‘open’, up-to-date and interactive as you can/feel
comfortable
 Be professional, even in personal circles, but not
personality-free
 Keep control over what’s posted
Infrastructure:
 Choose a few sites to cover various needs and audiences,
nominate one as central, link them
 Be consistent, or delete sites you’re not using
Time management
 Frictionless workflow
 Set time aside once a month

24. Resources
 On Good Practice for
Researchers
Vitae’s Handbook of Social Media for
Researchers and Supervisors
RIN’s Social Media: A Guide for
Researchers