2020-02-05 18:59:25

Motivation

  • You will likely have many jobs throughout your career.
  • Freelance/self-employed jobs keep growing.
  • Most good jobs (and other opportunities) are found through connections.
  • Think of yourself as a “brand”.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Motivation

  • People (potential collaborators, employers, employees, etc.) will look you up online.
  • If you don’t control your online presence, you are at the mercy of what shows up.
https://on.rt.com/8zyi

https://on.rt.com/8zyi

How to build and manage your brand

  • Create and curate an online presence.
  • Create and curate content.
  • Develop a brand identity, i.e. who you are (professionally).

Content types

  • Created “once”, then updated:
    • your online persona (CV/profile)
    • resource repositories
    • teaching materials
    • …
  • Created “once” (but regularly), then static:
    • blog posts
    • videos
    • …
  • Created often, not very permanent:
    • Twitter
    • …

Ways to build and manage your online presence

  • General sites
  • Academia/Science specific sites
  • Self-built site(s)

General Sites

  • The professional networking site. Almost required to be on there.
  • You can customize your profile a good bit.
  • A good way to showcase yourself.
  • Great for finding/connecting with others.
  • LinkedIn is useful even if you are not looking for a job!
  • Build a good profile early, not a week before you start applying.
  • Some features require a subscription.
  • Examples:

Twitter

  • Great for learning about new developments in your field.
  • Good way to connect and engage with the community, and to announce your work.
  • Need to be used (active and/or passive) for it to be useful.

  • Need to decide if you want to mix professional and personal.
  • You can create/use multiple accounts.
  • Consciously decide on the topics you will engage with.
  • Learn ‘the rules’ (tweet/re-tweet/reply/like/hashtags/etc.).

GitHub

YouTube

Facebook

  • Everyone is on it.
  • Good way to stay connected with folks.
  • Some educators use Facebook groups for classes.
  • Hard to keep professional and personal lives separated (unless you create 2 accounts).

Medium

  • Platform for blog posts.
  • They promote, you can potentially get paid.
  • Not as much control as on your own website.
  • Other similar platforms likely exist.
  • Examples:

Other general platforms

  • Instagram/Snapchat/etc.
  • Often special purpose (e.g. posting images).
  • I have little experience.
  • I don’t know of any such platform that is much used in (science) academia, but might be useful for outreach.

Academia/Science specific sites

Academia/Science specific sites

  • Google Scholar
  • ORCID
  • ResearchGate
  • Academia.edu
  • Mendeley
  • ImpactStory
  • Publons
  • …

Google Scholar

  • Only for publications (broadly speaking).
  • Gives citation metrics.
  • Is fairly automated, you have to do very little.
  • Great way to keep track of your papers.
  • Examples:

If I want to get a quick idea who someone “is” in academia, I check their Google Scholar page.

ORCID

  • Gives you a unique ID to track your research productivity.
  • Used by a lot of journals.
  • Very useful if you have a (slightly) common name (but even if not).
  • Free and not-for-profit.
  • Examples:

ResearchGate/Academia/Mendeley/etc.

  • All are versions of academic social network sites.
  • All are commercial.
  • You have various levels of control of how your profile looks like.
  • Sites are trying to encourage interactions.
  • Examples:

I haven’t found those sites useful. I therefore deleted my accounts on those sites since I want to control my web presence myself and don’t want to keep too many sites up-to-date.

ImpactStory/Kudos/Publons/etc.

  • Sites that try to measure your ‘impact’.
  • Maybe fun, but I haven’t found them too useful yet.
  • Examples:

Own website

Some general suggestions

  • Decide what you want to be known for, create and curate content accordingly.
  • You don’t need to duplicate, e.g. you can link to your Google Scholar publications from LinkedIn.
  • Give some thought to the platforms you want to use, but you can fairly easily move around.
  • Better have fewer online outlets that you keep up-to-date with good quantity/quality content than being on too many platforms.

Some general suggestions

  • Content (e.g. blog posts, videos) can be any length and level of difficulty.
  • Anything that might be useful to others (or your future self) is worth putting out there.
  • Things don’t always need to be polished, but do have some minimum standard of quality.
  • If you have the discipline, consider creating content on a regular schedule.
  • Figure out how to ‘advertise’.

Some general suggestions

  • You might want to have more than one ‘online brand’.
  • Make sure you keep things reasonable updated and working.
  • Set Google alerts for your name (or other keywords).
  • Consider measuring your impact (e.g. Google Analytics, GitHub stars).

Further Resources