Academics' online presence: Assessing and shaping your online visibility Sarah Goodier 26 October 2012
IDC Report: The 2011 Digital Universe Study: Extracting Value from Chaos, June Slide from Laura Czerniewicz’s presentation ‘Academics' online presence - assessing & shaping visibility 2012’:
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: (From: Google y la reputación en línea del usuario; available at:
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
PRESENCE Extent to which you as the scholar are visible to others online PRESENCE Extent to which you as the scholar are visible to others online GROUPS The extent of your engagement with communities GROUPS The extent of your engagement with communities SHARING Extent to which you allow users to exchange and distribute your information SHARING Extent to which you allow users to exchange and distribute your information IDENTITY The extent to which others can identify you online as a scholar IDENTITY The extent to which others can identify you online as a scholar CONNECTIONS The relevance and appeal of your work to others CONNECTIONS The relevance and appeal of your work to others CONVERSATIONS Extent to which others engage with you and you with 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 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 media Jan H. Kietzmann, Kristopher Hermkens, Ian P. McCarthy, Bruno S. Silvestre Business 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. Slide from Laura Czerniewicz’s presentation ‘Academics' online presence - assessing & shaping visibility 2012’:
Do you know how you appear online? ?
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 What can you do? Am I making an impact? Can I be found online?
The process
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?
ASSESS Assess & monitor your general online presence
How? Regular Google searches On-going Google alerts of your name Measure your digital footprint
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
Your profile as an individual Profiles – Academia.edu – Facebook(?) – 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! Personal Professional
Improve your profile Van Schailkwyk, F Profiling academics online Profiling Academics Online: Online Profiling Toolkit
Academia.edu - analytics
Social media analytics
Facebook analysis personal-analytics-for-facebook/
Thanks to Sam Gross My question is “Am I making an impact?”
Broaden impact
GET YOUR OUTPUTS OUT THERE Maximise the visibility of your work
CC-BY
Improving the availability of your outputs Put journal articles you can online – Check out Sherpa Romeo for publisher archiving policies ( Is my research making an impact? Can it be found online?
Check out Sherpa Romeo for publisher archiving policies (
Improving the availability of your outputs Archive! – in repositories – In subject portals Is my research making an impact? Can it be found online?
Archive in open access repositories
Use discipline-specific archives
Improving the availability of your outputs Publish in open access journals Is my research making an impact? Can it be found online?
Publish in open access journals (as of 25 Oct 2012)
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 / /
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?
Upload videos & podcasts
Upload presentations in-south-africa
Maximise your discoverability Take metadata seriously “Well said! "metadata is a love note to the future" talk ane UZ anehttp://t.co/FjvCLV UZ
CONNECT & COMMUNICATE
Communicating & connecting Social bookmarking – Share links relevant to your subject (blogs, news articles, research sites, etc) – Bookmark papers and share useful references
Share links via Delicious
CiteUlike
Mendeley
Mendeley analytics
Communicating & connecting Microblogging – Twitter – Many academics & researchers tweet
Start tweeting
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 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
Communicating & connecting Blogging as a scholarly activity – Create and write a blog for colleagues, community and/or students
Communicating & connecting ‘The verdict: is blogging or tweeting about research 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.’
Communicating & connecting Start commenting and join in discussions on e.g. Mendeley, Academia.edu, etc.
Thank you For more resources, please see the OpenUCT Delicious bookmarks tagged ‘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’: Excluding images, screenshots and logos and/or unless otherwise indicated on content