School Forum Jan 2010

Managing your research profile online (or: “how to make your research work for you – now”) Lisa Harris and Lorraine Warren 13 th January 2010

Objective
This session will demonstrate how you can develop your digital presence in order to make yourselves (and your work) stand out from the crowd, using social media to build your online profile.

How many of these tools are you developing…?

Social media and innovation
Agility
Foresight
High velocity
Peripheral sensing
Trends
Rapid prototyping of new possibilities
Be active outside of existing sphere of influence

Rationale
Managing career progression increasingly involves understanding how today’s networks work and how to deploy them effectively, both online and offline.
Building and maintaining a personal brand in this way is becoming a critical activity in keeping up to date, promoting and sharing your research profile on a global stage
The importance of collaboration to the scholarly process is so widely recognised that it is often now a prerequisite of funding.
Funding councils stipulate that publicly-funded research papers are made freely available online, and encourage researchers to come up with innovative methods of distributing research findings.
Rising journal costs and long delays in publication time have led many academics to the conclusion that the current publication process is fundamentally broken.

Digital Wisdom???
The generational distinction (digital immigrants/natives) is a myth – Prensky (2009) now refers instead to ‘digital wisdom’:
“ Digital wisdom arises from the combination of the mind and digital tools; what the unenhanced mind loses by outsourcing mundane tasks will be more than made up for by the wisdom gained”
“ While the need for wise people to discuss, define, compare, and evaluate perspectives is not changing, the means by which they do so and the quality of their efforts are growing more sophisticated because of digital technology”
Some argue that digital enhancements make our natural minds lazier and less able (Carr 2008a). This attitude is not new. In Plato's The Phaedrus, Socrates objects to writing on the basis that it undermines the memory…

Twitter: academic examples
@courosa
@mweller
@drbexl
@dr_black
@JISC
@timeshighered
@esrc
There are also some useful Twitter guides which can be linked from: http://www.twitip.com/personal-brand-how-to-build-yours-in-twitter/

The role of Twitter
Provide feedback . Become known as a reliable and informative source of help to your network
Get Feedback . Ask for advice and you’ll receive ‘collective intelligence’ from your network
Direct traffic . Include links in a tweet to direct traffic to your blog or to the recommended posts of others.
Read News . subscribe to feeds for specific websites/conferences, or from content providers such as the BBC.
Make New Friends . Twitter allows you to befriend and track the messages of other users.
Network for benefits . Interact with other like-minded people, or experts in your field. Develop relationships for future mutual benefits such as testimonials or peer recommendations.
Find Prospects. Twitter can be used as a means to find potential customers or clients online. Do a search for keywords related to your product on Twitter Search and then follow users.
Provide Live coverage . For example to provide real time coverage of conference keynotes
Set Up Meetings . An informal and casual way of arranging adhoc meetings.

‘ Givers gain’
Ask not what the community can do for you, but what you can do for the community…
The best long term way to build brand influence is to be seen as a ‘giver’ of good quality practical information and advice.
An authentic personal brand therefore delivers both a track record and a promise of the ongoing delivery of value.
How exactly will *you* deliver value??

How social media has helped our work
Developing new contacts (joint article in progress with BCU)
Sourcing newly published articles, calls for papers and relevant events
Tracking and commenting on the blogposts of key contributors to the field
Keeping in touch, real time, with project participants

Measuring Success
How can you tell whether your brand building efforts are paying off? Check out these measurement tools:
Google alerts
Twitter alerts
Comment alerts
http://www.davidrisley.com/2009/02/16/3-powerful-tools-for-monitoring-your-brand/

Challenges
Ongoing time and effort is required to develop and maintain online profiles, learn new tools and ascertain when best to integrate them into the mix.
F2F brand building elements should not be forgotten – Harris and Rae (2009) show that it is not a zero sum game, because good online networkers also tend to be effective communicators offline.
As with most things in life, you get out what you put in, and persistence pays off.
It is critical to be authentic. If your online presence is developed at only a superficial level, for example by basing it simply on ego, spin or piggybacking off the work of others, then it will not be enduring.

Action Plan
So what exactly are *you* going to go away and do to develop your digital research profile?

References
Harris, L. and Rae, A. (2010) “Building a personal brand through social networking” Journal of Business Strategy
Carr, N. 2008a. Is Google making us stupid? What the internet is doing to our brains. The Atlantic 301 (6): 56-63. Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5eBJxMMM3
Prensky, M. 2009. H. sapiens digital: From digital immigrants and digital natives to digital wisdom. 5 (3). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=705

School Forum Jan 2010

by lisa harris on Jan 11, 2010

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School Forum Jan 2010 — Presentation Transcript