A short presentation about leadership and leaders who engage online, highlighting issues around authenticity, credibility and engagement.

1. Leadership and Social Media
Digital Presence
Lawrie Phipps

2. Some definitions
...it's not just twitter….
defn: forms of electronic
communication (as Web
sites for social networking
and microblogging) through
which users create online
communities to share
information, ideas, personal
messages, and other
content

3. Neither [effective] Leadership,
nor [effective] Social Media is a
popularity contest

4. Individual as Institution

5. Individual as
Institution
“Access to a ready means of publishing,
social media is being used by a cohort
of academics and academic related
staff that can be identified and
recognised through the online
promotion and increased visibility of
their work.”
Phipps (2013)
“Assessments of influence in networks
are individually-centered, rather than
institutionally-centered.”
Stewart (2015)

6. You need to make a decision about
where you are on social media, do
you blog at your institution or your
own domain?
You have a choice.

7. Authenticity

8. The illusion of unity
Horning (2012)
“The capability of social
media to document more
and more of what a given
person does and store
that data, make it
available for processing
and redistribution, makes
it harder to sustain the
illusion of a unified self.”

9. Unification by default: inconsistent by nature
Horning goes on to point out a paradox, that all the data activity
from our social media accounts gets assigned to the same Profile,
unifying it in a sense by default.
However, he argues that the activities of different “selves” are
forced to cohere, making the body of data incoherent and
“inauthentic”. By imposing a single persistent identity on users,
social media companies inevitably confront them with their own
inconsistencies.

10. So our use of social media will
inevitably lead to the highlighting
of our own inconsistencies.

11. The Resident Web and
Its Impact on the
Academy
Lanclos and White (2015)
“We value those moments where
we find the antidote to the
uncanniness of the disembodied
Web in what we perceive to be
indisputably human
interactions.”
Leaders gain authenticity by
becoming perceived as “human”
rather than cloaked by the
deliberately de-humanised
unemotive management voice.

12. Credibility
“on the internet everybody
knows you’re not a dog”

13. The Poly Social Self
Stewart (2012)
“Contrary to much of the digital
identity scholarship of the
1990s, which tended to
emphasize the fluidity of
identity uncoupled from the
gendered and signified body –
the “on the Internet, nobody
knows you’re a dog” theme –
the concept of networked
publics has given rise to a far
more enmeshed notion of
reality.”

14. If you pretend, or try to be
something you’re not online,
people will find out

15. Engagement

16. Engagement
“The sound of one person talking is
not, obviously, a conversation. The
same applies to organizational
conversation, in which leaders talk
with employees and not just to them.
This interactivity makes the
conversation open and fluid rather
than closed and directive. It entails
shunning the simplicity of monologue
and embracing the unpredictable
vitality of dialogue”
Groysberg and Slind (2012)

17. Leadership is a conversation it
doesn’t matter what space you are
in, be that physical or digital. In
order to be an effective leader you
need to talk with people not at
them. Sometimes in the online
spaces we forget this.

18. References
Horning, R. (2012) "Notes on the “data Self”." The New Inquiry. Accessed 8 Oct. 2015.
<http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/marginal-utility/dumb-bullshit/>.
Lanclos, D and White, D (2015) "The Resident Web and Its Impact on the Academy - Hybrid Pedagogy."
Hybrid Pedagogy. Accessed Web. 8 Oct. 2015. <http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/resident-web-
and-impact-on-academy/>
Stewart, B. (2012) "Digital Identities: Six Key Selves of Networked Publics." The Theory blog. Accessed 8
Oct. 2015. <http://theory.cribchronicles.com/2012/05/06/digital-identities-six-key-selves/>.
Stewart, B. (2015) "Contributions and Connections | Higher Ed Beta | Inside Higher Ed." Contributions and
Connections | Higher Ed Beta | Inside Higher Ed. Accessed Web. 8 Oct. 2015.
<https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-beta/contributions-and-connections>
Groysberg, B and Slind, M (2012) "Leadership Is a Conversation." Harvard Business Review. Accessed 8
Oct. 2015. <https://hbr.org/2012/06/leadership-is-a-conversation>
Phipps, L. (2013) Individual as Institution. Educational Developments 14:3