Strictly Research: Ten steps to setting up your social media research presence

Are you a higher degrees candidate?
Are you interested in setting up a social media presence as a researcher?
If so, read on!

There is quite a difference between your social media presence as an individual and your presence as a researcher - and the difference is social.

If you have a social presence online, it would be fabulous to keep that separate from your research profile. The reason being that when other researchers and employers are searching for information about you, it's best if they don't have to trawl through birthday photos while searching for your papers. You knew that though.

So with that in mind, here are ten steps for setting up your profile

1 Create a new identifier
Choose something which you can use across your social media profile. Somewhat like naming a puppy, settle on a name that you could shout from the middle of a park! So no "funky monkey"

2 Set up a Twitter account
Even if you don't use twitter for anything else, it can be a great way of staying up to date with ongoing developments in the sector. Start following your favorite organizations and individuals and track the tweets. Often twitterers will link to events, papers. This means that you don't have to chase everything.

3 Set up a Posterous site
Posterous is a great micro blog site with really good interoperability between twitter, Facebook and flickr and Twitpic. This is handy if you want to load photos particularly. Additionally, you can personalize the domain or use your own domain name. You will need a byline of some sort ie: researching the connections between audiences and collections". This byline is important so spend some time thinking about the best way to summarize your profile.

4 Tell us about yourself

 You can set up pages on Posterous so set up an "About me" page where you can tell us what you're research is, where you're studying, where you're up to etc. You may also want to add an abstract from your Masters or PhD proposal. Use this as an opportunity to promote your identity, your research agenda and your institution. Trust me, academics and employers find it invaluable to be able to get a clear sense of a research candidate's commitment if they can see it all on one site!

5 Make your site a one-stop-shop
Spend a little bit of time identifying 5 sites which are important to your research. Add these to your posterous site. Why? These are probably the sites which you visit most often so have them there on your home page so you can access them quickly

6 Do your research
Through your Twitter feed, start identifying issues which could be meaningful to your research. For instance, is there a conference on the aesthetics of media in the museum. Is this important to you? Write a quick blog post letting your readers know and use it as a way of thinking through issues which are important to your research. Make sure you link to the original. Better still, add an endnote citation!

7 Time to start writing
Use your site as your notepad for literature reviews, ideas about early drafts, notes on conferences you attend etc. Make sure you tag your posts, preferably with the same tags you use for your Endnote Library. That way you can cross reference your work.

 

8 Link, Link, Link

One of the best ways to ensure that your old content is read is to link to it in your new content. ie: Earlier this year I wrote about [link] and since then. You get the picture. They tell me this is also very good for SEO!

 

9 Think ethically
Make sure that if you decide to upload data collected throughout your research, that you read your ethics application. Do you have approval to publisize results in a forum such as this? If so, make sure you remove all identification from the content.

10 Invite your colleagues

Use this site as a way of promoting yourself as an up-and-coming researcher. You can invite others to subscribe to your content, ensuring that they receive updates. Similarly, don't forget to subscribe to your colleagues' sites. Don't forget. Social media is about an exchange.

 

And on that note, decades into my research practice, I think I might go and set up a posterous site myself. I'm feeling quite inspired! I've never liked the idea of having a site where you could learn more about me in detail but I think that even I have finally got over that. I'll let you know the address so you can link to it!

You can follow me on artech05 (notice it's ambiguous but then I did establish it 6years ago when I started blogging and I didn't know as much back then. At least I can shout it in a park if I have to!)