Links to Texas State University Resources & Policies
Social Media Resources (From Office of University Marketing)
Web 2.0 and Social Media in Education (from ITS site)
Maintaining Your Professional Reputation Online
Professional vs. Personal Accounts/Identities
- Some academic social media sites allow you to link your accounts with your Facebook account. Do you want to merge your personal accounts with your professional ones?
- Overly agressive privacy settings might be counterproductive for professional social media accounts, because you want certain information about you to be easily found and showcased.
- That being said, don't ever put sensitive information on your social media profiles.
Don't be (or feed) a Troll!
- What's a troll?
- The first contact someone makes with you might very well be online through your online persona or writings, before they ever meet you in person so think about the impression you might be making with your comments and posts.
- Try to avoid getting into arguments or disagreements online, particularly with prominent people in your field.
- If you do get into a debate, or disagreement, try to keep your contributions positive and polite, and consider taking the discussion to email or private messages if you want to continue the conversation.
Your Rights...and Copyright, too.
- Be sure to read the terms and conditions of any social media site before creating an account.
- Most of the time you retain copyright to anything you create or post on a social media site, but nearly all of them have a clause that grants them a license to use your content in any way they wish.
- Don't post content on social media sites that you don't want to share with the whole world.
- If you want to post content, protect yourself by adding a copyright statement (or Creative Commons license) on your materials.
- Respect other people's copyright rights, too. Don't post anything unless you have permission, or are allowed via Creative Commons license.
- Link to items you are unsure of, instead of posting or uploading them.
Social Media Overlap
To merge or not to merge social media site identities...
This image is used courtesy of a Creative Commons License granted by Intersection Consulting
All your comments, posts, and communications on social media sites are visible to anyone on the web (unless you use special privacy settings).
For Further Reading
- How to Manage Your Academic Persona Online--and Why It's Important.In this article the author presents suggestions on ways in which individuals involved in academia can develop and manage a professional identity on the Internet through various web resources. It recommends that academics make sure to emphasize aspects of their professional, not personal, identities that may make them appealing to potential employers and outlines how the social networking aspects of web sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Academia.edu can play a role in that process.
- Social Networks for Academics Proliferate, Despite Some Doubts.The article presents a discussion of several social networking websites designed for use by college faculty and scholars including Academia.edu, Mendeley.com, and ResearchGate.net. Particular focus is given to the differences between the functions and purposes of such sites in comparison to the online social networks Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Discussions regarding communication amongst academics and the dissemination of research are highlighted, and comments are provided by medieval history professor Guy Geltner, Academia.edu founder Richard Price, and Mendeley co-founder Victor Henning.
- Should academia care about online reputation management and monitoring?In this article, the authors discuss how reputation management has always been important for individuals, companies and organizations. Emergence of new types of media, as is the social media, brought radical changes in the ways we manage and monitor personal, corporate and organizational reputation. The fundamental purpose of this study is to describe how social media influences corporate and organizational culture in respect of reputation management and monitoring. It is also discussed how Academia and their stakeholders should be part of these changes.
- The academic online : constructing persona through the world wide webThis paper explores the way individuals are part of the prestige economy generated by universities as institutions. It explores how the construction of online identities or persona is now an essential activity for the academic both from the perspective of university value and individual/career value. Five distinct types of academic persona are explored primarily through academics working in digital communication areas; through these cases and examples this new communication environment is explored. This paper concludes that institutions and individuals need to develop in the most pragmatic sense, online academic persona and ensure that these online ‘selfs’ are connected with authenticity to the professional work of the academic.