Guides: Curating your Online Presence: Home

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Curating your Online Presence

This guide is for faculty, students, and staff wanting to learn about how to distinguish themselves academically or professionally online. A few rules of thumb:

Consider your goals and select the tools that are best for reaching them.
Have concerns about putting yourself "out there" online? Select the tools that address your concerns.
Choose tools that you can prioritize to keep fresh and up-to-date in order to meet your goals.

The underlying understanding in the above rules is that you do not need to be on every site. Be strategic!

This guide provides:

Goals and concerns to consider when developing your online presence (below)
Grid of selected tools for developing your online presence (below)
Online presence profiles:
- Links to the tool
- Tutorials/help using the tool
- Reasons to select it or reject it

Goals and concerns to consider when developing your online presence

Why do you want to develop an online presence? What are your concerns?

Issues to consider prior to choosing tools:

What are your goals?	What are your concerns?
Achieve tenure or promotion Win grants Receive speaker invitations Increase visibility and/or citations to published work Connect with other experts or potential collaborators Be found as a field expert (by media, editors, grant foundations, museums, etc.) Receive acceptance to graduate school Find an internship Find a post-doctoral scholar position Find a job in academia	Time Privacy Data security Online harassment Mixing professional and personal life
Other goals not listed above?	Anything else? It's personal!

Once you have answered the questions above you are ready to consider the tools. Take a look at the grid below.

Grid of selected tools for developing your online presence

The grid below compares online presence tools popular among academics, students, and professionals. These tools can be used to uniquely identify you, develop a personal brand, share publication information, recruit or be recruited, gathering citation metrics and download counts, find collaborators, find funding, and more. Brief descriptions of services are included below the grid. For more details see links to the left. ORCID is highly recommended for name disambiguation among academic researchers.

Downloadable PDF and DOCX

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