Your online reputation

On Monday Jen Winter from the Graduate Training Unit ran a session called Managing your online reputation for postgraduate students. I went along to to provide 'tech support'.


The session explains how academics and researchers can use the web to promote their work and build online networks of colleagues and potential collaborators. It includes advice on creating and promoting blogs, creating profiles on graduate social networking sites such as Graduate Junction and Academia.edu, and using Facebook and Twitter.

It also includes tips on managing your online presence so that you don't unknowingly compromise your own reputation. On Facebook, for example, this may include untagging photos, limiting their visibility, putting colleagues and parents into a limited profile so you can control what they see (and don't see), or even creating separate 'work' and 'personal' profiles.

It is surprising how many people are unaware of exactly how much of their online presence is visible to the whole wide world, and it's not pleasant finding out the hard way. You can post to social networking sites from your mobile phone, a facility which has led to so much morning-after embarrassment that one popular phone brand comes with a built-in breathalyser.

One of my particular favourites, this Tweet was posted by a senior researcher (not at York!):




His followers include his boss, staff from his department, students he supervises and senior staff in other departments around the country.

He is a grown adult and public tweets like this reflect his open and forthright approach in person. It's also a good fit with the conscious eccentricity of academics in his field of study. In other departments, or outside academia, this may be less acceptable.

The intention is to ensure that people understand what they're doing when they use social networking tools. Just as in real life, most people choose to modify the tone and content of what they say depending on who they're talking to. Now that so much of our daily interaction takes place online, where content is highly visible, searchable and archived for years, it is even more important to know who you're talking to.