You never know who might be watching...

Mike Ryder is a PhD student at Lancaster University. His research interests include biopolitics, sovereignty, science fiction and war. He is particularly interested in the intersection between literature and philosophy, and the works of Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. In today's post, he talks about digital marketing and being cautious about what we publish online as academics. Go and have a look at his (fab) personal website: www.mjryder.net and check out his Facebook page: www.facebook.com/MJRyder.net

In my previous blog I shared some of my personal experiences of academic networking. I’d now like to share some of my other experiences, drawing on my ‘former life’ as a digital marketing professional in higher education.

Blogs revisited

During my time working for Canterbury Christ Church University, I had the pleasure of being involved in working on a number of fairly high profile academic blogs including the Policing blog, and Discursive of Tunbridge Wells (Clinical Psychology) among others. One particularly important lesson for me, was that you never know who might be reading your work online. In one particular case, a colleague actually got invited to publish on the basis of several blogs that she had written and shared online. This then led her to further networking opportunities and a major boost for the department. No small achievement for a small blog cast out into the ether!

I’ve also had similar experiences on a personal level with my own website www.mjryder.net. Back in the early 2000s I had my website added to several student blogrolls, and from this I was contacted by none other than the University of Auckland (NZ) asking if they could use my website as a case study for their students! This taught me a valuable lesson about the power of the internet to reach countless others whom you might never otherwise meet. I’ve never been to New Zealand, and hadn’t even heard of the University of Auckland until they contacted me, but it just goes to show how far reaching your work can potentially be.  

On the basis of this example (and a few others) I was chatting to a member of the Sociology department at CCCU and he asked me if I might like to present to his students. Of course I said yes, and as a result ended up giving two careers lectures to students based on my experiences as a lowly English student seeking to enter the world of work.

While this final example may not be academic as such, it does go to show is that you never know where your activities may lead you. Networking and engagement can never be in vain, as someone somewhere will be affected by your work. 

A word of warning 

But a note of caution. You can’t just produce work and hope that someone somewhere will find it. I have two key rules that I follow when it comes to online publishing:

• Anything you publish online can be found.
• Just because you publish something online, doesn't mean it will be found. 

What this means is that anything you do online, for good or for ill, has the potential to come back and haunt you. Having an off day and feel like a rant? Don’t do it! Take a step back and think again! Even deletion won’t necessarily help you as people can take screenshots, and there are internet archives that scour the web and store material from years back.

     The other rule is just as important: don’t assume that just because you throw your work out there, someone will find it. People are busy, and your blog may not necessarily be very well known. Equally, it may be that there are hundreds of other blogs out there on a similar topic, and you might not even make it onto the first few pages of search results.

     If you want to take blogging seriously, it’s important to have a content strategy, and even more important to think about how your work fits in with your wider project of marketing yourself as an academic. 

     

     So if there’s one lesson to take from this blog, please remember this golden rule: your online activities should not exist in isolation. Just because you throw your work out there, doesn’t mean it will get picked up, or reach the audience you intend it for. It’s therefore crucial that you don’t consider your online activities in isolation. When you share a business card, why not also mention your blog / website / social media? Why not even mention them when you present at a conference? Better still, add them to your slides, your business cards, and your email signatures.

    You can also reach others by networking with your intended audience directly via social media, by tweeting relevant publications, groups or individuals. You can also post on blogs, or use guest blogs to help promote your own work. But whatever you do, don’t ‘fire and forget’. There’s a lot of information out there, and without a strategy to your communications, your work is very likely to go un-read.