Promoting a better online presence for researchers

Over the years I have attended a number of seminars and courses that talk about online marketing, networking and personal branding. I have so far found that although these methods are effective, they are based on a presumption - There is an ultimate transaction that occurs between you and your audience/client/customer. This can be to buy something, refer us to someone else, endorse us, love us, “like-comment-subscribe.” This is at odds with how scientists interact.

We in the research community only occasionally court our peers. We are usually employed full time on a project already, and do not have time to work on many extra projects. We work in large organisations with people in a similar field of study so we should have access to potential collaborators. We can meet like-minded people through scientific conferences. Our organisations try to actively publicise the work we do. In essence our immediate marketing requirements should already be covered by these more traditional resources. Outside of that, we are not really trying to “sell” anything. Our bread and butter is not encouraging people to constantly interact with us. This makes some of the canonical advice for developing visibility online seem extreme, even obnoxious. As a scientist, what is the value of promoting yourself online? It seems like a lot of work for very little gain.

The value of being visible online

I believe there is scope in an “Online presence” for every researcher no matter what career stage they are in but the priorities are not the same as a standard digital marketing campaign. Here is my general guidance on what one should try to achieve and some practical advice on how to achieve it.

People do look for you online! Whether you are a professor or a PhD student. Certainly if you have publications/presentations/posters then people interested in that work will look for more information about what you do. But we as scientists are special, we are presented both as an individual and as a part of a collective. People might find you through association as well, like through your lab group or institution website. In any of these cases, people’s motivation is to find out more about you professionally. What have you worked on? What can you do? When people do look for you, they will make one or two attempts but they will not go to the ends of the Earth to reach you. If the information is not forthcoming, they will likely move onto someone else.

Provide the minimal information

Our first step, therefore, in building an “Online presence” is to have the minimal information about ourselves readily available when people look. As an aside, having this information organised is also helpful for you when you need to fill in applications for funding or positions. Providing this information is not boasting, it is a statement of fact. It is giving information to someone who requests it. Think of it as a digital introduction. The way you introduce yourself in person is the same kind of information you want to convey when someone searches for you online. If I have a short conversation with someone at a conference, I may ask about things like: Their current institution, their major research interests, their former institutions, where they did their PhD, what they are technically good at, some way to contact them (email, twitter, etc.), and I might later look for an easy list of their publications/posters/presentations. All this helps me understand who they are professionally. Maybe in learning all of that we find that we actually do not have very much in common and that’s fine. I will remember you regardless.

How people search for you

As a final point, I will talk about how people actually perform their online searches. Consider; how do you find out more about a researcher you only know OF? What steps do you take? Try that on yourself and see the results. Are you happy with the way you are presented? Does it represent you honestly and effectively?

Working from my experience, I become aware of someone through one of the more established discovery methods - list of speakers at a conference, a CV of someone applying for a job with my institute, a poster posted online, an author on a publication I like. This is the starting point, stage 1, I see the name and I likely see the affiliation. I do not do an online search for “Experts in microbial genomics looking to collaborate”.

So I see this name, I copy it into a search engine, and look at the first six or so results. If this person has a common name, or a name that collides with someone famous, I may not see what I want so I will try to refine it with some extra keywords like the institution or the field of study. So in my case someone might try “nabil alikhan”, “nabil alikhan salmonella”, “nabil alikhan QIB” for instance. This is stage 2. What do your search results look like for you? Aside from websites, what images, videos or news articles are associated with these results? The third step is usually I would click on one of these top six sites and quickly skim what I see. What do you see for yourself?

It’s worth noting that my intent will dictate the information that I am looking for. If I am operating as a recruiter for a job I want to know if they meet the requirements for the role I am recruiting for. If I saw this person presenting a talk, I might be looking for more details of their methods in a particular publication of theirs. There are many more complicated scenarios, but I maintain that being able to understand you better will encourage me to approach you for collaboration, job offers, funding allocations or anything else.

In the next post I will discuss the platforms best suited to researchers, particularly those that are easy to setup and maintain.

If you want to hear more about this with different points of view, we talk about this on the microbinfie podcast in episode 66 - scholarly communications for bioinformaticians

Questions or comments? @ me on Twitter @happy_khan

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