Online presence means more or other than public social media accounts in my case. Through professional blogs and forums, I am an active participant in the local and North American WordPress professional development sphere such as StackOverflow, GitHub repositories, different web development and WordPress custom development oriented Slack channels as well as participate in Advanced WordPress and Advanced WooCommerce closed professional Facebook forums. I am also a WordPress Meetup and WordCamp co-organizer, where with team members we help people to belong to the WordPress online and offline community and through that, I help and give back to my open source community. My LinkedIn profile is the only social media platform where I have a maintained professional public profile.
When I started my journey as a web developer I had an always updated public portfolio website showcasing my portfolio pieces. These days my private work comes through word of mouth. At the same time, I am teaching, thus at this stage of my life, I do not need public web development portfolio.
My resident-visitor typology reflects a person who works and lives with technology and potentially possesses a wider spread online presence but running searches on my name clearly shows that it is really a lack of public digital presence.
The term “digital brand” was originally associated with corporate marketing efforts. However, the term “personal brand,” associated with individuals and developed and popularized in the late 1990s, has been digitized as a result of the ubiquity and user-friendly nature of social media environments like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Differentiating between corporate and digital brands has necessitated the creation of a new term: the “personal digital brand.” (Kleppinger & Cain, 2015 p.1)
During the MALAT program, I do plan to maintain my presence on the above mentioned professional forums, though I anticipate some drop in the intensity during the time when I am intensively teaching (such as every day) and pursuing the MALAT courses.
People use social media for a number of reasons: to connect with friends and family, to become part of a community, to find support, maybe fun, and to expand professional reputation. Digital communications have become a societal norm: for every professional, the choice is no longer simply to use or not use digital communication tools but to control a public image through the use of social media or lack thereof (Kleppinger & Cain, 2015). It can feel difficult to maintain a professional digital brand while simultaneously using social media platforms for personal purpose and fulfillment. In every field, professionals have to learn how to manage potentially competing and conflicting interests with regard to their own social media use.
I found the questions that Schryver (2013) listed very important in terms of how anyone approaches digital identity: “Are you proud of your digital presence? Will you be proud of it in ten years? Are there things that are untrue or pertain someone with the same name? What can you do about that?”.
Several years ago, I made a conscious decision not to maintain publicly active Twitter / Facebook / Instagram accounts. I do use some social media platforms privately for connecting with old friends and colleagues, but they are mainly for participating in closed professional group conversations and forums. I have no short-term plans to mindfully shift to the resident zone in my personal social media life (White & Le Cornu, 2011).
Through the MALAT program, especially by the end, I have the following plan to comply:
Goal & Purpose:
My goal is to create a sustainable digital identity that showcases my professional achievements and knowledge of learning technology. I will ensure to stay relevant and up-to-date as digital environments evolve. The plan is to enhance my current professional online identity including and potentially focusing on educational technology.
Skills & Knowledge Gaps:
I do have the skills to navigate many social media platforms due to my marketing and web development background. I am not used to sharing my opinions with wide audiences in a digital setting related to educational technology and related industry topics so far: it is a new direction.
Articulating my opinions and writing professionally will be a learning curve for me, especially due to English not being my native language.
Strategy & Approach to Address Gaps:
LinkedIn groups, Slack teams and Facebook professional forums will be the platforms I will focus on to create my digital identity in relation to education and technology in education.
The MALAT WordPress blog will be used strictly to keep my digital presence as a graduate student.
Exposure to academic writing and research methods will also be important as I begin my graduate journey.
Measures of Success:
Maintain my MALAT program WordPress site to share my thoughts with my peers and begin to follow relevant LinkedIn and Facebook groups, where I can read and potentially engage in meaningful discussions.
Try out new tools in my professional field in terms of integrating different tools into my daily workflows: Slack, project management tools, learning management systems, web development automation tools. Learn or dig deeper into educational technology tools such as Camtasia, Articulate Storyline etc.
Timeline:
This is a two-year plan that will be revisited time-to-time during the MALAT program as well as post-graduation.
I admit that I’m conflicted with the cultivation of a public online presence. On one hand I am fully aware and understand that having a noticeable, strategically planned online presence is a digital currency, can lead the way to different advancements and can be done SM/indfully (Hodgon, 2018), yet I’m quite protective of my privacy and do not favour to be in the centre of attention.
All illustrations are created by the author.
References
Dr. Hodgon, J. (2018, April). “Mindful” social media engagement in an age of Cambridge. Presented in the Virtual Symposium of the 2018 MALAT Program at Royal Roads University, Victoria, BC, Canada.
Kleppinger, C. A., & Cain, J. (2015). Personal Digital Branding as a Professional Asset in the Digital Age. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 79(6), 79. https://doi.org/10.5688/ajpe79679
Schryver, K. (2013). Who are you online? Considering issues of web identity. Retrieved from https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/guest-post-who-are-you-online-considering-issues-of-web-identity/?_r=0
White, D., & Le Cornu, A. (2011). Visitors and Residents A new typology for online engagement. First Monday.
Hello Beata,
I appreciate your experience of not expressing yourself online and not as engaged in social media. Have such a connection to the digital world in your field of work, I was surprised to see that you are not as connected personally. Do you think this is because of the nature of your job that you feel the need to be more private? By the way, your blog posts are very visually appealing, I will learn from you!
I admit both affected my decision. I am a quite private person in general. At the same time, I have been aware of the potential pitfalls of these social media platforms (or just paranoid), and always felt that the companies are continuously launching newer and newer fantastic features, but they do not evaluate the potential issues in advance (privacy, ethical…). They just react when something happens. My long-standing question is: just because we can, should we?
Me being private on the public social media doesn’t make me less active on the closed professional forums/groups ☺.
Thank you for your kind compliment on the visual presentation of the posts Danielle!
All great points Beata! I completely agree. Even when Snapchat was first launched as a platform that guaranteed that your pictures would be deleted and it was perfectly safe to snap whatever you wanted, they later found out that Snapchat indeed was keeping a database.
Hey Beata
Thanks for such a well thought out plan. I have a couple thoughts on what you shared:
1- ” In every field, professionals have to learn how to manage potentially competing and conflicting interests with regard to their own social media use.” This is so very true and I suspect something that most of us struggle with. I think it is a fine line and we need to be very careful with what we share publically and how we share it.
2- I thought it was an excellent idea to google your name to see what kind of presence you have on the interwebs. More and more people are investigating others online before interacting. It shows again the importance of curating your online digital identity.
I’ll be interested in seeing how much all of our plans might change over the next two years. Is this something you have considered at all?
I believe as we dig much deeper into digital networks, and our researches, our point of view and priorities will change. I am not ‘married’ to my privacy, and the above described current plans. Thus, I do think my plans will be adjusted over the time, hopefully to the better as technology and the possibilities will also evolve.
Personal digital brand is a currency, we have to have a strategy and an action plan how to create it and maintain it.
It starts with a research as well, and a first step is googling yourself to see if anything is out there what you don’t consider flattering or appropriate ☺.
Great points, Beata. I like your metaphor of digital brand as “currency”. I wouldn’t want to specify the exact situation, but a few years ago one of my previous VPs at another company discovered that employees he treated badly and fired, were blasting him on the company’s Glassdoor with bad comments.
I believe that this situation was a great learning moment for me as a team leader to realize that your brand and digital identity could be negatively impacted not just on your own doing but also by your overall behaviour and interactions with people.
I also thought it was an excellent idea to google your name to see what kind of presence you have on the web. What would you have to go if you identified something you didn’t like and wanted to have it removed? Curious to know what the steps would be.
You cannot really remove what you do not like, it is persistent as everything else published online (Boyd, 2011). If it is libel, you can contact the publisher to have it removed after proving that is causes harm to your reputation.
Another case is when there are other people with the same name as yours, and they have inappropriate content, which you think could be linked with you. Mainly you have to emphasize your digital brand and show that you are a different person (professional photos, professional content, professional social media presence), thus in searches it will be visible.
Reference
Boyd, D. (2011). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A Networked Self (pp. 39–58). New York, NY: Rutledge.
Hi Beata,
This and your other posts are very insightful and as Daniella mentioned “very visually pleasing”!
I agree with your point that the action plan that we have now currently may not be what we want in the future especially as we grow personally and professionally through what we learn from our cohorts and through our experiences in the MALAT program.