Sifting through the current blogs and twitter feeds of other professionals in the field of online education, I feel slightly overwhelmed by the amount of content people are posting each day. “Online social behavior has significantly modified the nature of human activities, habitats, and interactions.” (Tiago, & Verıssimo, 2014, p. 703). I wonder to myself, if I can keep up. Cultivating a digital presence is very much like growing a garden. It will take preparations, the right tools, a good work ethic, daily work, care and time (Stevens, 2018). Much like my fellow cohort, we have all but the last item on this list.

Purpose:

Cultivating my digital identity and presence will fulfill two purposes for me.

1: It will help me become more of a resident (White & Cornu, 2011) online where I can add ideas and thoughts to the ever expanding wealth of knowledge growing online.

2: I can increase my network of professionals and colleagues who can add to my knowledge and be an integral sounding board for further and better ideas around my research.

Gaps:

One of my skill gaps includes just what to post and/or tweet about. As stated earlier in this post, there is an insurmountable amount of content online and choosing what to post or tweet about might be a difficult task. To do this I recognize I will have to set aside my perfectionist mentality and just post regardless. Another gap I foresee will be reaching out. As an introvert I have trouble making introductions at the best of times, so making ‘cold call’ connections will be difficult. However, I do have support from my instructors and my cohort to help me engage in the vast network of professionals. In fact this has already taken place with the help of the 2018 RRU MALAT Virtual Symposium, as I have already made a couple connections to some of our presenters. I also understand that I will be engaging with the appropriate networked ‘publics’ as described by (Danah Boyd 2010) of like-minded colleagues. (White & Cornu, 2011) describe a digital resident as

Strategy:

For someone who would rather stay a visitor as explained by White & Le Cornu (2011), my comfort zone is visitor and to remain anonymous online. This, of course, is counter-intuitive to the course and the values of open pedagogy/learning. I often will read news in regards to education and technology, the next thought should be to share.

The first step of creating a digital presence would be to set an objective or goal. There are far too many examples of people posting their lives which doesn’t seem to gain a lot of traction. As these individuals post haphazardly, with little clear direction their viewers only really have unorganized thoughts spread on a wall. Another method of posting is with purpose in order to tell a story. “Stories have the ability to build connections with personal experience, which helps facilitate meaning making and retention” (Lowenthal 2008, p. 532).

Part of my strategy will be to apply my learning to my online presence. I would do this by tweeting the papers and articles that I find the most engaging, of course being mindful of copyright and licensing. The second step would be to include perhaps summaries of my findings in blog posts as part of ongoing thoughts and ideas that I would gain from future research as part of the MALAT program. These will have to be posted mindfully in order to convey a consecutive theme/story to engage my potential audience. My third step would be to include continuous communications with my cohort and other education leaders in my ideas and findings. In order to do this, I will have to set time aside specifically for the purpose of adding to my digital presence. (White & Cornu, 2011) describe that a resident “[spends a] proportion of their lives is actually lived out online where the distinction between online and off–line is increasingly blurred” (para 30), and I by continuously posting I hope to begin a dialogue and begin living a portion of my life online as a digital resident (White & Cornu, 2011).

Posting is technically only half of digital presence, the other half is recognition. By utilizing proper hashtags, and posting about my own blog entries, I can increase my visibility and hopefully viewership.

Evaluation:

I will be able to ascertain some form of success just be measuring the number of online entries I add. It’s very much like the sports idiom, “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t make” wit this in mind the more I post the greater likelihood that I will be able to establish a connection with my readership. My current average is perhaps one ever few months as the need to share arises. Once to become more comfortable with sharing my opinions and adding more thoughts to my blog, I will be able to check the timestamps of each entry, tweet, etc. and be able to compare the number of posts in against the number of posts in the last week or month. This will allow me a strong foundation to measure how my digital presence will move forward. Another method of measurement can be by counting comment, retweets, likes, etc. These are commonly used to express people’s agreement with your thoughts or opinions (Bélizaire & Groenendyk, 2018, p. 6).

Another method of evaluation is to use online social tracking program such as Klout.com. In Klout you can connect your different social media accounts, websites, blogs, videos, etc. and the internal algorithm measures various factors, such as followers, friends, fans, subscribers, in-links, page rank, outlinks, comments, replies, likes, upvotes, tags, reshares, retweets, and views (Hutchinson, 2015), and analyzes your effeteness in content development/distribution. Kloud will then assign you a Klout score which will indicate how well or poorly the current state of your digital presence. As stated my online presence is stagnant as I have not posted since mid 2017 and my Klout score is hovering at around 30. I can use this number as a baseline to measure my improvement as I add more content to my online presence.

In conclusion, to accomplish my goals of increasing my digital presence in regards to digital residency (White & Cornu, 2011) and network of colleagues, I will need to expand my digital influence by increasing my posting (Bélizaire & Groenendyk, 2018, p. 67), and posting thoughtfully that fits the expectations of my readhership (Bélizaire & Groenendyk, 2018, p. 66). I can then measure my personal success as to overcoming my psychological safety barriers (Zhang, Fang, Wei, Chen, 2010, p. 432) by counting the number of posts I create. I can also measure all the factors of my social influence of followers, friends, fans, subscribers, in-links, page rank, outlinks, comments, replies, likes, upvotes, tags, reshares, retweets, and views (Hutchinson, 2015), by assessing my Klout score. With these measurements I can evaluate how my strategies are improving, and what I might need to change in order to better fit my goals.

References:

Bélizaire, D., & Groenendyk, M. (2018). Effective Social Media Strategies for Business Libraries. Ticker: The Academic Business Librarianship Review, 3(1), 1-12. Retrieved June 15, 2018, from http://ticker.mcgill.ca/article/viewFile/28/26

Boyd, Danah. “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications.” In Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, 2010, pp. 39–58., www.danah.org/papers/2010/SNSasNetworkedPublics.pdf

Hutchinson, A. (2015, October 31). Wanna’ Know How Your Klout Score is Really Calculated? Retrieved June 15, 2018, from https://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-business/adhutchinson/2015-10-31/wanna-know-how-your-klout-score-really-calculated

Lowenthal, P. R. (2008). Online Faculty Development and Storytelling: An Unlikely Solution to Improving Teacher Quality. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 4(3). Retrieved May 1, 2018, from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol4no3/lowenthal_0908.pdf

Stevens, D. (2018, January 17). 10 Tips to Grow Your Social Media Presence. Retrieved June 15, 2018, from https://deeply.social/10-tips-to-grow-your-social-media-presence/

Tiago, M., & Verıssimo, J. (2014). Digital marketing and social media: Why bother? Business Horizons, (57), 703-708. Retrieved May 1, 2018, from http://blog.mahanbs.com/Images/Weblog/blog/WeblogHtmlFile/1-s2.0-S0007681314000949-main.pdf#Raff0010

White, David S, and Alison Le Cornu. “Visitors and Residents: A New Typology for Online Engagement.” First Monday, vol. 16, no. 9, 5 Sept. 2011.

Zhang, Y., Fang, Y., Wei, K., & Chen, H. (2010). Exploring the role of psychological safety in promoting the intention to continue sharing knowledge in virtual communities. International Journal of Information Management, (30), 425-436. Retrieved April 22, 2018, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0268401210000289