PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: How to use LinkedIn as an academic

This post is part of the series PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: posts written for the Dutch academic career network AcademicTransfer, your go-to resource for all research positions in the Netherlands.

These posts are sponsored by AcademicTransfer, and tailored to those of you interested in pursuing a research position in the Netherlands.

If these posts raise your interest in working as a researcher in the Netherlands, even better - and feel free to fire away any questions you might have on this topic!

LinkedIn. The website may sound to you like a place for consultants and other folks in the industry. You may consider ResearchGate and your blog as your online venues of choice. Perhaps you prefer to interact on Twitter. Maybe you once made a profile on LinkedIn when you were an undergraduate student, and then never updated it. Wherever you are, I'd recommend you to build and maintain a profile on LinkedIn. For academics, LinkedIn can serve the following purposes:

1. Become findable
Sometimes, your profile page on your institution or your blog can become more difficult to find. Your LinkedIn profile can be a good tool to monitor and manage your personal online brand. It can be a source of consistency as you switch institutions. Use it to have your most important information and specialty online, and keep it updated.

2. Have your elevator pitch online
Your summary on LinkedIn is your online elevator pitch. Use a paragraph to summarize where you studied and worked in the past, your current position, and your service appointments if these are important in your field. Keep this summary updated in the same way you keep the summary of your resume updated. Whenever you are invited somewhere as a speaker, you can simply copy and paste this summary for your introduction.

3. Use it to keep in touch with contacts
E-mail addresses are unreliable, especially for early career researchers. If you move from short-term post-doc project at one institution to another place, it can be difficult to keep in touch with your contacts. I use LinkedIn as my digital address book - and one that updates itself all the time. The only drawback of this approach is that it may be harder to get a response from a colleague when he/she has a profile, but actually doesn't use LinkedIn at all. Whenever I receive a business card, I search for the name in LinkedIn, and add this person as a contact - business cards get lost easily, but a LinkedIn profile connection can stay (provided that a contact doesn't block you or deletes his/her profile). An added plus is that you will get notified when a contact has a birthday, changes jobs, or has a job anniversary. These occasions are always good to touch base.

4. Digital CV
Consider LinkedIn your online CV. Update it regularly, and add the information that you have on your CV: educational background, work experience, honors and awards, language proficiency, skills and publications. Moreover, you can link LinkedIn to other services such as Slideshare to showcase your presentations, and to Publons to have your verified peer review record visible. If your graduation is approaching, make sure your LinkedIn profile is up to date, does not have spelling errors, and gives a good overview of your contributions to the profession.

5. Participate in groups
Just as with other social media, you can join groups on LinkedIn, and participate in these groups. You can ask questions, and/or answer questions. If you are getting towards graduation and consider a job in the industry, interaction in professional groups can be an excellent way of getting noticed.

6. Follow institutions and companies
You can follow business pages on LinkedIn (institutions and companies) to keep up-to-date with some important players in your field. These pages can notify you of open positions, and give you a general idea of the culture of a certain institution beyond what is available on their webpage. The same holds true for other social media platforms, which are all less static in nature than a website.

PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: Online branding for scientists

This post is part of the series PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: posts written for the Dutch academic career network AcademicTransfer, your go-to resource for all research positions in the Netherlands.

These posts are sponsored by AcademicTransfer, and tailored to those of you interested in pursuing a research position in the Netherlands.

If these posts raise your interest in working as a researcher in the Netherlands, even better - and feel free to fire away any questions you might have on this topic!

Today, we continue where we left of last month, when we talked about how to use Twitter as a scientist. Now we are going to look at the entire perspective of using the internet to show to world who you are.

When I mention online branding, often researchers shoo away. Branding is for marketeers, they tell me, and I have no need to brand myself at all. I myself don't like the term "branding" that much (I don't like the associations that branding call for, such as commercialism and consumerism). But let's be scientists and call it branding, because that's the definition somebody gave it some time ago. I could wonder why creep (the fact that concrete, and structures made with concrete, have deformations that increase over time when stresses remain the same) is called creep, and I find it a creepy word, but it is what it is.

So now that we -hopefully- have your fear and repulsion for this marketeer language out of the way, I can introduce you to what we are actually talking about: having an influence on what the internet shows the world about you. If you are not active online, or not conscious about your online activities, you depend on other people. If you do not manage your online profiles, perhaps only irrelevant information about you might be available online, and give people the wrong impression of you.

Let's do an exercise - right now. Go to Google and type your name in the search field. What do you find? What are the 10 first results that show up? Here's what I find - and it is indeed the information in a nutshell that I want to show up when somebody googles me:



If your search returns the fact that you won the lottery of your local baker, some emotional comment you once made on a news article or whatever random stuff you are trying to sell online, it is time to get some grip on your content. If future employers look you up online, you want Google to take them gently by the hand and bring them straight to your important information.

You might say that it is easier for me, since I have the curse and blessing of a unique name. There's only one other Eva Lantsoght active online, and she is a translator in Prague, so it is very clear for whoever looks me up online that we are two different people. If you have a very common name, you might need to repeat the exercise by googling your name together with your current institution, and see what shows up then. For consistency, just as with your journal publications, you might want to add the first letters of your other first names to your online content. Because my name is so uncommon, I use just Eva Lantsoght online, but I do use Eva O.L. Lantsoght for all my publications.

What should I do to get grip on the online content that is available about me, you might ask now. Well, let's break it down into several steps. Remember that once you start to take action here, the irrelevant stuff will start to sink down to the bottom of Google's search results and your important information will be right there at first glance. Here are several actions you can take to curate your online profile:

1. Using Twitter

Here's our favorite blue bird again. If you don't have a Twitter profile yet, check out my post from last month to help you in getting started. You can also find some inspiration on who to follow and who to look for on Twitter in this post that I wrote a while ago. In terms of showing up in your Google search results, Twitter will only provide one entry. However, if you think you are able to post something on Twitter every now and then, keeping in mind that is a very fast media source, then it is certainly worth the time and effort. And with "time and effort" I am expressing myself strongly: I feel that using Twitter is a gentle form of distraction that can lead to interesting professional results.

2. Using LinkedIn

LinkedIn is your online resume. If you don't have a profile, you need one (much more than you need a blog or a Twitter account).

If you don't have a LinkedIn account, carve out 2 to 4 hours some day to get this thing up and running. Take the summary from your resume, and add it to your summary. Use a recent photograph. Transport all the categories from your resume into LinkedIn, and make sure your information is up to date. Then, start connecting with people you know. Typically, LinkedIn will suggest people you know to get started.

If you have a profile, give it a serious look, pretending you are an outsider (say, somebody who would be interested in working with you). Do you like what you see? Is your information up to date? If not, it's time to clean ship and give your profile an overhaul.

3. Writing a professional blog

I've blogged extensively about, well, blogging. Blogging in academia and blogging as a scientist is what I particularly have been writing about. If you are not sure on how to start blogging, here is the introduction manual I wrote not so long ago. It is my opinion that blogging is for every academic, but I also understand that time is a valuable resource for all of us. You can learn a lot from it. Even if you don't have time to run your own blog, you can always contribute as a guest author to other blogs. Just make sure your byline gets your name and information correctly, so Google can find you.

4. Finding your brand

If you start to use several social media platforms and other online sources, you might want to start thinking about what is really the main thing about you that you want others to see. I'm not talking about holding up a rosy image of your life (let's leave that to some Instagram accounts, where all food looks perfect and everybody is always in the sun). Authenticity online is something I care deeply about. What you want to share online depends on what you are comfortable with. Nobody is forcing you to post sarcastic tweets, or to retweet political things. I do, because I guess it's a GenY thing, and I've always embraced the internet as a means to communicate with the rest of the world. But nobody is forcing you to do so; it is perfectly fine if you only tweet about your field and your current work.

5. Finding your tribe

Once you start using social media platforms, you can start to form bonds online. Through the blogging and Twitter community, I've been reaching out to fellow academics over the last 6 years, and I have gained a tremendous amount of insights. I learned a lot of tips and tricks from fellow researchers during my PhD, and learned how to manage my time and plan accordingly. My tribe, as such, has been generally academic. Your tribe might be more specific to your field - whatever you are comfortable with, and whatever feels like developing meaningful connections. Make sure you reach out to others by leaving comments on their blogs, replying to tweets and interact in different ways. Once you have found your community, you will hopefully see the benefit of putting some time into your online profiles, and Google will show information that you yourself provided to the internet.

Authenticity in 2.0?

I recently tweeted and wrote on Facebook about a paper rejection. Afterwards, I heard the comment that I should not write about those things, for several reasons:
- People will only remember my bad news and not my good news.
- You have to remain quiet with regard to failures.
- Your "competitors" will read this and feel good about it.

However, my goal on this blog, and on Twitter is to show the real life in academia:
- the lovely places where you get to travel to conferences as well as the late nights in the office;
- the immense joy upon approval of a manuscript as well as the rejections and lessons learned;
- the juggling of tasks as well as the moments of solitude in which you find yourself wrestling with a difficult concept.

I was more than relieved when I read "Being Inappropriate" by Chris Ashford. It also led to a short discussion on Twitter, where I mentioned the negative comments I got on tweeting about paper rejection. I storified the tweets



You might wonder why I tweeted about the paper rejection, but did not dedicate a blog post to it. The reason is that I don't feel like this chapter is finished. I received the comments of the reviewers, and I understood my "mistake". As I was struggling with the word limit, I decided to cut out most of the information on my experiments and refer to previously published work of mine. That technique left me with more words to spend on explaining what I did next (applying the findings to a method for assessment for existing solid slab bridges, and checking a set of existing bridges according to 2 methods). However, the reviewers -rightfully- pointed out they had no idea what the recommendations are based on, and the paper doesn't tell the full story.
For a blog post, I would like to have the story completed - I already know what is missing, but I still need to go and reflect on how I can incorporate all the necessary information into an improved and revamped version of that paper. Therefore, until the story is complete and I know how to tackle the problem, I will not write a full post on it.

So far, I don't think it is harmful to write about rejections and the learning processes in academia (because in the end, you learn from a rejection and you will improve your writing afterwards, no?). But I'd like to know: do you write about rejections? Or do you only highlight your successes and achievements?

Branding Fail

Today, I was reading an article on an online newssite. The article was about a company that offers training courses to demotivated and burnt out employees. I thought that sounded interesting (I enjoy reading about personal leadership and development), and so I clicked on to the website of the company, where I discovered they hadn't updated their website since 2005. Like, 5 years ago!

They only advertise a personal branding workshop which they were offering on a certain date in 2005. Really, I found this such a difference between the statement the company makes (we don't care to give you up-to-date information) and what their actualy goal is (training on personal branding, and getting more fulfillment from your job).