Are There Any Downsides to Social Media?

Is there a strategy to communicating your research online? This episode explores:

• What an academic communications strategist does.
• Why having a strategy to your online presence is important.
• Common misperceptions about communicating online.
• Lessons learned from an academic communications strategist.
• The benefits and challenges to being an academic entrepreneur.

Our guest is: Jennifer van Alstyne (@HigherEdPR), a communications strategist for professors and researchers. At The Academic Designer LLC, Jennifer helps people share their work effectively in online spaces like websites and social media. The Social Academic blog shares advice about managing your online presence in Higher Education. Jennifer is a Peruvian-American poet with a BA in English from Monmouth University, an MFA in Writing & Poetics from the Jack Kerouac School, and an MA in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She lives in San Diego, California. Connect with Jennifer on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Our host is: Dr. Dana M. Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner energized by facilitating meaningful conversations and educational experiences. She specializes in college student relationships, gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as student success and assessment planning. Dana is the author of From Single to Serious: Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses, (Rutgers UP).

Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

• Social Media How To’s
• Articles about managing your personal website
• Successes and Setbacks of Social Media: Impact on Academic Life edited by Cheyenne Seymour (Wiley)
• Social Media for Academics by Mark Carrigan, 2nd edition (Sage)
• This NBN conversation on how social media has shaped contemporary society.
• This NBN conversation on theories and practices of social media communication.

Welcome to The Academic Life! You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN.

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