Context: Used in training materials for staff at Monash University– the objective of the piece was to help articulate what online presence is and how it can be used to further career and educational objectives. This was originally published as an essay on my Monash blog, which I then re-wrote as follows for online reading and staff training. The audience was predominately academics.
Outcome: Staff indicated that the materials helped them understand what online presence is and how they could use it.
What is Online Presence?
Online Presence is the sum total of different publishing threads within the online space and the sum total of all external references to these threads.
These publishing threads work together in a marketplace of competing online presences. Within this marketplace, the quality of what sellers produce – alongside their ability to market it – enhances their reputation.
Online Presence might be understood as online persona. Unlike a simple Web Presence, which provides a vendor point-of-contact (for example a Website) an Online Presence is a virtual person made up of many parts.
For instance, an organisation may have a Website in addition to a Facebook presence and a Twitter feed.
The ways these tools work together in the online space and the way these connections are perceived and valued helps form an organisation’s Online Presence.
Adding Value
A successful Online Presence adds value for its audience. By producing timely and relevant content that understands and anticipates its audience, people and organisations forge the connections that increase and enhance Online Presence.
In other words, if you want to be linked to, cited and referred to as authoritative, you need to understand what your audience is looking for and help them find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible.
You have to provide a solution to (at least some of) the problems your audience is grappling with, even if the problem is as simple as trying to locate a postal address for your business.
Dynamic, not static. Diffused not centralised.
Social media tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest mean that publishing is now diffused and accessible. In the Web’s formative years, publishing was often restricted to those who knew how to code or those who had administrative access to an organisation’s chief publishing tool — the content management system.
Now, the individual has become a publisher of the organisation of her own professional and personal history.
She promotes her work experience and professional interests through social media, networks through online forums and blogs using one of any number of blogging tools.
The individual is no longer circumscribed by relational publishing: she is, in effect, a micro publisher.
The Importance of Content – the Power of the Post
A post is a discrete bit of content published for a given purpose. It’s a communication of news.
While it might not necessarily be “news” in the conventional sense of current affairs, the content tells a story or contributes to a larger narrative.
A post can take many forms. It might be a section of text, a log, for example, or an image or a hyperlink or a media file.
In the context of Online Presence we can understand posts as foundational, the bricks and mortar of Online Presence.
As an Online Presence does not exist in isolation but rather within an economy of competing presences, locate-ability is key.
The information that makes up an Online Presence must be locatable if it is to assert itself successfully and reach its target audience.
It must be aware of its what it’s trying to say, and to whom, and provide useful, authoritative and engaging information. It must also make reference to the right keywords if it’s going to be picked up by search engines.
In making relevant content the keystone of Online Presence, the publisher must tirelessly ask herself what information will be of value to her reader and how she can structure or disseminate this information in the best way.
Enhancing your Online Presence
Below are but a few ways academics can improve their Online Presence:
- Determine your audience and produce content that addresses its needs. Every chunk of content should incorporate key words that aid the accessibility of content via search engines.
- Ensure content is news-driven and timely, making your site an authority and the first point-of-contact that users consult to determine what’s current.
- Link in to other parts of your site where it makes sense to do so, keeping the user within your domain. For instance, one post may naturally segue to other thematically related posts within your domain. By linking from one to another you increase traffic within your site and increase the time spent on your site.
- Enrich your content offering by giving users a value-add in the form of multimedia or downloadable files that enhance their experience or enrich the information that’s being presented.
- Diversify your publishing channels. For instance, keep a Twitter or Facebook presence alongside a blog presence and interlink these different presences. They should not simply reproduce the content of one another, they should add value to one another.
- Create reciprocal linkages between related sites, even if these aren’t within your domain. This ultimately increases traffic to your site and also enhances the reputation of your site if it’s one that others cite as an authority within a certain subject area.
Benefits
Finally, it’s worth considering what the benefits of an enhanced Online Presence are:
- Publishing through a blog or other channel doesn’t take the place of peer review but it does help you build a community profile for your research. For instance, a documented case study of work in a particular field may contribute to raising an academic’s public profile and the perception that her work has community value. If you can generate a conversation, you can also generate a perception of value.
- It keeps you engaging and publishing through the traditional print publications cycle.
- It gives you an online portfolio of work that you can use to support applications for funding. This point is particularly important for academics who do a lot of field work.
While this obviously benefits you professionally, it also means that your work is having community impact, which is a key value, and one that goes far beyond the confines of the university itself.
Alae Taule'alo 