A couple weeks ago, I attended a session sponsored Center for Teaching & Learning titled Let`s Tweet Up! Creating a Digital Identity in Support of Research, Teaching, Learning. Dr. Ilene Alexander led us in a discussion of how to leverage Twitter and social media in general as a busy graduate student. This was a great opportunity to hear from graduate students how Twitter is being used in their fields, and to learn about some useful tips and resources.
Some of the big questions the graduate students had coming in to the workshop were:
- How do I separate my personal and professional identities online?
- Why should I use Twitter when I already have so many things to pay attention to?
- How do I fit twitter use into my workflow?
- How do I find other tweeters in my subject area?
Here is a partial list of some of the uses for Twitter that were mentioned in an attempt to answer some of these questions:
- crowd source
- follow sources
- track professional organizations
- curate resources
- post calls
- contribute
- intentionally making connections
- seek new ideas
And finally, here are a couple of resources I came away with that could be useful to a wide array of researchers:
- Social Media: A Guide for Researchers
- Your favourite academic tweeters: lists available to browse by subject area
This also inspired me to do some updating of the PIM Social Networking website.
Thanks for posting this! It look as though there are no definite answers in the post above to the question posed: "How do I separate my personal and professional identities online?"
Were any useful suggestions made on this point? Having multiple twitter accounts, or perhaps separating identies through use of tagging?
Emilie: Some tactics mentioned for managing multiple identities were creating separate accounts; using different variations of your name for each identity (e.g. including your middle initial for academic stuff); and using tools like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite to manage multiple social media accounts.