General Feedback on Topic 2

Thanks to all of you for some excellent discussions about online identity. Yes it is a huge area and impossible for one person to cover everything, but I hope you agree that collectively the group has produced a variety of interesting perspectives and resources on the topic.

Some posts are getting too long – experiment with “doing more with less”. Remember the recommended word counts! For example, use pictures/diagrams/videos/embedded tweets to illustrate a point rather than a long verbal description. There is no “one best way” but learn from you like about how other students have approached the task (don’t forget to credit them!) And what can you bring in from the video workshop to add value to your posts and help build your profiles?

Make sure if someone comments on your work that you moderate it quickly and refer any technical problems that may occur. We have some great tech support that I can call upon. A few comments have been going missing and this can be frustrating for all concerned.

Some of you are making excellent use of twitter in terms of encouraging comment on your posts and furthering the debates. I’d like to see more engagement with people beyond the module – if you have drawn upon someone’s work in your post – tweet them a link to it and thank them. You can’t guarantee a response of course but you never know! Often these things work indirectly – you might not get the immediate benefit you were hoping for, but it all helps to boost your visibility and other connections may develop as a result.

Finally, on a semi-serious point, please note I have underlined the word “authentic” in Topic 3’s question about developing an online professional profile. While it is great to publically acknowledge the work of colleagues and others with a supportive tweet, make sure you don’t overdo it. We all need occasionally to take an objective look at what we put “out there” and check that it passes the bull***t test. For example, if you had a job interview lined up and were following your interviewers on twitter, you might want to make a constructive comment on work that they have shared, perhaps linking to something else that it relates well to. That would probably impress them, as evidence you had done your homework, and had something useful to say on the topic. You wouldn’t RT everything they had written saying it is the best thing you’ve ever seen. Because that wouldn’t be authentic. It would be creeping 

So the trick in building a professional online profile is to get that balance right – clearly showing what you have to offer but without boasting, exaggerating or simply looking creepy. (ok, I realise that some sales roles may form an exception to this!)