I have been asked by the good folks from SBL’s Student Advisory Board to present a paper/lead a discussion on how graduate students and recent PhD’s can best use social media (and what to avoid). I wonder what you think of this for a title and abstract?
“On the Internet no one knows you’re a grad student.” Or how social media can help you, build you up, and tear you down.
I will consider how one can leverage social media such as blogs, Facebook, academia.edu, twitter, and so on to help one build community and garner feedback (and positive attention) for one’s work. Of course social media can also be a sucking morass [probably shouldn’t use that in the blurb] where a stray, unwise comment can remain forever to embarrass you like a fly trapped in a bit of amber while sitting on the toilet. [Probably shouldn’t use that bit either.]
What do you think? And of course, wanting to leverage social media myself, please feel free to send me your thoughts and comments on this topic and I will weave it into my presentation.
5 thoughts on “SBL Paper on Social Media”
I am convinced that the key to using “social media” is to comment on other’s blogs/statuses etc. The only way to get readership is to become involved in reading the blogs of other people. When you read their blog and comment, then they will usually come to your blog and leave a comment. If they like what they read, they will come back. But this means that you have to read a lot of other blogs in order to get some followers. It is rare for someone to just stumble across my blog, so I have sought out others. At times this has worked against me, such as the time when I got involved with a group of bloggers who were Christian, but had the most wacky ideas! But luckily, the converse is true, that when you stop commenting, they stop reading your blog. So I quietly slipped away from their wacko topics. lol
I agree somewhat with Delirious. At the same time if any of us read just a little bit about SEO and apply it to our blogs/websites it can greatly increase web traffic. I get probably 80-100 visitors a month just from google searches. StumbleUpon gets me another 80-100/mo. Every now and then I post stuff (aimed at a very broad readership) on Facebook and get 50 or so extra hits that day.
Having said that, I regularly get email from people who claim to be students in an developing country (like Indonesia or India) studying something remotely related to my blog. They expect me to do all of their work for them.