Welcome to Growing Up Comm., a production of the ICA Podcast Network. This podcast covers topics relevant for students and early career scholars, like finding a work life balance, leveraging social media for personal branding, and navigating the global job market. I'm Sarah Pila-Leiderman, Research Assistant Professor of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. Today we'll be talking about social media and personal branding as a scholar. It's increasingly important for young scholars to be mindful of the role social media plays in their careers in this digital age. We hope this discussion helps students and early career scholars be more reflective of their use of social media for professional branding. I'd like to open the floor to my esteemed guests to introduce themselves and tell me something you love about your social media presence.
Hi Sarah. My name is Reyhaneh Maktoufi. I go by Rey, she/her. I am a science communication researcher, practitioner, producer, and trainer. And I was a Civic Science Fellow in Misinformation at PBS Nova. My favorite thing about social media is that one of my social media friends, so someone that I knew in the industry, who I first met on social media, who I met in person, maybe twice, I am now her bridesmaid for her wedding. So that's probably my favorite thing about it.
That's so fun. So I'm Sara Grady. And my pronouns are she/her. I'm a graduate student, I'm getting ready to finish my PhD at Michigan State University. And I study media psychology. So I'm particularly interested in functional approaches to entertainment, and how stories are sort of a force for good and part of the way we communicate with each other and understand the world around us. My social media favorite thing, I feel like, it's a really great way to feel connected to a much broader field when, you know, the day to day of doing my research can feel so narrow and so small and just me at the computer. It's a great way to feel like I'm part of this community and to give each other both social support and also tools to further our practice.
Hi, thank you so much for having me, I'm Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Connecticut. My research is very much in communication technology, social media. I spend most of my time academically, I guess, on Twitter, where I've built a really wonderful network of people. And I think that's the main thing I really enjoy about being there - is getting to connect with so many other scholars, and other schools, other countries. And it's given me a lot of opportunities to go visit other places, to connect with new people, start new projects. So it's a space I really love being in.
Awesome. Thank you for sharing. So I pulled this quote quickly off of Wikipedia last night, so no judgement - sorry, folks. The definition here is: personal branding is the conscious and intentional effort to create and influence public perception of an individual by positioning them as an authority in their industry, elevating their credibility, and differentiating themselves from the competition to ultimately advance their career, increase their circle of influence, and have a larger impact. So my first question to you, how do you see social media being used to develop a personal brand? What strikes you as the advantages of doing so?
Something that I like about social media as a person that likes to do a lot of different things, I think when I'm showing myself as a full person who is a researcher and an artist, I do want to bring in a lot of myself too as like a goofy person that sometimes is vulnerable, and sometimes it's credible, and sometimes you can trust, and sometimes you can be entertained by. And I really appreciate that, that I had Instagram to show off a lot of my art and my day to day. I really appreciate having Twitter where I get to share a lot of my research. And at the same time, I have TikTok where I get to do like some experimental things where I'm like, "I'm just going to do this," like, fast forward process art that I did, and it gets like one like and I'm like, "Okay, I'm on TikTok. I can pretend that I'm the youth." I think as women of color, we know like - research has shown that stereotypically we are put in boxes of less credibility. So I can kind of brand myself differently in different spaces. I do code switching sometimes, certain languages that I use on my Instagram, I don't use on Twitter and I have the ability to, you know - I know who's on Twitter, I know who has access to my content. And that's been a very helpful, I think, distinguishment between the different platforms.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point and thinking about how we talk about social media, as if this is one broad umbrella of things. But of course, every platform has different tools, different affordances, different kinds of communities. And that doesn't mean that you can't operate across a lot of them for different facets of your identity or in different ways. But it means you also get to pick and choose. And that can be - I think, Rey, you bring up a really good point in that you can be a whole person and also be a researcher. And for a space like ICA, it's really important to ask what kinds of stories you want to tell? How do you want to portray that work as part of your life and as you, as part of the work? And that's a really beautiful thing in social media spaces that you can't do everywhere else, because they will say, one of the assets of social media - as somebody who's getting ready to finish their dissertation, who's looking down the job market, in the fall - I can see how the way I am online as a scholar, as a scientist, as a researcher, and as an expert, is part of the story I get to tell about me as a potential job candidate. It gives you some space to craft your own narrative about yourself as a scholar in a really valuable way. That's hard to do in other formats.
I'm wondering, Sarah, you mentioned, you know, thinking about how folks might perceive you, if they're going to look for you, when you're on the job market and things like that. Could you imagine a place that you would rather them see some version of you, or or another, or like, Oops, they found your Tiktok. But is that okay? How do you feel about that?
Honestly, even if you don't spend a lot of time in LinkedIn, or Twitter, or some of the spaces that are more traditional academic discourse job-finding social networks, it's worth thinking about what your digital footprint looks like. There is no job in the world, whether it's academic or otherwise, where you're not going to get Googled. So knowing what shows up on the first page of your Google search is really important as you think about what you're putting out in the world. And that's not to say that I think anyone should hide who they are, right? Like, that doesn't mean especially for marginalized communities, for people who feel like their identities are underrepresented in certain industries, that you should not be those things and embrace yourself and everything you are, it just means like, yeah, I really don't need dumb things I wrote in my early 20s to be how I frame my life as a scholar now. And so it's a very fine balance. I know a lot of people - when you think about having multiple platforms that you work across, you might want to think about where you share the same handle across those platforms and where you use different ones. So my LinkedIn URL and my website and my Twitter all share the same, like, moniker for me. But I might use, not necessarily a pseudonym but, a different way of demarking my name so that it doesn't have the same SEO and doesn't come up in the same searches for things that I want to keep more private.
I was thinking about, Sarah, specifically in the job market, but again, anyone on the job market or otherwise, as you mentioned, you know, there's that digital footprint. How do you feel about people who you expect to follow you on Twitter finding you on a different platform?
That's, that's a very good question. I think something - well, first of all, I'm from Iran. So I'm generally very self-conscious about what I put on the internet and on my social media. I'm also older, so now I think more about like, "Oh, wow," I sometimes look back at things that I wrote and I'm like, "This is just dumb." So now, not only I think I'm very more self-conscious about what I post and who sees it but I have people that actually check some of the stuff that I post for me. I have friends, family sometimes that I'm like, "Hey, this is something that I really want to talk about, do you think I should post it?" It's like, you want to be authentic and you want to put something that feels, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes it's a personal opinion that you have like strong feelings about it, and then you have to make all of these decisions of I am on the job market or people are going to see this that are going to make the decision if they want to fund a project that I have or not? So I'm personally very conscious of what I post. It doesn't make me happy, obviously. A lot of times I get actually very angry and I'm like, you know, "This is like - why can I not just say, at this moment, how vulnerable I feel and how scared I am," especially when you're in job market, right? Right. You have all of these conversations in your head and a lot of times I make the decision of I'm just not going to put it out there. I would rather be safe than sorry.
Great. So my next question for folks is, what should people do if they haven't ever thought about their personal branding? Just right off the bat, student, early career folks who are just starting to get into this. We've mentioned a few different platforms and how different platforms have different audiences, so it might require different presentations. But where to even start?
I guess the place I started was just thinking about what my goal is with using different social media platforms. So besides Twitter, I also use Facebook and Instagram. But I decided, for me, those are very different. And I really don't use those in a professional capacity. And so for Twitter, I did actively sit down and think, what is my goal here? What would I want to get out of it? At the time, I had been leaving graduate school and then going into starting to work as a postdoc, and then my faculty position. So my goals have obviously shifted at that point, it was sort of positioning myself as a scholar. Now it's more, you know, connecting. But I do go back and revisit, what is that goal? What is my intent?
You know, you actually reminded me of something when you're saying that about this kind of goal setting intention. And somebody once gave me advice about this when I was first thinking about how I wanted to position myself on social media. And they said, Twitter is in many ways like a cocktail party. It's a space where there's a lot of different conversations going on and you can be in them to a variety of degrees, you can lurk on the sidelines and just listen, you can move between different conversations, but it's important that you recognize the give and take of that. Balancing when you listen and when you self-promote is a really important way, both to like sort of insert yourself as part of the wider conversation, but also see how you fit in. And you might come across new opportunities that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise, if you just treat it as like an advertising campaign, for example.
I think maybe something that I would say it's helpful to do sometimes, using social media for branding feels like a full time job. So do the things you like to do when you're thinking of branding. Because sometimes, like in our head, we're like, "Okay, this is going to be my brand. And I'm going to commit to this. And I'm going to continue like making one post a week about that and putting out there." And at some point, you're like, "Oh my God, this was supposed to be fun, I was enjoying it. And now, it just feels like another responsibility." Definitely a big part of it would be just like spending time looking at other people's profiles and seeing what is something that you like and think that is authentic, and it's something that you would want to do and you would enjoy doing it. So see what is the kind of posts that would make you happy to do but also as Anne said, it kind of helps with your goals and strategies that you're thinking so that you can find that balance of, "This is supposed to be fun, I feel like I want to post about something that makes me happy or sad, but I want to post about it." And at the same time, it's still in line with the kind of branding that I want to have for myself.
Anyone else have any last sort of thoughts on that branding. Maybe, where it's an advantage to be using certain things over others? Or where it can be a disadvantage? What are other platforms people might consider using?
I mean, I have started using TikTok not mostly as a person that like puts content out but like mostly to watch stuff. A lot of times it's like, you know, entertaining TikTok and I spend like an hour just watching it. But definitely, I think TikTok might also be a place - so for example, if your goal is to be a communicator of science, right? So you're not necessarily thinking of having to be on Twitter so that you can reach professional community, but you want to reach out to more diverse audiences that are in different places, then maybe Twitter is not a place to be maybe it should be TikTok.
I totally agree that TikTok is super fun. And I feel like I find a lot of science content there that I follow and find really interesting. I have not ventured into posting on TikTok at all. But I think it's a really good point to think about with the audience and the content. And so for me, Twitter makes sense because I'm more interested in having conversations and I don't always necessarily have content that's not just a link to share anyway, versus maybe if I was doing work that was much more visual, I would think about going over to Instagram and sharing that or something that's longer form writing, maybe I would go to Facebook.
Yeah. And I think, to sort of piggyback off of that, even within a single platform, one that's even very, very established, there's still a wide variety of communities that are in there. So the way that I would have used Twitter when I was working at a research center is different now when I'm in graduate school. And so thinking about those goals, like Anne was saying, of what is it you're trying to get out this and who is it that you want to interact with, really mattered. If you want to be in an industry space, those are very different conversations than the like hashtag academic chatter would show you, right?
Wow. Thank you all so much for this fascinating discussion. And I want to wrap up with one last question for all of you. As much as you can, think about one piece of advice that you have for students and early career scholars on building or even maintaining their brand for social media and beyond.
One of the things I would say, right now, is to be authentic. That there's, there's an important piece of this that is yes, selling yourself, is selling your work, is trying to build this professional identity and edifice of the things that you do that you really do want to craft and be meaningful and intentional about. But that shouldn't be at the expense of being honest and true to why you do the work and to the identities that you bring to the table in this work and the ways that you navigate these spaces. And I'm not saying you have to dive headfirst into every controversy and every online argument, but you get to make those decisions. And in some ways, that's a lot of power and a lot of freedom. And I hope that everybody can embrace that in their own way.
And I think the point of branding is, it's a brand, it's memorable, you think of someone and you think of their brand. So my advice, again, which I feel icky about saying it is, be memorable. When someone thinks of a job, and should think of you, they should be like, "Oh, I remember the social media person, or like the sci comm person, or the person that like, connects research and practice." Like something that it's easy to, like, grab on and be like, "Oh, I remember that person for that." And it sounds easy. It's not easy to be memorable, because there's like so many people out there, but it helps to always, like, have the reminders of like thinking even if it's like two-three words that you usually bring up or hashtags that you usually use more common, to include those. Those are the things that would actually make people think of you when the next thing of you know, a position coming up, or collaboration, or friend.
When you said you feel kind of icky with the personal branding idea, I totally get it. And for me, the thing I'm gonna say too, that also makes me feel a little icky, is that idea of like networking, right? And so, not everything has to be, you know, content that I'm producing and posting. Right now I'm following, you know, for instance, the ICA '22 hashtag and so I'll just jump in and be like, "Hey, congrats, cool! See you there!" So I think that's at the heart of it for me, is is kind of connecting and some of that will be around content and the things you're doing, some of it will be a little bit more, you know, personal about who you are. And then a lot of it I think it's just conversation.
Amazing. Thank you, thank you, thank you to my guests. This has been amazing. So glad to have you all in one place even if virtually, but we really do appreciate it.
This episode of the Growing Up Comm. podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association. Our producer is Christian Elliot. Our production coordinator is Nick song. Our executive producer is Aldo Diaz Caballero. The theme music is by Will Van De Crommert. If you'd like to hear more about the participants on this episode, please check the show notes in the episode description. Thanks for listening!
