Managing Your Professional Identity Online

A Guide for Faculty, Staff, and Administrators

In higher education, professional online identities have become increasingly important. A rightly worded tweet can cause an academic blog post to go viral. A wrongly worded tweet can get a professor fired. Regular news items in The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed provide evidence that reputations are both built and crushed via online platforms. Ironically, given the importance of digital identities to job searches, the promotion and distribution of scholarly work, pedagogical innovation, and many other components of an academic life, higher education professionals receive little to no training about how to best represent themselves in a digital space.

Managing Your Professional Identity Online: A Guide for Higher Education fills this gap by offering higher education professionals the information and guidance they need to:

- craft strong online biographical statements for a range of platforms;
- prioritize where and how they want to represent themselves online in a professional capacity;
- intentionally and purposefully create an effective brand for their professional identity online;
- develop online profiles that are consistent, professional, accurate, organized, of good quality, and representative of their academic lives;
- regularly update and maintain an online presence;
- post appropriately in a range of online platforms and environments; and
- successfully promote their professional accomplishments.

Managing Your Professional Identity Online is practical and action-oriented. In addition to offering a range of case studies demonstrating concrete examples of effective practices, the book is built around activities, templates, worksheets, rubrics, and bonus materials that walk readers through a step-by-step guide of how to design, build, and maintain professional online identities.