All entries for Monday 07 November 2011

Thing 11: Use Lanyrd to network at conferences

While many of the tools we’ve looked at are useful for keeping in contact with people you meet at conferences, Lanyrd is a new service which takes this to a higher level. Rather than just connecting individuals, it uses social media to allow connections to emerge at every stage of the conference. It draws on your existing social networks to help you find conferences, connect with others who are participating, find coverage of events, promote your own coverage and track your history of participating in conferences.

For thing 11 we're asking you to log into Lanyrd and list, or register your participation in, an event. As ever here are the step-by-step instructions. And don't forget to blog about it.

Like all of the tools on 23 Things, even if it’s not immediately obvious that Lanyrd will be something you personally want to use, it’s good to be aware of it and perhaps check back in future. While it may not be popular in your discipline yet, if it becomes so in future, it will be an incredibly powerful tool for networking.

Additional Resources

Lanyrd Frequently Asked Questions

Further Tools to Explore

Though not as social or interactive as Lanyrd, the following tools can be very effective when promoting or searching for academic events:

• Conference Alerts
• H-Net

Emma Cragg : 07 Nov 2011 12:00 |  Tags: Conferences Lanyrd Networking Theme4 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Thing 10: Explore research specific networks

So you have a twitter account, you know how to use it and you’re in contact with some of the other people on the 23 Things course. Now what? Find other people to follow.

Following people within your area is a great way to expand your network. Even if you don’t personally interact with the people in question, having their tweets added to your feed can be hugely beneficial. For instance once you follow a wide range of people in your area, your twitter feed soon becomes full of an interesting and diverse range of articles, papers, videos and podcasts which people link to in their tweets. There’s so much information on the web and so much content posted on Twitter that being selective about who you follow is necessary if you want to cut through the clutter and find what you’re interested in.

by respres

In this way Twitter can function as a form of social filtering, helping us find content online which will be useful or interesting to us. Exactly who you follow will shape the extent to which this is the case and it’s something which rewards work and thought. But how do you know who to follow?

A great way of finding people to follow is to use the lists feature. This allows Twitter users to create lists of people within a particular area. Go to each of the lists linked below and look through the people listed in them. Is there any one you want to follow? If so then select ‘follow’ and you’ll rapidly have a wide range of academics in your Twitter network.

Additional Resources:

• Warwick Research Students
• LSE Academic Tweeters Lists
• Warwick Uni List
• Another Warwick Uni List
• Wolfson Research Exchange

Emma Cragg : 07 Nov 2011 11:00 |  Tags: Networking Theme4 Twitter |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Thing 9: Engage with your network on Twitter

Now we’ll explore how to engage with your network on Twitter through replies, retweets and hashtags. Replies are self-explanatory: they are tweets you send in response to someone else’s tweet. Retweets takes someone else’s tweet and forwards it to all your followers e.g. if you thought the tweet was interesting and want to share it with others. The step-by-step guide for thing 9 describes how to reply and retweet in the context of using hashtags but please note that anything on twitter can be replied to or retweeted, even if it has no connection with a hashtag.

Hash tags are a way to mark a tweet as being about a certain topic. For instance if I tweet about BBC Question Time during the show, I’ll mark the tweet with the hashtag “#bbcqt” e.g. “not convinced by government minister’s answer #bbcqt”. This hashtag is an established convention, encouraged by the BBC show’s producers, to facilitate discussion about the show. When you click on the hash tag in a tweet, or enter it into the ‘search’ box at the top of the twitter interface, all tweets marked with the hashtag will be displayed. In this way hashtags let Twitter uses see what people are tweeting about events, issues or topics.

Additional Resources:

• Twitter hashtags explained
• The Twitter Hash Tag: What Is It and How Do You Use It?
• LSE Impact Blog posts about using Twitter as a researcher

Emma Cragg : 07 Nov 2011 10:00 |  Tags: Networking Theme4 Twitter |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Thing 8: Register for Twitter and find researchers to follow

Twitter is a powerful networking tool because of the fast, informal and non-hierarchical communication it facilitates - if you find someone’s work interesting and want to communicate with them then you can instantly get in touch. The fact that responses on Twitter are so quick to compose, as well as the generally friendly and sharing ethos on the service, means that people tend to be very responsive and approachable.

Perhaps more so than most digital tools, it can be hard to ‘get’ Twitter until you practice using it - it’s so different from other forms of communication that trying to describe it in the abstract can make it sound much more confusing than it actually is. However there’s a large academic community using it and more are joining every day.

by eldh

For some examples of the ways in which Twitter can be used by researchers, take a look at this guide produced by a doctoral researcher at Warwick Manufacturing Group.

For thing 8 we're asking you to sign up to Twitter and find some researchers to follow. Use the step by step instructions to get started. Remember to blog about your experience.

Additional Resources:

• LSE’s Twitter Guide
• 10 Ways Researchers Can Use Twitter

Emma Cragg : 07 Nov 2011 09:00 |  Tags: Networking Theme4 Thing8 Twitter |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Networking online for researchers

The author of the blog posts for this week’s theme is Mark Carrigan. Mark is a postgraduate researcher in the Sociology department. He is a prolific blogger and can be found on a number of social networking sites online. As a 23 Things course tutor tutor, Mark can support registered participants through your blogs, so be sure to write about your experience of all the Things!

For many people ‘networking’ isn’t an attractive term. It conjures up images of forced, superficial and self-interested interaction. But it doesn’t have to be like that. At heart networking for researchers simply means expanding the range of people you’re in contact with.

Who are you going to want to be in contact with? Most likely your priority would be people who work in your area and share your research interests. We all already have networks, even if we don’t think of them as such. By expanding the range of the researchers you’re in contact with, i.e. your network, it’s possible to raise your profile, be aware of opportunities and find potential collaborators. This expansion could happen at a number of levels:

1. Within your department
2. Within your discipline
3. Within your institution
4. Outside your institution
5. Outside your discipline
6. Outside academia

Many of the digital tools we’ve looked at in 23 Things are great for networking online. We’ll look at two tools in particular this week: Twitter and Lanyrd. The former is a social networking and micro-blogging service based around sending and receiving messages of 140 characters or less. Lanyrd is a relatively new service which uses Twitter to digitally connect people who attend conferences.

Additional Resources

• Vitae’s Overview to Networking
  
• Networking Challenges
  
• Researcher to Researcher
  

Emma Cragg : 07 Nov 2011 08:00 |  Tags: Networking Theme4 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem