Entrepreneurs are great networkers. Aside from innovating, starting, running and growing their businesses; making hard decisions and taking risks - they spend a lot of their time connecting, building relationships and yes... socializing. Entrepreneurs network through any possible means - monthly meetings, clubs, lunch and breakfast meetings, expositions, conferences; and in this digital age, they successfully optimize the use of social media. Networking is a very important part of surviving the competitive and globalized 21st Century business world; and collaboration and communication have been named two of four non-negotiable survival skills of the Century.
For the entrepreneur, networking is invaluable. During these interactions, he or she meets with prospects, shares information, makes valuable contacts, connects with like-minded people and trades experiences. For both the entrepreneur who is growing a business and the established businessperson, networking provides essential support and knowledge management system.
In contrast, academics are characteristically buried in their own "business" of teaching, studying, researching, meeting and working towards tenure. Their networking is usually limited to their clumsy “politicking” while working towards promotion, and probably when collaborating with other researchers on projects. Otherwise, theirs is a very “unexciting” life, devoid of any serious engagement with society, their peers and sometimes, even their families. Their time is taken up with a constant need to publish or perish and endless rounds of meetings, research, publications conference presentations and teaching. Their life is normally centered around their work environment - their labs, their offices and online on scholarly databases. In the academy intellectual rigor is ascendant, often strictly based on the scientific method, where theorizing, hypothesizing, experimenting and reporting are the normal, and it is considered unprofessional to be engaging or lively. The "true" academic is typically a nerd.
With such a lifestyle, academics tend to suffer from pressure, depression, impostor syndrome and burnout. Indeed, mental health and mindfulness have become popular items of discourse in academia. In addition, with the ”new normal” taking its toll and most academic activities now being remotely managed, academia is undergoing a rapid change that requires that academics must brush up on their social skills. Thus, beyond interacting for the purpose of co-authorship, academics need to network more to cut down on stress, receive and give support, receive information and mentoring and share workable strategies.
To network like an entrepreneur, academics need to deliberately build stronger professional and social networks. In addition to networking through conferences, academics should use social media platforms in an active and deliberate manner to widen their circle of professional acquaintance for both formal and informal purposes. It should stop being normal for science to be isolating. Moreover, the world is now a global village, it can be beneficial to relate with academics and professionals in other disciplines and in any part of the world – particularly with the affordances available through the Internet and social media.
Recommended platforms that should be part of the toolkit of the productive academic include Twitter, ResearchGate, LinkedIn and a host of others. These networking platforms are credible environments that academics can use to develop supportive global communities at no cost. Each one has its own peculiar strengths which make it somewhat better that others. While all this would seem to be too much “in the basket” of the busy academic, developing a reliable social media strategy would reduce any difficulties or clumsiness.
The next blog post will explain how to develop a workable social media strategy for academic success and effectiveness.
