Build your own faculty brand

Why you need to develop your own professional brand

As noted by Columbia University, many professors consider the concept of branding to be fake, demeaning, like product marketing. On the contrary, a faculty’s brand can provide a public window into your background, your current interests, your team, and your vision for the future of your research. In other words, it allows faculty to tell their own story rather than letting others define it, improving their academic reputation. In turn, a solid brand can help faculty develop their leadership roles, increase the impact of their actions, and even earn more.

As noted by Dr. Amoah, a website provide faculty members the space and flexibility to present a comprehensive description of the research portfolio (publications, citations, and professional achievements) and teaching activities. These sites can serve as a central hub, linking profiles on other platforms, consolidating one’s digital presence, and improving favorable attitudes towards the unit. Moreover, an academic website provides faculty members the opportunity to develop and present their own recruitment strategy, highlighting (for example) specific research accomplishments over other general priorities described in the strategic plan from their department/college/university. The website can also provide an official platform to promote the work of graduate students, helping them to advance their own careers.

What elements should be considered to build a faculty’s brand?

• A personal website. Many faculty only include research, but you may want to include teaching and professional activities. The goal is to showcase your work and make it findable. Here’s a good example of an academic’s professional website.
• Scholarly profiles.
  • Create a ORCID ID, a unique author identifier so you get credit for all your work.
  • Create a Google Scholar account and a SCOPUS author profile listing your research works. These can be linked and are visible to all researchers.
  • Add DOIs to your papers so you can directly link to them from your website and/or CV.
  • Consider including your Web of Science ResearcherID number (doesn’t change, even if you change your name or institution affiliation). One of the advantages of using this free service (Publons, linked to your ORCID) is that you can use it not only to track your publications and citation metrics but most importantly to claim your contributions in peer reviews and journal editing work.
  • Deposit your work in Clemson Open
• Social media accounts. Academia.edu , ResearchGate , Mendeley , and LinkedIn  all provide avenues for you to connect with others, track your stats, and promote your scholarly works.
• Blogs. A spot to tell the success stories of your team members, not only showing the world their strengths and achievements but also showcasing your personal commitment to their development. Keep in mind that leveraging success stories in your marketing strategies is a cost-effective way to reinforce your brand’s promise.
• Kudos. Tell the story of your research and showcase it to a global audience through this free scientific communication tool.
• Research impact.  Explore journal impact factors to find the best place to publish.  Find your h-index, track your citations, and learn about altmetrics.
• SEO. As described in this Starter Guide, you likely created your website thinking about the people that will serve and trying to make it easy for them to find the site and explore the content. That said, one of those users should be a search engine, which will ultimately help people find your content. SEO—short for search engine optimization—is about helping search engines (such as Google) understand your content, giving your site preferential visibility, and ranking it high in the result search page.

Additional Resources 

These central sites provide opportunities for faculty to integrate information (from existing resources) into their sites by using a permanent URL.

• Benchmarking Suite: The Benchmarking Suite is available to college deans, associate deans, and department chairs, and provides benchmarked comparisons of scholarly activity at the departmental and Ph.D. program levels to user-defined peer groups over user-defined time windows. Clemson login required.
• Faculty Insight: The Faculty Insight tool is available to academic leaders and faculty members. This tool displays the scholarly activity and products for individual faculty members, and provides them with possible funding sources, honorific award opportunities, and research collaborators based on this data. Faculty can use the Faculty Insight tool to examine their scholarly data in the Academic Analytics Database, request/report corrections to that data, and edit their research profiles to include additional scholarly data. Clemson login required.
• External Discovery: Clemson University’s External Discovery Site is a public-facing gateway to our scholarly activity and products. The Site combines Academic Analytics comprehensive scholarly activity data with Clemson’s own data (e.g., from Faculty Success and InfoEd) to create a modern, configurable, and fully pre-populated website that showcases our research and researchers at the University, program, department, faculty, and keyword levels. The use of static links enables faculty, programs, and departments to present their own front porch to media, donors, industry, prospective graduate students, peers, and others via their own web presences.

In addition, faculty can consider:

• Brand Guidelines at Clemson (Division of Marketing and Communications)
• Building Your Research Brand: A Guide for Academics (Academic Impressions, Training is free for Clemson faculty)
• 5 (Arguable) Assertions About Academic Websites (Inside Higher Ed)
• Provide an interactive experience using a ChatBot (https://www.chatbase.co/)

Want to know more?

Please use this form to provide feedback or nominate a colleague (including self-nominations). In addition, you may reach out a Clemson subject librarian, take the Research Impact Challenge, or reach out the authors of this blog post at: