Exegesis

This exegesis aims to provide a critical interpretation of choices made to create a professional web presence. It will expore the aim of the web presence, and choices made in terms of style, presentation and nodes to contribute to an overall internet identity.

Aim of web presence

The aim of this web presence is to promote Kristy Long as a communications professional who is developing and learning about new communications. The aim of this web presence is to portray myself in a professional manner, sharing questions, observations and challenges resulting from my day job, but also to share some other aspects of my life and personality.

Consistent style

In keeping with a consistent online style to contribute to a united web presence, the same elements have been chosen for use across my central node and supporting nodes. These elements include the same colour schemes, the same images and the same style of writing.

Colour Colours inherently evoke emotion and contribute to communication. Differing shades of purple were chosen to create my web presence. According to Lee Hopkin’s article Organisational Communication Colour (n.d.) purple can often evoke feelings of wisdom, victory and humility which aligns with the identity I am aiming to create.

Images

Rather than preserve anonymity, I have used an image of myself as the purpose of this web presence is self-promotion. An image of what I look like helps put some context to my presence and build a relationship with the audience. However as Hua Qian and Craig Scott (p.1432, 2007) point out the mug shot image gives less information away than a personal shot taken with the home in the background or with friends and family in the image.

The image of the running shoes was sourced from Creative Commons at http://www.flickr.com/photos/marlon-bunday-mmx/4836031806/ and denotes a personal hobby as outlined in the ‘About Me’ text, but also supports the notion of stamina and patience when working with large, conservative organisations as discussed in text.

Layout

I have used a consistent layout where possible (specifically the blog and about.me site) and kept the most important information featured at the left alignment to the screen. Most of the tools chosen however take on the layout prescribed by the tool (LinkedIn, Delicious and Twitter).

Writing

The style of writing is similar across the central node, and contributing nodes to contribute to a professional yet personal web presence. The length of posts has been kept concise to reflect the medium. I felt it important to point out these tools and posts were in an effort to help me learn and understand Web 2.0 so that if a professional peer was to come across my internet footprint I would perhaps not be judged so harshly.

Central node

The platform from which the central node has been developed from is the site AboutMe. About.Me was chosen as the central node as it is simple and fast to build, allows ‘contributing nodes’ to be easily displayed, and allows you to customise your site enough so you can convey and manage a web presence.

As Anne Helmond writes (p. 7, 2010) “Everything that was once stored and expressed in the personal homepage on a single server is now distributed across the web.” This summarises the exact purpose of platforms like About.Me.

I did consider using a web site builder such as Weebly but chose About.Me. About.Me is unable to display live direct feeds from my other contributing nodes (such as blog postings and tweets) which has been a conscious decision. While I am committed to maintaining this web presence after this unit, About.Me makes it less obvious if I do choose to abandon my commitment to any of the contributing nodes. Out-dated or inactive blogs and Twitter profiles would do my web presence more harm than good.

Contributing nodes

Blog

A Blogger.com blog was chosen because it is one of the most widely used blogging platforms and I have used it before. 

I reasoned a blog would be useful to contribute to my online presence as it allows me the opportunity to display more personality and more in-depth thought over pure micro blogging tools through its ability to allow more characters than micro-blogging tools.

In following Qian and Scott’s observations that “personal journals account for 70 per cent of all blogs,” my blog contains personal observations, achievements and challenges in my professional role of developing a new intranet on SharePoint 2010 and introducing enterprise 2.0 tools in the workplace.

Twitter

According to Akshay Java et al (2007), “Compared to blogging, micro blogging fulfils a need for an even faster mode of communication.” Interestingly, my workplace blocks Blogger but Twitter remains open for staff use. As my web presence is all about my work as a professional communicator, it makes sense that I need to use tools throughout the day that are accessible and where short, sharp ideas, questions or observations can be posted to contribute to my web presence. Twitter suits this purpose.

Within this community, my role is an information seeker following those who I view as an information source - keeping me connected to the very latest thinking and ideas regarding intranet and digital communication in the workplace.

The people I follow also contribute to a web presence or identity. If others were to view my profile and look through the list of people and sites I choose to follow, this contributes to my web presence and helps to add context to my identity. The same is true for all the contributing nodes I have chosen.

As my web presence, and therefore my tweets are centred on my profession and career I have also set up an automatic link to feed Twitter updates to my LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn

While this node cannot be counted toward this assignment as it was created several years ago, I added it to my central node as it is an important professional network that contributes to professional identity. It also offers opportunities to network with colleagues and peers and career prospects. If I am to continue developing this web presence after this assessment, LinkedIn would be an important contributing node.

Delicious

Similarly to my Twitter account and blog, I have followed people that tag intranets, social media and enterprise 2.0 while attempting to contribute my own sites to these topics and community.

Building a web presence with the purpose of promoting a professional and work oriented identity in intranets and digital communication in the workplace, has certainly influenced the choices made in style and presentation, as well which Web 2.0 platforms would be chosen and how they would be used. It should be noted for true identity to be created, nodes need to become more two-way so that the professional identity being presented is endorsed by others in the community.

Bibliography

Akshay Java et al (2007) ‘Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities’, Procedings of the Joint 9th WEBKDD and 1st SNA-KDD Workshop 2007, August 12.
Available: http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/get/a/publication/369.pdf 

Helmond, A (2010) ' Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software.' Anne Helmond. New Media Research Blog. Available: http://www.annehelmond.nl/wordpress/wp-content/uploads//2010/01/helmond_identity20_dmiconference.pdf

Hopkins, Lee  (n.d) Colour your communication Retrieved from http://www.leehopkins.com/articles-on-organizational-communication-colour.html

Qian, H., & Scott, C. R. (2007). Anonymity and self-disclosure on weblogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4), article 14.

Intranet style guide - not to be underestimated!

I was finally able to upload the final draft of our new intranet style guide for intranet authors yesterday - after which I took great pleasure in picking up my pen and crossing that off my task list.

Writing the style guide was a task I'd been struggling with. As the Intranet Manager moving from FrontPage to SharePoint 2010, I also have a huge learning journey ahead of me just as our authors do. It's hard to direct everyone else on this level of governance when you don't quite understand the product yourself in an organisation that has limited SharePoint knowledge (certainly from an intranet management perspective) and when you are a team of one.

I spent some time with third party consultants and treated my workshops with them a bit like a journalist would with a source. I asked lots of really basic questions and posed scenarios and 'what ifs?' to not only find the answers I was looking for, but to get them rephrased back to me in plain English and put the concepts of SharePoint back into everyday terms.

I think sometimes people can get too caught up in the 'SharePoint' lingo ... lists, libraries, views, columns, inheritance ... when really these things just mean a list of information, a folder, sorting a folder, metadata, cascading permission levels.

There were lots of topics and information in the style guide that of course remains unchanged; regardless of the technology you've chosen. But I really struggled with the stuff I didn't understand. It was a great exercise for me as the intranet manager to get my head around some of the not so basic decisions we had to make early on to lead our authors to produce a consistent and usable site. I'll revisit the style guide at the end of the project to make changes and refine it, before getting it nicely designed and published. I'm also considering making a collaborative online learning centre/how to wiki to support it where perhaps the intranet manager, site owners and super authors can contribute.