Promote Yourself - PR Primer for Academics

News Flash - You are an expert. As an academic, you are an expert within your field. Building your research profile should include some publicity for yourself. It helps you, your department, and your university.

I know, you need one more thing to do. You're already researching and writing, just add a few tasks to the end of each project to-do list.

1. Write a news release about your research in progress and when you land a publication or present. Send it to your university's media relations team. Even if it doesn't land a big TV news story, placement on the university news page helps your SEO. Need help? Look for a PR writing course on your campus. Students love real-world projects they can include in their portfolios.
2. Adapt your research into a public-friendly blog post. Send it to your department, center for teaching excellence, research and innovation office, library, and university publicity office with no. 3. The publicity office will LOVE you for helping them do their work. They need content for their magazines, online newsletters, and social media outlets! Our library likes to create displays of faculty research. It's nice when they don't have to hunt down what they need.
3. Make it visual. Anyone can use Canva.com or a free infographic builder. The hard part of boiling down your work down. 
4. Take pictures at conferences. Aim for the highest resolution you can, and action shots would be even better. Images and graphics are helpful to your university marketing team when they are trying to put together a publication or a gray web page.
5. Share your research synopsis and graphic on your own social accounts. If you don't like tooting your own horn, thank your grantor and laud your student-writers and co-authors for their work.
6. Update your university web page (and all of your academic accounts like ResearchGate, etc.) and add areas of expertise as needed to your web bios.

Now, every university is different. See what is acceptable at yours and ask senior researchers about these ideas and your local points of contact. 

You say, "But, I don't want to look like an arrogant snot." I hear that, but picture this. The university PR team is staring at a list of hundreds of faculty members. They have no idea what everyone is doing. They can't. That's a lot of hunting and individual contacts to build. You can help them by bringing content to them.