Promoting Talks and Calendar Events With the Events Made Easy Plugin

Numerous posts on ProfHacker have considered how to create and sustain a professional online identity, including Miriam Posner’s Primer for Academics, Jentery Sayer’s advice for job candidates, and George’s open thread on personal versus professional websites.

Here I want to introduce a very simple idea for any professor, alt-ac, or student who does indeed have his or her own professional website. It is quite simply: promote your talks and appearances.

In a prominent position on your site, maintain an up-to-date list of upcoming conference presentations, invited talks, readings, gallery shows, or any other appearances that are related to your academic life.

What are the benefits to publicizing your talks this way? Visitors to your site can see what you’re up to. You’ll end up with a record of what you’ve done—an archive that is especially handy when you write your annual report. And (perhaps most crucially) you can keep track yourself of where you need to be when, and what you’re supposed to do there.

There are countless ways to create an ongoing list of your events. My recommendation here is based upon my own trial and error finding an event manager plugin for WordPress, which I use to host my blog. After trying many alternatives, I settled upon the fabulous Events Made Easy plugin.

Events Made Easy includes too many features to mention here, but I’ll highlight what I like best about the plugin:

• You can easily include Google maps and outward bound links in the description of your events.
• The plugin includes a very configurable widget, allowing you to place your list of upcoming talks in your blog’s sidebar.
• The plugin generates RSS and iCal feeds for your events, meaning you can create an event once and propagate it to other places online. For example, I use the RSS feed to provide a list of my events on my teaching site, and I load the iCal feed into Google Calendar, so that my events show up there (and consequently, on my smartphone).
• You can even—not that I have ever used these features—incorporate a reservation system and PayPal payments, for those really popular (and pricey) talks you give.

What about you? Do you maintain a list of your upcoming talks on your website? What tool do you recommend for doing so? And are there any drawbacks to publicizing your talks this way?

Business Calendar & Schedule photograph courtesy of Flickr user photosteve101 / Creative Commons Licensed