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What’s up everybody. I’m Shontavia Johnson and this is another episode of the Shontavia Show, where I want to inspire you to build a brand, business and life that you love.

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So today is Thursday and y’all know what I like to do on Thursday. I have thoughts about so many things. I hope you have questions. If you have questions, I’d love to use my Thursdays to answer your questions. If you have a question you can reach out to me at askshontavia@gmail.com.

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So let’s hop into today’s question, which is about the faculty entrepreneur. This is a little bit of a different question and I love it because you know some of y’all know I spent many years as a faculty member and I’m excited that I get to revisit what I was doing back then and how I might be able to help folks.

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So here’s the question.

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Dear Shontavia, thanks so much for the work that you do. I’ve watched your rise from fellow to professor to higher ed administration with great interest. I am a new faculty member at a public university and I want to be an academic entrepreneur. I’d like to share my research outside of the ivory tower. I want to market and brand myself as a public intellectual of sorts. Think Marc Lamont Hill or Melissa Harris. Perry. Any tips? Thanks so much. BJ.

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Alright BJ. So this is awesome. Thank you. I don’t know you, BJ, I don’t think, but thank you for the kind words. Thank you for letting me know that somebody’s watching even when I think nobody’s watching, somebody’s watching.

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So I have a lot of thoughts about this. Like BJ mentioned I started out teaching in a temporary capacity as a fellow. I moved to a law school and did that for many years and now I sit in a higher ed administrative position.

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And, I’ve got a lot to say about this topic. I’m gonna try to keep it brief though.

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So if you are an academic and you want to be an academic entrepreneur or a faculty entrepreneur in the sense that you want to build a personal brand and start receiving consulting opportunities and being in national media publications and that kind of thing, this is the question for you.

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Now, if you’re talking about using your research to spin out technology, I don’t think that’s what BJ’s asked here. Maybe I can cover that in a future episode or something.

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But this answer is really for the faculty member who wants to brand themselves. Maybe bring in some new streams of income, maybe at some point do this kind of stuff full time.

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So my first tip, I’ve got two or three. Let’s stick with three. I’ve got three tips that I think will be helpful when you are at the very, very start of your academic entrepreneur journey.

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(1) So number one, please, please, please read your university conflicts policy or it might be called a conflicts of interest policy. This will tell you what you actually are allowed to do by your university or institution. And most of, I mean maybe some small schools don’t have conflicts of interest policies. Many probably do though. But a conflicts of interest policy basically sets the rules for how you can engage outside of the university and outside of your traditional teaching/scholarship/service framework that most faculty members at universities have to adhere to.

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So universities already set up the rules to let you know what you can and cannot do. So that’s the first thing. Do that. Find your conflicts of interest policy and read it. Why is this important? Because if you don’t follow the rules, maybe you get fired, especially if you’re not tenured yet.

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You get yourself in a lot of trouble. And, I can talk about this a little, but you don’t want to be in a position where you’re doing work and you create something really dynamic and you want to use it in your own business, but the university owns it or owns the intellectual property because you’ve done it in the scope of your employment as a university employee.

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So that’s the first thing. Read your university’s conflicts of interest policy. If you have questions about where to find it, sometimes it might sit in like a provost’s office. Sometimes it might sit in like a research division or something. Maybe it sits, in the president’s office, who knows? But you probably have a conflicts of interest policy to look into and consider.

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(2) Number two, create an easy-to-digest message. Alright, so to my fellow academics, I love y’all, but sometimes you are so hard to understand.

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You have done this really dynamic, engaging research, which I love. You’ve written academic journal articles, you’ve written scientific articles, you’ve done research papers, you’ve done posters, you’ve done all this really amazing stuff, but nobody understands it out in the world.

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And if you really want to translate your message out more broadly, you are going to have to create a very narrowly focused message. I won’t even say narrowly focused, but an easy to understand message.

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And some of the best guidelines I’ve seen about this, when you are an academic looking to translate your work publicly, it’s something that I’ve seen Michigan State do. They have like a whole office devoted to faculty communications and helping people get their research and their ideas out more broadly outside of the academy. And some faculty members at Michigan state created something called the COMPASS Message Box and I’ll drop a link in the show notes for those of you who are interested in the COMPASS Message Box. But I’ve read it, I’ve used it myself and I think it is incredible. Because sometimes it is hard for academics to bring the message to a level that is appropriate for the public.

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This COMPASS Message Box tool helps you do this. It’s basically a diagram with a few different parts and it walks you through what it should look like when you take academic research and translate it into the public.

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And while I won’t go through every piece of it right here, I’ll just mentioned the categories that the COMPASS Message Box says you should consider and assess and address when you are translating your research for the public.

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So the issue, like what is the big picture issue that people care about? Is it global warming? Is it entrepreneurship in the blockchain sphere? Is it podcasts for mommy blogs? I don’t know. Whatever the specific issue is, you start by identifying what is the thing that your target audience cares about. Then they ask you to consider what the problem is, what the solutions are, what benefits there are to your research, your approach to all of this and the “so what.” Who cares?

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What is it that your information and advice will provide to the public? So the COMPASS Message Box, I think, is a great tool for you to start creating an easy to digest message.

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Another tool or resource I would highly, highly recommend is something called The Conversation. theconversation.com is a digital platform. It’s a nonprofit. And The Conversation’s, frankly, one job, is to take academic research and information from professors and other people who work in universities, have those folks write public facing articles and then they publish them on The Conversation website and then push them to larger publications.

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So like Time, CNN, Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, Newsweek, those types of media, websites and newspapers will look for articles to republish from The Conversation.

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And one of the things I learned doing articles for The Conversation–I’ve probably written, I don’t know, 10 to 20 articles for The Conversation–is they always require that you write to the level of a smart high school student, like a 10th grader or an 11th grader.

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And even when you write the articles they make you write it within a software program that tells you if you’re writing too smart or if your writing is not in that sweet spot.

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And it really helped me frame all of the work I’m trying to do for the public. Because I would start out using these big words that, you know, people outside of universities don’t care about, even if they know those words and know what they mean. It helped me really start to create a public facing message.

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So when all else fails, when you’re talking and speaking and writing publicly, write to a level of smart high-schooler. And take a look at that COMPASS Message Box. So that’s my second suggestion, creating an easy to digest message.

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(3) And then the third message or the third suggestion I have is to start positioning yourself online on your own platform, and other people’s platforms, as an expert.

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So I mentioned The Conversation. They’ve been amazing for me. Like I’ve appeared in just about every major publication in the US and a couple abroad.

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I’ve been interviewed in some Australian news groups. I’ve been interviewed by a Russian entity, was interviewed by a couple of different news organizations in the UK.

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I actually, a couple of years ago, was headed to the UK for a completely unrelated thing. I got there and apparently I’d been on the radio that morning and the people who picked me up had heard me on the radio, the people who picked me up from the airport.

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So you know, The Conversation really has been amazing for me. It led to my TEDx talk. It led to me being invited to present on a panel at SXSW a couple of times. So I’d recommend positioning yourself through not only The Conversation, The Conversation is amazing, but also on your own platform.

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So if you don’t own your name.com, whatever your name is or whatever catchy phrase or whatever you want to use, I would recommend buying that domain name and starting to put yourself out there that way.

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And, trying to appear on other people’s platforms. If it’s The Conversation, if it’s, you know, other entities or agencies start positioning yourself as an expert.

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I’ll drop a link in the show notes to some links, some other suggestions of places where you can find opportunities to position yourself as an expert. Because there are a couple out there where you can really start to position yourself as a public–you mentioned BJ–public intellectual.

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So I hope that answers your question. I hope for the other academic entrepreneurs out there, I’ve given you some some things to think about. To everybody else, I hope that it gives you also some things to think about.

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If you have questions about this, if you’d like my thoughts about something else, reach out to me at askshontavia@gmail.com. Thanks for listening.