Academia.edu is a four-year old Bay Area-based start up. The website allows you generate a profile where you can list your academic credentials, your research interests and your publications. You can then choose to follow other individuals in your field. As you log in, you can view a “news feed” like page that gives you updates on relevant papers and the people you are following. You can also post questions that others can view and post answers for. The goal of the site is to allow easier sharing of information.
The main text on the site’s welcome page reads, “Academia.edu is a place to share and follow research. Share your papers. See analytics on your profile and papers. Follow other people in your field.” This positioning statement is effective in portraying a few key features of the site and its mission. Users make profiles and can follow other users’ work. These users can upload copies of their publications that followers can download. At the top left of the webpage, a graph shows you your usage over the past five days, but this is only the beginning of what the site can show you. Academia.edu can also show you the number of people that have viewed your paper, what keywords brought them to your work, and the country they are from.
However, this version of the positioning statement fails to make a clear argument for why this is useful or unique. When reading the positioning statement, you don’t necessarily envision its facebook-like user interface complete with a news feed and areas to post questions for which others can offer answers. Without more of a description, a user may picture a site similar to LinkedIn and question why this would be better. LinkedIn is already a professional social networking site where you can post your credentials and publication citations, link to other professionals, and see who has viewed your profile.
On the AngelList website, I found an alternate description of Academia.edu: “Academia.edu is a social platform for academics to share research papers. Its mission is to accelerate the world’s research. It’s widely thought that science is too closed, and too slow. Academia.edu is trying to change that.” I thought this statement was a bit more effective by evoking the idea of a “social platform” and need for “accelerating research.” However, it lacked the descriptions of analytics that would likely be appealing to users. My new positioning statement for Academia.edu would include language that depicts the key features of Academia.edu that distinguishes it from LinkedIn, while maintaining the more emotional call for accelerated research.
UW Marketing 555 