CPD23 – Thing 3: Consider your personal brand

I’ve been struggling a little with Thing 3. I must admit that I’m entirely not comfortable with thinking of myself as having a brand. It’s only in the last year or so that I’ve developed much of an online presence so until recently I’ve only ever really had to consider my professional reputation offline; in a work environment or face to face capacity. My online presence, I hope, reflects how I am in person in my professional life. However, I’ve never attempted to establish a recognisable ‘brand’ across my online presence.

What’s in a name?

When I initially set up my Twitter account I was mainly doing so out of a curiosity to see how it all worked and was unsure about having my real name as my account name so chose a random moniker instead (devised from my love of bargains and my University nickname – I’m from the North East and apparently say “champion” a lot!). As I now use this mainly for professional reasons I kind of wish I’d chosen something simpler like my real name or at least something to do with libraries! I’m still not sure about my blog name either. I pondered it for some time before setting up the blog last year but in the end settled on something I was undecided on purely because I just wanted to get going with posting. Although there’s no consistency across these two platforms with the names I’ve chosen, I do try to link my online presence up by having my blog URL on Twitter and my Twitter stream on my blog so hopefully this is not such a big issue. I also have a flavors.me page, using the halfpricechamp username from my Twitter account, which shows both my blog and tweets.

Visual brand

I haven’t attempted to develop a visual brand online at all really. Both my blog and my Twitter page have fairly simple, unfussy themes but that’s where the similarity starts and ends. This is something I haven’t considered before as figured most people see my tweets in their feed rather than going to my page so didn’t think how the page looked was all that important. I think I’ll be having another look at this though to get some sense of cohesion across platforms – this definitely appeals to my sense of order!  Ultimately I hope the content is more important than the look of my blog (substance over style I suppose), though can see that the appearance is important to convey the right message and needs to be consistent with the professional nature of the content.

Professional / Personal Identity

The limited online presence I have developed is mainly for my professional life; though I don’t try to keep the professional and personal completely separate as it’s nice to see a bit of personality outside of the library and information world. I’d like to think that I take a ‘profersonal’ approach on Twitter, whilst my blog is focussed on reflecting on professional issues and CPD experiences, so is consequently more professional in tone.

Time for a reality vanity check

So I Googled myself…which was…strange. First, I searched for just my name and two of the results on the first page were me – my Twitter page and a Lanyrd entry. My LinkedIn profile was on the second page of results. This is largely neglected (I’m hoping to rectify this during Thing 6) so I should make more of an effort to keep it updated as it ranks quite high. Adding the word librarian to my search returned more results relevant to me, including my flavors.me page and some LISNPN results. I was surprised that my blog didn’t seem to show up in any search results but realised that I hadn’t set my display name as my full name (!). I updated this and a couple of days later it now appears in the top four.

Time for a revamp

Although I’m still not comfortable with the term brand – like Emma I prefer to think of it as my ‘online identity’ – it was really useful to scrutinise my online presence in this way. It’s definitely got me thinking about how I want to represent myself online in the future. I’ve already started tweaking the appearance of my pages on Twitter and flavors.me and have been considering the impact of the inconsistency in the names I use on Twitter and my blog. It may be time for a change!