CPD23 2011 Thing 3 – Personal Branding

Thing 3 is about personal branding, this is what I had to say on the subject in 2011 –

This is the “thing” I feel I need to work on most, I am really bad at it.

Online I have too many, very different identities; for a start this blog doesn’t know whether it is personal or professional! Then there is LinkedIn which is definitely professional and at the other extreme Facebook where I have deliberately decided not to say where I work but I have many colleagues and ex-colleagues as friends; is it OK for them to see the drunk photos? On Twitter I have two accounts, one is personal and the other which also feeds through to LinkedIn more professional. But again I have got muddled and some followers follow both accounts. Also I sometimes tweet to the wrong account leading to a scramble to delete tweets and LinkedIn updates.

My aim is to tidy the above up and create something more coherent for a professional brand. This may include some name and avatar changes and a change of style on this blog. In the process I may have to cull some Twitter followers (or encourage them to move accounts) and Facebook friends. Though I am still now sure how successful splitting the personal and professional can be?

And perhaps even more important I need to take the lessons and decisions from this task into my real professional life and stamp my brand on what I do in the office. I have been reading Susie Kay’s book, “The ABC of Professionalism”, there are many ideas to take from it into this task. A professional of her definition would not have allowed a situation to get quite as heated in the office as I did this morning. Crazy, angry librarian is not the brand I want!

For me this is a really challenging “thing” and I suspect that the decisions may take me more than just this week, so watch out for a Thing 3 part 2 post sometime in the future. I look forward to reading how others have managed to solve these problems.

Note: I never did come back to this and write part 2!