Monday 21 May 2012

Thing 3: Personal branding

I haven't ever given much thought to my personal brand.  I'm now at a stage in my career where I don't intend to change job any time soon, so I'm not too bothered about what potential new employers might think about me.  However, this thing has got me thinking - I care about doing a good job and want to be thought of as a successful professional, so perhaps it's about time I marketed myself in that way.

My first task was to google myself.  My partner and I did this together, and I confess my 'helpful' librarian side emerged as I gently told him off for forgetting to put inverted commas around his name... As I google myself on a fairly regular basis the results didn't really surprise me.  There's a link to my Facebook page,  a mention of me via CILIP and that's really pretty much it.  I do go out of my way to remain anonymous online, mainly because I work in a school and don't want my pupils to be able to find me.  However, perhaps I've been a bit too good at this!  I think I could possibly relax a little bit and raise my professional profile ever so slightly.  I feel that there is definate discouragement from my employers towards using social media to engage with pupils  - I have been told that I'm not allowed to have a Twitter or Facebook account for the library for example.  Knowing this makes me feel very uncomfortable about pupils stumbling across information about me online and the possible reprocusions of that.

I do use Twitter, originally just for professional purposes, but as I've got more in to it the professional and the personal have become mixed.  Again, because of the school thing, I don't use a photo of me for it.  As a result of thinking about it for this blog I've decided to set up a second account purely for professional purposes (@thelibmonkey) and keep my other account purely for my own personal stuff.  If pupils find me I'm quite sure the libraryness of a professional account will drive them away!

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