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!

Thing 2: Indulging my naturally inquisitive side

Thing 2 was a dream come true - an excuse to have a good nosey around other people's blogs.  I've lurked on several blogs for a while now, as well as a host of twitter accounts, forums, you name it.  Which when I see it written down makes me feel like a total stalker!

Reading the blogs it seems that I am not alone in this.  I don't know why I choose to lurk rather than contribute.  Logically, I know that my opinions are as valid as anyone else's, but my natural shyness seems to take over.  This is something that I will try hard to overcome.  Having a dialogue with other librarians can only be of benefit to my professional development, and, who knows - maybe what I have to say will help someone else.  Really, what have I got to lose?  I've taken some tentative first steps today with a couple of comments on blogs.  It wasn't so hard, so watch this space!

I haven't quite worked out how to follow blogs yet, so that's my task for tomorrow. 

cpd23: The first thing

So here I am.  Having eventually got my head around the cpd23 'thing' that I kept reading about last year, I've decided to participate this year.  Cue much trauma around setting up a blog...hmmm, I really could benefit from this I think!  

I'm most looking forward to learning about different online tools and taking the time to get to grips with them properly.  I like to think that I'm fairly web-savvy, but I know that there is so much out there that I don't know about that would probably make my job a lot easier.  Working in education, I'd also like to be a step ahead (or at least inline with) the young people around me, if only to prove to them that I'm not some old fogey who thinks books are the only way forward.