Thursday, June 30, 2011

Thing 3. Personal branding.

Googling myself was interesting. The first things that came up were two facebook pages which, when I checked, were not my Facebook pages. I was actually quite glad to see that, as I have my Facebook settings as private so it clearly works. Not that I have anything particularly incriminating on there, I just don’t want to share my personal life with the whole world. Is it bad for an information professional to say they are slightly unnerved by social networking? I could never really get the point. Ok, it’s great for some things. My brother lives in China so it’s an easy way to keep up with him and see photos of where he is. I never use it for anything more than a quick “Hi, how are you” though. Any personal stuff is done on e-mail or skype. I know people who have hundreds of facebook friends but I have only 22 and all of those are people I know in real life. Ok, some are old school friends that I have very sporadic contact with, but most are people that I see anyway on a fairly regular basis and have no real need to communicate with them on Facebook. I don’t understand why people I don’t know and will never meet would possibly want to see the photos of my recent trip to Royal Ascot with my partner. I put them up so my friends and family could all see them, but why would I want to share those with total strangers? This kind of blog is different as it’s for professional purposes, which I suppose starts to answer the question about how I want to come across online.  I’m definitely one of those who likes to keep their professional and personal online identities separate.
Back to the googling. I didn’t come up anywhere just using my name, but found that I share my name with a singer (strangely enough, born in the same city as me) and someone who was arrested for shoplifting in Fulton County Georgia, USA, on 8th March. I can say with 100% certainty that neither of those are me. My singing voice would clear the room and on Tuesday 8th March my diary shows that I was at work. I don’t even have a passport so was definitely not in the US. Honest!
Adding Library to my name got immediate results though. The very first one that came up was my workplace ‘meet the team’ pages. I was also interested to see that a question I’d posted on the Colric Jisc mailing list in 2010 came pretty high up the list too. I don’t have Twitter or Linkedin pages, so that was about it. Nothing incriminating, but nothing very impressive either.
Following on from my thoughts above on professional vs personal I suppose what I take from this is that I actually have a very limited online presence and have to consider whether that is a bad thing. I’m an information professional  competing for jobs with other people working their way up the ladder , many of whom will be much more technologically literate than me. There’s no getting away from the fact that employers do carry out online searches on prospective employees. Although they won’t find anything bad against my name, they won’t find anything that makes them think I’m the person they want in the job either.
That brings me to branding. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the thought of creating a personal brand but, having carried out this activity, I begin to see the need for one. I’ve already established that I want to keep my personal and professional life separate. I just have to work out what information I do want out there. I’m still not entirely sure about that at the moment but hopefully doing the 23 things over the next few weeks will enable me to refine my online presence and, as I’ve already admitted that I can take or leave social media, let me see that there are some aspects of it that could be really useful.

Friday, June 24, 2011

cpd23 thing 2. Success at last!

Have finally managed to follow some blogs. Hooray! I think there must be something in the College's Internet Explorer settings that affect Blogger, as I'm doing this from home using IE and it's working no problem. A colleague recomended using a different browser, so I might try Firefox at work next week and see if I get on any better. I know the college blocks students from using some social networking, such as facebook (hmm, not entirely sure why we always find students on Facebook then. They always seem to find some way around it!) but my colleage had success with Google Chrome so definitely worth a go on the different browser.

Anyway, I digress, I've quite enjoyed looking at some of the blogs and seeing what other people are up to. I'm currently following 6, but three of those are people that I know. I'll probably add another couple of 'stranger' blogs just to get a wider picture of how we're all getting on with the 23 things. I'm mostly sticking with other FE librarians at the moment, but I'll make the next few from different sectors. It doesn't do to be too insular! In common with many others, my selection criteria has been relatively random. Apart from mainly sticking to FE so far, I've gone for blogs that I liked the names of, or checked out people who'd left comments or were following my blog. Some of the names do make me laugh, or are quite intriguing, and it can be disappointing when you click on one and find no posts at all. I'll need to keep a note of those ones and check them out later

But a Friday evening is no time to be doing this. My intention was only to log-on for two minutes to see if it was working. Show's how easy it is to get sucked into this whole blogging thing!

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Thing 2 - well, trying!

I'm finding Blogger a bit difficult to use and, from other comments, I know it's not just me. Makes me feel a bit better, as I know I'm not doing anything stupid. According to my dashboard I have 4 followers, but I can't find out who they are. There was one magic moment where they all appeared on my blog page (and it was very nice to see you there!) but it's never happened again. Even clicking on my 4 followers on the dashboard leads to a blank page. I also know I saw the 'Follow' link on my blog at one point, but it seems to have gone again. Going on from that, I have been attempting to do Thing 2 by looking at other blogs and trying to follow them. I know that I can do it from the dashboard by pasting in the url, but surely I should be able to do it from the actual blog page. If anyone can shed any light, and tell me if I'm being completely stupid and doing something very wrong, please please enlighten me! Because it's all been so creaky and clunky to set up I'm feeling a bit discouraged. Not at all the intent of the 23 things programme.

Monday, June 20, 2011

First ever post!

Well, this is my first ever post on my own blog. I've created it for the cpd23 things, that will hopefully introduce me to lots of new ideas and concepts over the next 16 weeks. Working in FE, summer is a quieter time, so I'm looking forward to learning 23 new things and putting them to good use.

I'm not sure about blogging yet. I enjoy reading ones written by other people but am not sure that I would have enough to write about myself. I suppose I'll find out over the next 16 weeks!