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 8^th March. I can say with 100% certainty that neither of those are me. My singing voice would clear the room and on Tuesday 8^th 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.