Personal Brand

Thing 3 in our CPD quest requires us to consider our personal brand. Wow, that's a tough one! The "Old Dog, New Clicks" tag line came to be some years ago (when I was ignorant of both web 2.0 technology AND my need to stay on top of it). I was lucky enough to also secure the name for my (new) Twitter account.  From a professional point of view, this name could work either way - either implying negative connotations of a relic librarian or, hopefully, it could indicate somebody with a continuing desire to learn. 

The blog itself was a lot harder. As somebody who lives several continents away from home, I have taken to Facebook and the possibilities it offers for social networking, sharing and communicating, but I would like to keep my personal and professional lives separate and don't feel that my light-hearted approach to social networking is appropriate for professional networking. So I've taken a little more time to get an uncluttered, more corporate look, free of noisy backgrounds. I've tried to copy this look over to my Twitter site too. As Facebook depicts the happy-go-lucky me, I've also just signed up for a LinkedIn account, which I've heard is the professional equivalent. I'm yet to explore this and see if I can brand it to my needs.

As part of this exercise, we were encouraged to do a vanity search (come on, we've all done it at some stage). I did two. The first one was at the start of this course and revealed that I was, to my horror, a nobody! To be honest, this was really no great surprise.  A little bit of work on the blog and setting up new accounts has pushed me to number two. 

Now this may not necessarily be a good thing. Number two was, in fact, my Facebook account and, while this has a reasonably high security setting, as an anonymous user I was still able to view basic info and my insanely grinning profile pic.  The information available is not overly damaging and I am disinclined to change any of it - it is who I am, but I will need to work on building my professional online presence to boost my rankings there!


New Click: Perhaps I should dig out some old articles I have had published (how old is too old???) and work out how to upload them

A friend just posted this link on background checks. It may be legal to drill down into somebody's social networking account (no indication is given here as to what security settings are breached to achieve this), but as the "News of the World" dust settles, I ask is it moral/ethical?