As we have seen through this week’s readings and exercise, personal branding it extremely important for individuals who want to maintain their positive ‘brand’ online. Your identity online is not only the content that your posts, it is also what others who have either interacted with you or your organization have also posted online.
In order to maintain your brand, an individual needs to have a clear idea of how to maintain and manage their brand online using social media. This idea should include what social media or mixture of media technologies will be used and the amount of personal information the individual is willing to share or what specifically the focus of their online brand will be.
As a future librarian, I think that focusing in on professional issues and leaving out most of my personal information would be the best approach. This week’s readings made me think about what kind of personal brand I am portraying online and how I could better engage it and anyone interested in it. Creating a blog would be a great start, I could create posts that are important to me professionally and that will allow me to further research those topics, link to them, and strengthen my brand. Also, creating a profile on Google, as discussed in the readings, would be an extremely easy way to manage the information that is available about me on Google, at least within the first couple of search results. Even more, creating a twitter account and linking to it from my blog will be another great outlet to manage my online brand.
Also, using Twitter, Facebook, and some of the other social media monitoring sites to monitor my personal brand online will help me find and resolve any negative content related to me. This could be the key to finding a job once I graduate from library school, especially if a prospective employer finds content about me that impresses them.
Personal branding seems a tricky area to me. You are right about professional blogs needing to stay away from too much personal information. However, personally, I think a blog that has a touch of personal reflection on the professional topic makes the post (and the poster) more interesting and personable, which would make me more likely to hire such a person. I aim to create a brand online that takes into account my professional and personal lives, but I want to make sure that the professional side is much more present than the personal side.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you, Toverduin. :) Adding some personal information will make a person stand out and could be the difference between getting or not getting "that" first librarianship. Blending a person's online brand geared towards the professional aspects with some personality and personal reflection would be the ideal scenario. I also hope to successfully strike this balance.
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