CPD23 - Thing 3: My personal brand

Recent dedication and determination to complete my current Aber ILS module has left me slightly behind in completing my CPD 23 blog posts however, I told myself I was going to complete this programme and when I start something I want to see it through.  So, with this in mind, I will be working my way through the 'things' which I have missed starting now with thing 3.

Some really interesting points in the post on Thing 3: consider your personal brand which made me stop and think about how I want to convey my professional and indeed personal self to the online world.  Having studied leisure management then on to management with HR at university when completing my first degree, I have always been aware of the importance of brand identity and how important company image is as the major part of my studies surrounding branding were focused around organisational distinctiveness and corporate identity.  Now that I am 7 years into my career within the library and information profession and part way through an Msc in Information and Library Studies, it is time for me to take what I have learned about organisational brands along with what I have read on the CPD23 blog post and on other CPD23 participants blogs and apply it to my own personal brand.

Thinking about my own unique identity within the online library community and even offline within my work and studies, I guess I am part way to achieving an image, if I look back over job applications which I have completed in the past, I start to see a pattern of how I sell myself, now just a case of applying this along with an image and I am part way there.

Now for the vain part, the Google search of my own name, there were several results on the first page which did refer to me personally but I am perfectly happy with them.  My Facebook page is listed along with some Twitter posts.  Twitter is my main social network for professional purposes, I like to use it to follow the latest developments in libraries, technology and business and mainly use it to post about my studies or interesting library, technology or business related links.  However, after looking at the advice as part of CPD23, one thing I am going to do is work on linking the profiles together to create a consistent brand image of myself as mentioned by Jo on the CPD23 thing 3 post: visual identity (http://cpd23.blogspot.com/2011_06_01_archive.html). 

This was always refelcted in my studies of organisational brands and is something I believe is very important in the image of any individual or organisation, afterall we only have to look at the biggest and best brands of the world to see how successful this can be.  Clever marketing and strong brand image can often see people and/or organisations identified by a logo alone.  Ok, so perhaps my own brand won't go worldwide in an instant but applying the same ethos to strong marketing of my own personal brand is certainly a start to fully establishing myself in the library and information community.