Interesting one, this. To be honest, I don't want to be branded. That's what happens to drinks and sportswear. However I do of course see the benefits on having a recognisable online presence. I think this is a personal area, also. It depends on how much self promotion you're really comfortable with, and I'm not comfortable with that much, but I know I 'should' make an effort in the sense it's good for your career, etc., etc.
In my role at the moment, events and conferences are not available to me due to my work training priorities (my employer is not going to spend money on my cpd as a librarian when I am employed as a researcher), and I spend much of my time working alone. Therefore, you might argue, online presence is even more important. Well, yes and no. I guess I'm just rebelling against the ubiquitous need for personal branding. I want to allow for some spontaneity, and new ideas. I'm not sure that I really like the amount of personal detail available on the web about us either.
I've read some other blogs and comments about this, and I go with the 'profersional' approach: I am consciously creating blend of professional and personal which goes with the ethos of the blog I've just created. We all have separate areas of life, and some of keep these more separate than others, but for me my librarianship training had a lot of personal elements to it, and I wanted to keep my - somewhat tenuous- links to librarianship that way.
Having said that, there are some areas of my online presence that I recognise do need sharpening up. I need to link up my blog, twitter account and linked in account (mortal sin) and make my blog posts a bit more visible. I need to work on my blog 'look'- at the moment I use a template, and would like something a bit more personal. These are things I can do over time, and are going on my to do list. However, I'm still going to retain that bit of
rebelliousness...
No comments:
Post a Comment