I had not had the pleasure of seeing Ned Potter’s presentation at CILIP’s New Professionals Day but the positive feedback I found encouraged me to check it out. A lot of what I thought about my personal brand comes from a corporate perspective (a recent feature in Shortlist [link unavailable] was very useful) making me think about my brand by in the context of my 5 core values, which turned out to be very tricky so I stopped! I had hoped to ‘be my brand’ immediately, emerging online as my professional self without showing the journey (if I kept that position I’d never emerge).
So here I am. I had always signed up to social network sites in the past as a means to connect to friends but now see the value of a professional presence. With that in mind, for me Facebook is strictly friends (or should be) and I hope not to embarrass myself on other sites, I hope not to embarrass myself on Facebook either but I’m not of the opinion that I shouldn’t be me in the comfort of my social circles where I swear like a sailor with their bits in a mangle and always have.
What’s in a name?
I have had a number of Twitter accounts in the past, dropping them rapidly as my interest waned but not deleting them until recently. Rather than going back to an account and tidying up I opted for the creation of new ones (no, I don’t know why either)! My first iterations were simply my full name, first initial – surname or some variant with an underscore. I later opted for @digicol13 (digital collections being the area I was based in and 2013 year I’m due to end). I have since lost access to digicol13 so set up ANOTHER Twitter account. @CostYouAll is not particularly inventive but hopefully useful for anyone who meets me as it is how I pronounce my surname (minus the all). Hello, I’m John Kostiw. This is something I have also used for my blog name keeping a clear connection. Following the advice on many a blog I now use the same profile picture across my social network sites.
Shock horror, I hadn’t Googled myself for around 10 years! Not since Dave Gorman’s Are you Dave Gorman? When I thought I too would find it fascinating to find another John Kostiw. It wasn’t. Having more of an online presence now I thought it worthwhile to see what information about me was out there. As suggested I used various search engines, my first appearance on Bing was my Facebook page (locked down) with my LinkedIn profile appearing further down the page a similar result to DuckDuckGo.
My Google results faired a little better; first page, second result was LinkedIn, in the top 5 was my old twitter account annoyingly with a not embarrassing, but not preferable profile picture.
As I looked through more results my concern grew...somewhere along the line I had signed up to last.fm (news to me). I will try to rectify this later if possible but I also found information about myself on Yasni referring to Amazon wish list titles (clearly me with the amount of library related books displayed) Ummmm what, how? I have or so I thought kept my Facebook thoroughly private, this exercise prompted me to double check, while not every aspect was friends only nothing was public. But profileengine.com had a little more access than I liked with access to my friends and group lists although I’m not sure how up to date the information is.
I thoroughly recommend people search for themselves in these sites to see what is available. I would also be cautious about what information you allow mobile apps to access when downloading to your smartphone as I suspect this is why I’m finding a bigger footprint than expected.
While I am now more aware of my personal brand and branding I imagine this will still take a back seat for the time being as I need to evaluate what I want my brand to say about me, how I want this to be portrayed and how it can work for me among other things.
I seem to have a habit of apologetic sign offs...so here I go again, but this wasn’t even half of what I could have written!