Thing 3: your personal brand

Now, here's a tricky one. I think I'm a bit hard to pin down online (maybe in person too?) because I feel like I have two separate identities: poet and librarian. Plus lots of other supplementary ones as well. The poet in me is not much of an online networker, but on Twitter (my main online 'home') I wear my librarian hat, my parent hat, my Lewes resident hat, my Archers fan hat and my random idiot hat (the Archers hat is particularly snazzy). Obviously everybody except the most tedious monomaniac has various interests and facets to their personality; so what does it mean to talk about a consistent online brand, let alone expressing 'core values'?

Names
I have never used my full name on Twitter or when blogging because it's an unusual name and I don't necessarily want what I say online to be linked back to my workplace. Even though I do take care not to slag off my job or my colleagues! But I do have a nickname, and variants of it, that I have used everywhere online since the late 1990s. It's not very imaginative - just a derivation of mistyping 'Rachel' all the time - but it has stuck and some of my 'real-life' friends use it too. So it's a pretty consistent and findable moniker I guess. As my professional activities cross over more and more with my online activities, it's possible I will start using my real name again, but I'm not sure yet.

Photograph
Lately I have used a real picture of myself on Twitter, so people can recognise me at conferences, tweet-ups etc. And if it pops up in other places as well, that's less to do with a desire for consistency that because it's the only picture of myself that I like...

Professional/personal identity
My tweets are a mixture of personal and work-related, but usually missing anything that would identify where I work or who I work with (see above). My library has a separate Twitter account, which I also run, but I see that account as a way to represent the library and network with people of interest to our institute as a whole, rather than discussing specific aspects of my own role, eg cataloguing. Or the Archers. I don't know if this split completely works, but hope that my personal mixed-bag approach and the fact that I am generally friendly and fairly amusing, makes me a good person to interact with...

Visual brand
Not very good at this, I suspect. Looking back at the other blogs I've had, there wasn't much visual consistency, although I tend to favour soft colours and fairly simple designs. One blog was entirely pink for a while, which was a mistake. But basically I am fickle - so I will go off and think about what I can do to develop more of a memorable style. (Blogger doesn't exactly help.)

I still don't think I know what my 'core values' are, although I'm fairly confident that my online writing/interacting style reflects 'me'. When I'm online I want to discover, learn, chat, make people laugh and form personal and professional links that can translate into the non-virtual world.

The Google verdict
In my writing life I obviously want to get my (real) name out there as much as possible. The top Google result for my name is for my book on Amazon, which is ideal. Of the remaining 9 results on the first page, 3 are related to my professional role, 2 to writing activities, 2 are people-search pages, and 2 are links to profiles on social networking sites. One of which is not me! 'Archel' relates mostly to Archel Road in London. And if I enter 'Archelina' I get some Twitter results plus an unrelated World of Warcraft character...

I think this is all fine, as I don't want to be TOO visible online outside my chosen networks. Except as a best-selling poet of course :)

Thing 2: some more

I'd been thinking that I'd gone right off blogs in recent years, and that it was probably a function of a) my chronic lack of time since having a child and b) the effect of Twitter on my attention span. I wasn't really feeling the 'comment on people's blogs' part of Thing 2, because if I want a conversation Twitter works much better for that - the blog/comment format is just much more clunky somehow. Because a blog post takes much more time and effort than a tweet, I feel a comment needs to similarly well thought out. And then you're sort of committed to the discussion - I don't want to keep checking back necessarily, but nor do I want to be emailed every time someone else comments. Moon on a stick, anyone?

But then I read walkyouhome's self-professedly ranty, but excellent post on #cliquegate, something which I'd been only half aware of but did resonate with my last post about 'self-selecting groups'. And commented briefly on it.

Admittedly, having a bit of time to actually keep up with my feeds is directly related to the fact that we're experiencing a lot of downtime with our LMS at the moment... and I figure it's better to reflect and engage during these periods than stomp about in frustration eating Hobnobs. Which could so easily happen.

Thing 2: investigate some other blogs

So, I have now roamed around a few of the other blogs, new and old, that participants in CPD23 have registered. I did this via Delicious, where participants have been helpfully tagged for easier browsing. But what criteria to use to check out someone's blog, given that I definitely couldn't look at all of them?

First I looked at a few people who were in the same sector as me. In my limited experience, the role of a librarian or information worker varies wildly between (and actually even within) sectors, so I thought I might have more of a chance of knowing what people were on about if I focused on academic/research libraries like my own. Edit: forgot to say that I was also on the look-out for people working on repositories and open access, as I've recently been involved in setting up our repository and hope to expand my knowledge in that area...

I also looked mainly at UK people, not because I don't enjoy and learn from all the US and other overseas librarians I follow via their blogs or on Twitter, but because in terms of professional development I have more to contribute, and learn, about the UK.

A third criterion was to - initially anyway - ignore people I already know, either in person or online. I am very interested to see how my existing contacts get on with CPD23, but decided that I wanted to seek out new people first!

I found it interesting stumbling on the blogs of people who had never blogged before (my library contacts are a pretty self-selecting group of social media mavens!) and people who didn't like the idea of putting themselves 'out there' online at all. I wonder if they will change their minds by the end of CPD23?

I have subscribed to a few of the blogs via my Google Reader and will no doubt add more. Now to go forth and comment!

Thing 1: blogs and blogging

This is a new blog to reflect on 23 Things for Professional Development. It's the fourth blog I've had (and I've been a contributor to several more) which frankly seems like overkill, but none of the others are really a) live or b) library-related so a new start seems appropriate.

In fact, my first blog was set up well before the days of Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Flickr or any of the other social media tools that have expanded my personal and professional world and generally made everything so much better :)

I'm taking part in CPD23 because:

a) I'm in an odd/interesting point in my career, where I love my job but am not technically in a professional post, and so

b) my ambitions and interests sometimes exceed my role, and this could probably be managed better, but

c) I also get lazy sometimes, so

d) I need to better absorb and reflect on the learning I'm doing every day through online social networking, conferences, casual conversation etc.

Looking forward to exploring it all!