Thing 3 Proper: Considering my personal brand.

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together

I have chosen to link cpd23 to my work account and have included it in my objectives for 2012-13. This was because I thought it would be beneficial to focus on the new area of librarianship that I am currently exploring. Having seen the number of blogs of people who had to drop out of last year’s course then I think it is probably a good idea to have the impetus of my end of year review to finish this myself! However, this does mean that I could be slightly limited by what I can say.

In the last blog post I mentioned that I would try to have my twitter account rolling alongside this blog but I have decided that that would not be a good idea. As an evangelical librarian many of my tweets are about libraries, but they also include random conversations with friends as well as retweets of remarkably mundane things that celebrities have said. I also have a fondness for retweeting @librarianclock who enjoys exclaiming statements such as “by jove, it’s gin o’clock’ at 5.30pm everyday. This is sadly something which jars with the RCN’s policy on alcohol (they are correct- it is very bad for your liver!)

I am quite lucky in a way when it comes to having an online presence because I have such a boring name. I keep my facebook account strictly personal (although seeing as my personality is as a librarian I am a member of certain related groups on there) and the improbability of tracking me down (linked with high privacy settings) means that prospective employers should never be able to find too many photographs of me enjoying gin o’clock!

When I Google “’Rebecca Jones’ library’ my linked in account  is the fourth option but there are more hits for a Dr Rebecca Jones who is an award winning school librarian and (understandably) far more important to search engines than me!

My usual name online is hipporebecca (you’ll never guess what I collect!) Searching for this online takes you straight to my twitter account but you also see much more of my personality- from my ebay. Google Plus and Amnesty accounts through to my obsession with music. Although I have done this before, I was surprised to see just how often random jokes between friends on twitter are popping up as a search result.  Worryingly, the result at the bottom of page one links to a page where I’m rated on ‘Hot Tweeters.’ I guess another advantage of using my work account to do CPD23 is that I don’t dare click through and see how I’m rated!

I decided to call this blog ‘Bex Without Spex’ rather than hipporebecca because I wanted it to be more professional (although I don’t know if I’ll be continuing this blog once I finish CPD) and, more importantly, my work colleagues thought that it was a better name. I suppose it shows my continuing interest in the image and stereotypes of the profession. It also makes me feel like a bad rapper when I ever I say my blog name in my head, but that’s by the by!

So should I be worried about not having a personal brand online? I’ve been very impressed, reading the cpd23 reading list and other blogs, how seriously some librarians are being- from having consistency in logos across all online platforms to printing business cards for conferences. I don’t think that approach would suit my real life personality or work ethic. I left my previous job because I didn’t want to be pigeonholed- either as someone who only worked in public libraries or only worked with children- and am using this course and the online resources to explore my transferable skills. I am happy to cross reference the different aspects of myself. Feel free to follow me on twitter- I’ve started to follow people on this course (although mostly I just copy what my friend @nicololosaurus does)  and I might refer people on twitter over here if there’s anything (perish the thought!) that can’t be expressed in 140 characters. I think I would like to use these platforms to gain skills and knowledge and then just force my personality on people who are [un]lucky enough to meet me in real life.

My one constant- here is another photo of myself outside a library – this time in Cozumel, Mexico.