Sunday 3 July 2011

Thing 3: Consider your personal brand

I have to admit that I have never really considered my personal brand before, and actually find the idea of me having a brand as being a bit strange.  I have always tried not to put too much information about myself on the internet due to privacy concerns.  I do have a Facebook account but use it mainly for personal use, and have tried to make it as private as possible.  I have, however, recently joined LinkedIn (after much deliberation, again to do with privacy), but that is still not available for indexing by search engines.  That is something I may come to reconsider during this programme.

It therefore comes as no big surprise that I do not really have a web presence at all.  As well as my privacy hang-ups, I now use my married name, while my previous work was in my maiden name.  Out of curiosity, I did search with my maiden name, but most of the initial results were for other people’s Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles.  On Yahoo! I found some references to me in my last job on page 6, but in Google and Bing, nothing came up relating to me in the first 11 pages unless I added some other search terms (such as previous employers or locations).  A search for myself on LinkedIn revealed that, at the moment, only my profile is listed so it is reassuring to know that if potential employers search, they will only find me.

So, where to go from here?  Well, the positive point about having nothing available in my married name is that I can start afresh and create my brand from scratch.  That, I think, will be a ‘work in progress’ as this programme progresses.  I did try to think of an interesting and individual name for this blog, but as it was taking so long, I thought it would be better to just pick something and try to get to grips with the ‘Things’.  I did think of some ideas, but found they were already taken when I checked on Google.  When time allows, I intend to investigate some of the features of Blogger to make my blog more interesting, but for now the basic layout will suffice.

I have yet to investigate Twitter, so I’m looking forward to Thing 4 with anticipation...

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