Over the past two days I have thought a LOT about my personal and professional branding. Joeyanne commented that she likes to take a "profersonal" approach to demonstrate both sides of her personality - and this is something I would really love. However, in my current position, I work with children aged 11-16, and mixing personal with professional is something that requires the utmost security, and it may be something I simply cannot do. I should also mention that I have the tendency to make sarcastic comments on social networking websites (non-work-related!!!), some of which I know friends would find hilarious - yet people I know in a professional capacity may find a tad rude(?!). Both my twitter and facebook accounts have the highest level of security to stop students etc from adding me, or seeing these!
For the past 3 or 4 years my online alias has been rlb14, my initials and my lucky number. I have decided to keep this alias and use it as the focus of my branding. With "rlb14" already taken on twitter (by someone who has annoyingly never tweeted), I have simply added an underscore to the end of it (hence rlb14_).
I have revamped the layout of my blog which was previously a desktop template, to something I can brand across the whole of my online profile and perhaps in future, business cards and CV print outs.
As my visual brand "logo" I would like to design an owl to go with my title (hubby says this what I most remind him of). My twitter background has been a very cute Mommy and baby owl for the past year or so, but creating one of my own would be a much better solution to stealing someone else's image!
Googling my own name results in a whole list of personal security breaches, including facebook comments I have made, and even a map of bike rides I have been on which start and end at my home location. I have updated and tightened all of my security settings and will be writing a complaint in to facebook on the issue of privacy.
I will end my entry with a question - what do you think my personal brand (so far) says about me?
