Thing 6 2013: Consider your personal brand

Thing 6 2013: Consider your online presenceYour ‘personal brand’ is affected by online information and your online presence, whether you’re active online or not. The first thing many people (including potential and current employers!) will do when they hear your name is Google you, and it’s important to learn how to ‘curate’ that brand, which should be considered part of your professional identity. A good way to think about it is as an extension of the professional you. A strong online presence can be a powerful tool in achieving your professional goals, particularly in promoting your work and reaching a wider audience.

For Thing 6, we’ll be exploring a number of ways to manage and keep tabs on your digital footprint. You’ve already made a crucial step in setting up your blog! Some of these represent some basic tools that everyone should be familiar with. If you’re pretty comfortable with the basics, we’ll provide some additional options you may wish to explore.

Task:
We’ll begin by taking a look at what content is associated with your name online. Start by Googling yourself. Type your name into Google (and/or any other search engine) and see what comes up (you may also want to try nicknames – Liz vs Elizabeth, for example). Do the same thing over at socialmention, which gathers data from social media. Next try running your name through MIT’s Personas project (EDITOR’S UPDATE: the Personas tool seems to be broken at the moment, although it’s worth checking back as it’s a fun visual representation of your online presence), which is a great way to visualise the types of content associated with your name and clue you in to other people with the same name.

You may want to try combining your name with certain key words (e.g. ‘libraries’ or ‘neuroscience’), or even seeing if what comes up when you search for keywords only (e.g. ‘neuroscience researchers oxford’). Do you or your work appear on the first page or two? If so, is it content with which you’d like to see yourself associated?

Once you’ve analysed how you appear online, start to think about how you’d like to appear and what you might be able to do to make that happen. Quite a few of the tools we’ll explore in upcoming Things can improve and augment your online presence (having a LinkedIn profile, for example, is a great way to make sure you’re visible), but there are things you can do now:

Accounts
First of all, think about online accounts and profiles you already have. Do they come up when you search? Do you want them to? Make sure accounts you already manage are up to date and reflect the persona you want to share – including your name and photograph, if relevant. If you haven’t already, fill out the ‘About’ page on your new or existing blog, and consider adding a photograph. Try to be consistent across all platforms.

Professional vs Personal
Do you want to keep your professional and personal identities separate online? Many choose a middle ground and let their personality shine through their professional presence. Keep in mind that if content is accessible to colleagues and professional contacts, you probably don’t want your latest holiday snaps or student party photos showing (although this may be fine for some people/accounts). You may also want to consider whether anonymity does or does not fit in with your professional goals.

Blog post:

  • How easy were you to find online? Were you happy with what you found? What sort of ‘person’ emerged, and what might other people think about him or her? What did you, or might you, do to address this?
  • How important do you think it is to maintain a professional presence online?
  • Tag your blog post ‘Thing 6’.

Exploring further
If you feel you already have a handle on your online presence, or if you’d like to take what you’ve just done a little bit further, there’s always more you can do to ‘curate’ your online brand.

  • Consider linking. If you have multiple online accounts, find ways to connect them. If you have accounts on social media tools like Twitter or LinkedIn, you may want to provide links to them on your blog (see this WordPress help article if you want info on creating links). Google favours pages on .ac.uk domains, so include a link to your University profile or page (if applicable) from your other accounts.
  • Try setting up a Google alert for your name, or perhaps your name with a keyword or two. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts and choose your search terms, how often you’d like to receive alerts, and where you’d like to receive them.

Further reading

8 thoughts on “Thing 6 2013: Consider your personal brand

  1. Hello Liz, that was a useful post on Personal Branding. I have two clarifications to make:
    1. How do I include a “-.ac.uk” domain link to my page, or what does it mean? I would love to do it very much.
    2. While MIT page lists my profile on top for my name-search, and Google/ duckduckgo show up my blog & linkedin profiles quite well, Socialmention hardly shows up – somewhere down below – that too only on youtube; it simply does not show me on linkedin or blog, etc.
    Could you please help me understand this?
    Richie

    • Hi Richie-

      1. If you have a profile on your University page, try to include a link to it elsewhere – and vice versa, if possible. For example, you can put a link to your Uni profile on LinkedIn or Twitter, and include a link to your social media accounts (if you feel it’s appropriate) on your Uni page.
      2. On search results – each of the search tools uses a different algorithm, and assigns weight to various results in different ways. I don’t know the ins and outs of their formulas (and they’re secret), but all you can really do is continue producing good content. One thing this exercise does do is allow you to see what comes up that other people might see when they search for you, so you can be aware and know whether it’s good or bad, or if you’d like to try to get your name out a bit more.
      Does that help a bit?
      Liz

  2. Oh, yea! When I first did it to write for my blog, it worked well; but now -after your message I tried again, and- I have a problem. Tried it both in google chrome and firefox. “Network error, try reloading”

    I had and have a problem in working with socialmention on firefox & explorer, last time; but not on chrome. Even now -as I try it out- firefox & explorer keep on searching endlessly; but google chrome does its work well.

  3. Pingback: Things 11 and 12 2013: LinkedIn and Academia.edu | 23 Things for Research

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