Thing 3 - consider your personal brand

My blogging is starting to form a pattern that I'm not proud of - tackling the blog at the very end of the week is like doing your homework at the last minute. Not that I am likening CPD23 to unwelcome homework! I've promised myself that I will  hit Week 3 running & write my blog at the beginning of the week. Anyway, back to the theme of Week 2 - considering my personal brand.
 I started by googling my very common name, Sarah Harris, & was faced with page after page of all the other versions of me. I was actually quite surprised to find that I finally appeared on the 14th page with a link to my LIS New Professionals Network membership. It was quite heartening to discover that my first appearance on Google was a library-related one as I am trying so hard to connect with the sector at the moment. As I use my plain old name on Facebook I guess that if  had continued to trawl through the Google pages I might have found my Facebook link, but there are so many with my name that I kind of lost interest. I have to confess that my presence on Facebook is definitely as a 'lurker'. I ended up on it by default after a few friends requests, but I have never been proactive, tending to use it as a way of catching up on what other people are doing rather than chronicling myself. The majority of my 'friends' are from my theatre work so I'm not sure if my Facebook profile is really any use currently for my LIS activity...
 Onto Twitter - googling of my Twitter name 'selharris' fared rather better & I appeared as the 6th listing on the first page! Not a case of successful branding, however, but happy accident. When I registered on Twitter I couldn't use my forename & surname as the tag was already taken (common name syndrome again) so I opted for initials. I wonder if the use of initials seems a little formal/distant but I hope that combined with a profile photo it will seem less so...
 And now my blog title - like many other cpd23 blogs I have read, the issue of choosing a name caused much procrastination. In the end, I avoided trying to be witty or cryptic as I didn't want to disappoint people when they got beyond the title! I went for the obvious, but, as I don't have any other blogs, decided to omit the '23' so that my new blog could extend beyond the life of the project & be relevant to other stages of my career. So with 3 different versions of me on social networking sites I don't consider myself to have a brand as yet.The one common theme so far is my profile picture which is a recent photo & one which I don't dislike too much. I was faceless on Facebook & Twitter for some time, & it was only after attending the npid2011 & hearing so much about networking that I decided to bite the bullet & post my photo. I think I like having it as a straightforward, consistent image.
 As far as professional v personal identity goes, I think that I am fairly keen to use social networking mainly for professional promotion, although it's difficult not to allow personal aspects to slip in, particularly when blogging. I do also enjoy following non-library Tweets, although they are generally arts/culture related. I suppose having personal elements do make you seem more human! Maybe 'profersonal' (?) is the way to go after all.
 I tried tweaking the visual elements of this blog. I went for a complete re-design, then returned to my original template, then compromised on an altered background! To be honest, it was all about me making something look 'prettier'. I wasn't doing it with any branding in mind as I don't think that I have reached any conclusions/decisions regarding my online presence just yet. For the moment I am happy to make little changes/refinements along the way as I progress through cpd23, learning from the process & from reading everyone's blogs.