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| Personal Brand by stefano principato on Flickr |
I didn't give a whole lot of thought to my 'personal brand' when I set up my blog and Twitter account in September, but have since wished I'd done one or two things differently. On Twitter the variations of 'Annie Johnson' that I liked had been taken (as had 'LibrariAnnie', by someone who has tweeted "don't think anyone really needs to follow me on twitter..." curses!) so I went with @Annie_Bob, a nickname I've had since secondary school, and a username I've used for various things before. I also decided (although I really can't remember thinking about this) to use my red cartoon face avatar instead of a photograph.
If I was doing it again, I would have perhaps spent some more time coming up with a Twitter name that was more professional sounding, and would have used a photo of myself for the picture. However I was talking to a few people about this at NPC2011 and a couple of people said that it was a good picture because it was distinctive and stood out in the Twitter timeline. So I suppose there are positives to cartoons too! As for the blog, I did spend quite a while thinking of the title, as this seemed important. I wanted something literary, but not too obtuse, something friendly and well, I'm a Tolkein fan. At first I had a standard bookcase template, which I've changed very recently. Every second library blog seemed to have the same background so I wanted to have something different.
So as it stands there's no visual link between my blog and my twitter account, and now I've created a Netvibes page for Cam23 2.0 which is completely different again, so this is something I should probably change, especially as I'll be creating a LinkedIn account and I've forgotten what else over the next couple of months.
I've got a fairly common name, so Googling "Annie Johnson" comes up with musicians, writers, and boats. If I add "librarian" then the first five results are me, and eight of the twenty results on the first two pages are me (this is with me signed out of Google and in a different browser to usual). It comes up with Cam(lib)teachmeet things for the first three results which is a little odd, ideally I'd like my blog to come up top. But there's nothing there that I wouldn't want my employer (or future employer) to see, so that's good I've kept my nose clean!
Are you saying you don't want to be associated with camlibtm? ;) It does something similar for me - things like a photograph of me speaking at Ignite come up really high in the rankings, higher than my blog. Not that I'm not proud of having spoken at Ignite, though!
ReplyDeleteI think the picture you have as you Blogger profile is really nice - if you ever wanted to change the cartoon face I think that would be a good one to choose!
Katie
The trouble is I didn't even do anything at TeachMeet! Thanks, this is one of the few pictures of myself that I do like (and it's a few years old!) so if I did change the Twitter avatar it would probably be to this one, and that would be consistent too. I'm just wary of changing it as I think people know me by the cartoon face by now!
ReplyDeleteI think that if you're going to change something on Twitter you should only do name or picture, not both at the same time! (as @LibWig recently demonstrated)
ReplyDeleteAnnie, thanks for this post, it makes useful reading for a first time round 23things-er. I'm glad I've read it before setting up my Twitter account and will now give some thought to my 'personal brand' and try and be consistent as I set things up. I think the cartoon face is very memorable and distinctive! Jenny
ReplyDeleteThanks Jenny, glad you found it useful! I think the consensus is to stick with 'the face' for now, which is good because I'm quite fond of it!
ReplyDelete