I'm a brand? Really?

Well, I'm already a week behind on cpd23 due to being on holiday last week, although I have to admit I wasn't looking forward too much to thing 3 as I find the idea of my personal brand to be quite uncomfortable. Like many people I suppose I worry about mixing my personal online presence with my professional one, and in fact my personal inclination is to try and limit my exposure to, well, anyone I don't know. Luckily (well, perhaps) there is a Carly Sharples who is a Conservative politician with a very heavy online presence, so if you Google my name, you get an awful lot of results about her, and I fade delightfully into the background.

My Twitter feed is my first result (my name is @carlysharples - got in there before Miss Conservative lady clearly, hehehe), and I suppose my twitter feed, while personal, is a fair reflection of myself, my views and my interests. There's a fair number of library tweets on there that's for sure!

And what next? Oh yes, the YouTube video of myself I was required to make for work, designed to be shown to off-site and partner college students so they have a fair idea of what I look like and what I do.

I have no webpage, no LinkedIn, Facebook is not visible to anyone other than my very close friends....So I am a half hidden tweeting librarian who may, at first glance appear to be a Tory (I am not!) Definitely food for thought there I think. Delving a bit deeper and more sensibly, if you add 'Worcester' into the search you get a lovely handful of relevant results, all linked back to my work as a librarian at the University of Worcester (including a category for 'Liaison Librarians' on Zomobo...interesting! http://zomobo.net/Liaison-Librarians).

So, after a week of considering this, what conclusions have I come to?

• Branding and selling clearly aren't the same thing, but I feel like they are. Like many other people across all professions I imagine, I find the idea of constantly having to advocate for myself and my profession exhausting, but no one else is going to do my shouting for me, and developing a consistent online presence is something simple I can control.
• I am actually pretty pleased with my online presence - I want to be discovered in my professional capacity, not my personal one.
• I could do a lot more - for example, using the name 51st Century Librarian for this blog links in no way to any other aspect of my online presence, and unsurprisingly doesn't appear when I Google myself. My Twitter feed isn't personalised really, and I make no real attempt to have an online professional presence that is distinct from my employment. 

Just like starting this blog, I feel trepidation about 'owning' my brand online over and above the way I'm presented through my employment. But is that all I am? Or is there more to me? I guess you'll just have to watch this space...