Thing 6: 'Jason Partridge' The Brand

Thing 6: Consider your personal brand

A google search on my own name brought up various LinkedIn profiles of 13
professionals (having not yet explored LinkedIn, none of the profiles were of me!). Varoius websites that offered finding addresses and phone numbers for my name search, which I am pleased to say could not provide my address and telephone number. There were also other offers for searches via several social media websites and a website related to real estate.

I switched to images (for interest and amusement) and actually was able to find my facebook profile quite quickly from the profile picture. This was a little suprising and I am not sure how I feel about the profile picture being so readily available from a quick search - it will likely influence what I add in future.

Following the same guidelines in searching through socialmention and MIT’s Personas project which showed similar results.

Adding Library to my name search allowed me to narrow my namesakes and I found my Google+ account quite quickly. Though as my Google+ account is a recent venture, there is very little information displayed.

It would seem from the searching that my online profile is very limited and this was what I was expecting. My Facebook account does not see much activity these days and is more often updated by other people tagging me in posts and photos than of me adding anything myself. The largest contribution to online activity I have had recently would be the Blog I am writing now and the 23 Things programme - hence the reason I have joined!

I think that keeping a online presence and in particular a professional one is important and is something that I am looking to increase for myself and develop as I become more intune with what is available to me.

As such I have recently taken MySource Matrix CMS Training (Content management Systems workshop for website editing), joined the 23 Things programme, signed up for seminars 'Facebook: pages that work', 'Engage: Careers and Social Media' and 'LinkedIn: Designing your academic profile'.