Introduction
What does your wardrobe say about you? Many of us choose our clothing carefully to portray a certain image and Atkins (2017) points out this has been a practice throughout history.
Our online image is something to which we should pay equal care and attention: this is how others will see us and draw conclusions about us, possibly before we have even met. In Thing 2, we encouraged you to search for yourself as a first step in staying safe online. This week, we take managing personal information online a step further, by considering the possible impacts of what we might share and how others might interpret that.
You can read more about managing personal information in ‘More Detail’ below, then take a look at the activities under ‘Try’ and finally, share your thoughts and comments with us under ‘Share’.
Try
The activities this week could take a few minutes or up to an hour.
Take a look at the profiles of those following 23Things on Twitter. What do their profiles tell you about them? Is there sufficient information to decide that you either do or don’t want to follow them? Note that you can view Twitter without having an account yourself.
Alternatively, take the same activity reviewing the profiles of people you know or respect on LinkedIn, or any other platform you use.
Review your own profile on whatever platforms you use, and update if necessary.
If you’re interested in exploring this topic further, read the journal article Online Personal Branding: Processes, Challenges, and Implications.
More Detail
In considering how you manage your personal and professional information online, a good first step is to make a list of all the platforms you currently use, and why you use them. This might include Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Pinterest and possibly many more. What is your purpose in using each of these? Are you sharing social activities and personal thoughts with family and friends who already know you? Are you sharing images onto an open platform that you’re happy to share with the world? Are you blogging about your learning, or maybe your cat, in an open space where you invite others to connect with you? Are you creating a professional profile with a view to gaining employment? In each of these spaces you create a persona and reveal more or less of yourself, as you choose. In some instances, you may have created a profile without much thought, whereas in others, you may have considered very carefully what it is you want to portray.
As we discussed in Thing 2, every one of these interactions leaves behind a footprint. Labrecque, Markos, and Milne (2011) explored the processes people use to brand themselves in a digital space and the challenges faced in creating a personal brand, finding that their study participants intentionally fashioned their online profiles to maintain their brand identity, with some deliberately managing different profiles for different audiences. The participants received feedback on their digital profile from a panel of reviewers which caused several of them to make changes such as removing tags from images, deleting old photographs or posts, updating relationship status and in some cases, deleting selected accounts altogether as they considered the viewpoints of friends or family, colleagues, and possible future employers.
“Seeing yourself from somebody else’s eyes, it’s allowing you to see what other people think of you, especially people that have no idea about the person that you are.” Gina, (female study participant, 22)
There are benefits in taking the time to manage your personal online information and developing your own brand:
- It’s easier for people with common interests to find you
- It’s an opportunity to promote your areas of expertise
- You can show others you’re interested in collaborating
- You can expand your personal or professional circles beyond your immediate environment or locality
- You can raise your profile for potential employment opportunities.
There are several platforms you might use to create your professional brand; we’re including some tips for just two of those, but ask in the comments if you have questions about others.
LinkedIn provides opportunity to create a detailed profile, list your achievements, follow others, post articles and join discussion groups. The groups feature allows people with common interests to share knowledge and information, and build networks: The National RTO Network group, for example, currently has over 13,500 members, providing opportunities for many rich discussions on topics relevant to Vocational Education and Training in Australia.
Twitter provides for a brief profile, with its limited characters encouraging the use of key words. Through using hashtags and following others it is possible to engage in global discussions, as well as share resources and connect with new people. As an open, public platform, Twitter is frequently used by conference organisers and participants to create a backchannel, allowing those not at the conference to participate in the conversations. We’ll cover more on Twitter in Thing 5 next week.
With all platforms, it’s important to consider carefully what you post: think twice, post once is a good maxim to follow. Once your post is there for the world to see, particularly on public platforms, it may be too late to delete it as others may already have screenshots of what you posted. Stoller (2019) blogs about the unexpected confrontation arising from what was intended as a light-hearted tweet from a satirical social media account. The ensuing conversations on Twitter demonstrate the pitfalls of a careless post and the ease with which people can take offense, reflecting poorly on your personal and professional image.
In summary, consider carefully the image you want to portray, and take the necessary steps to either modify that image if you’re already active online, or to create that image if you’re just starting out. There are a few activities under “Try” to get you started.
Share
What did you learn about yourself or others from exploring their profiles and reviewing your own? Consider how profiles might differ across different platforms. Why might you connect with a person on one platform but not on another? Is there anything in any of your profiles you might change?
Leave a comment below or write a short blog post and share the link here.
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References
Atkins, A. (2017). What is the Origin of “Clothes Make the Man”? Retrieved from https://medium.com/@alex_65670/what-is-the-origin-of-clothes-make-the-man-7f75e070bf45
Labrecque, L., Markos, E., Milne, G. (2011). Online Personal Branding: Processes, Challenges, and Implications. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 25 (1), 37-50 doi: 10.1016/j.intmar.2010.09.002
Stoller, E. (2019, May 31). Satirical Tweet Causes Epic #SAchat Reaction. [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/student-affairs-and-technology/satirical-tweet-causes-epic-sachat-reaction
Feature image: S. Tucker
Thing 3 was written by Sue Tucker, 2019.
Reflecting on this topic, I feel that perhaps my professional digital footprint needs some work. I Tweet and post to Instagram under the pseudonym @curtinmakers, but that doesn’t really help bolster my own personal profile (as my name is not associated with those accounts). I will consider setting up a LinkedIn account for this purpose.
Thanks for your thoughts, Marie. It may be that you don’t want or need to have an online profile, and that’s fine too. Not everyone wants or needs to have a large online presence with hundreds of followers. What we do need, is to make sure that if we have an online presence, it is an honest reflection of who we are. So don’t feel you have to create a LinkedIn presence just because others do. For me, it has proved useful to be able to interact in the same space as other VET professionals, whereas on Twitter I can connect more with those working in HE and educational technology.
I am not a big social network user however I have had a LinkedIn account for professional networking for a long time and have found it useful for connetcing with strangers in other countries who share the same intersts. This networking has proved very beneficial.
I look forward to learning more about using twitter next week. I am not converted yet.
Hi Michelle,
I use my Twitter account for that exact same reason – it was a real thrill a couple of years ago to meet my Twitter colleagues in real life at a conference. It’s great that there are so many different options available as not every tool suits everyone.
I totally understand the purpose of building personal brand. The thing is how we balance between your personal interests and your profession on your profiles? There are specific tools/platforms for us to portray our personal lives or to build our own brand professionally. But how do we balance them? For example: LinkedIn is for professional connection – I have my profile there built with connections with other in similar areas. Facebook is my personal channel. Should they be connected? Will people from my LinkedIn connections search and look at my Facebook profile? I doubt that my concern sounds quite silly to someone but it is my real thought at the moment.
In my perspective, specific tools like Linkedln, FB, and so on for building personal branding just help us a part. Definitely connections on Linkedln will help you expand our social networks. However, in reality, it depends on how many times you spend on for chatting with those connected. Or we just invite friends, accept friends and follow events updated by these internet insiders. For me, building personal branding is what you effort to do, to build your image and people can “recognize” you by a different thing or sometimes a small thing derived from your heart. This takes time and personal capitals.
I did search for myself when learning Thing 2 several weeks ago, which was the very first time I thought seriously about how my online persona could be seen by my family, friends, colleagues and other people. In Thing 4, I deeply understand the challenges we might face when creating online personas on any platform. And suddenly, I remember a Vietnamese saying that goes ‘The beauty lies not in the rosy cheeks of the young woman, but in the eyes of the beholder’. To keep balancing between personal life and working life is not an easy task for all of us, but now a must if we want to survive in such a modern society.