Rudaí three : Developing your Professional Brand

Linkedin and all that

Developing a professional brand is not something I ever seriously thought about. I never thought about how I come across online as I only used linkedin as a place for my cv and even then it wasn't very good. I used both facebook and twitter as a way of social networking and keeping in touch with friends and family. 

The googling of my name in incognito mode was an interesting exercise. As I found there was another Emmet Keoghan who put up lots of stuff like videos of him having a good time. Thankfully he is a bit younger than me so there should be no confusion for potential employers! 

My photo is the bane of any of my profiles. I don't like any of my photos and never have. The one I use for my facebook profile is the Emmet Lego character. On twitter I do have a photo of myself taken in the Guinness storehouse and its the only photograph where I'm smiling. On linkedin I used to used to have black and white photo taken as part of the media production module in the MLIS. I was told I looked like an author picture on the back of a novel. But it was out of date and replaced it with the current one. I was criticised here as being to serious looking! So whats a good photo? All mine seem to be one of the eight mistakes! I thought serious would be the way to go for a CV as I don't want to look to frivolous but maybe not. 

I am a member of 16 groups on linkedin some of which I dont know why I joined but others I have got some great use of especially the government libraries group and the public libraries group. I have gotten involved in discussions and debates and have got recognised at some seminars for them. which may or may not be a good thing. It certainly means I should be careful of what I post. 

I have 166 connections which are based on my classmates on the MLIS and people I worked with. 

I have recognised some pretty big weakness in my profile here in that I don't have a summery, my headline is weak and I don't have any recommendations. This last one is hard to get as none of supervisors are on linkedin!

So it looks like I'm going to be busy for the next while...