CPD23 things #3 and #4

Thing #3 is 'Consider your personal brand' and #4 is 'Current awareness - Twitter, RSS and Pushnote', and I'm considering them together, not as a short cut but because of the inter-relationships between the tools we use for both.

For example, I use Twitter, but not as part of my public profile. I have a locked personal account, which is a great source of incoming news and links, a really useful tool for current awareness, and is invaluable for bouncing ideas off people.

A few years ago, I also had a public Twitter account set up under a random pseudonym (an account which has long since been deleted) which I set up to learn on. Twitter was one of those things I really had to try on for a while to see how it could be useful. Setting up a test drive account, not tied to my "personal brand" in any way, gave me the freedom to experiment and learn by doing, without the worry that I'd somehow do something that would be inscribed forever on the permanent record of the internet.

I do occasionally feel a bit boxed in by the decision to keep Twitter personal rather than professional - at least in terms of what I'm posting, rather than reading - but at the moment the balance of costs and benefits still isn't pushing me to go public in full.

I have a lot of respect for the benefits of 'living in public' ala Jeff Jarvis , but I think pseudonymity and 'constructed publics' - like a locked Twitter account - give many of the advantages with a lower level of risk.

Searching for myself online showed both that the personalized search bubble issue isn't particularly affecting this search, and that I need to do a little work. The University biography page that's been anchored as the first result in my vanity searches for several years vanished in the re-vamp of the department's website at the start of the year, and it's new location, hidden inside my library's OPAC pages, doesn't have quite the same SEO juice.

This blog doesn't show up in general searches (only a couple of the people-specific search sites had made the connection), so I need to tweak the meta-data to better represent the fact that this is one of the spaces where I choose to be public-broadcast.

The name 'Miss Alice' is, I admit, firmly tied to my current post - one of my past students started calling me by the title, and it all went from there. It's one notch more formal than just 'Alice' but less so than 'Ms Tyrell', and I'm not faculty so the generic 'Prof' isn't appropriate. The name landed here, because I started the blog for a student audience, and my using it for library-related thoughts is a relatively new development.

My LinkedIn profile, which is now the first substantive thing you find when you search for "Alice Tyrell", isn't as inviting and informative as I'd like it to be. I've done a little tidying up, but not being able to re-order my 'current' positions to list my primary post above my two part time volunteer gigs without fudging the dates fairly spectacularly is ... frustrating.

I think it's relatively clear that I'm not any of the other Alice Tyrell's that show up in the search results, though - I didn't die in 1422, I'm not a thoroughbred horse, nor was I a vaudeville dancer in the 1920s.

way more than 140 characters...

Some of Don Schindler's tweets from a conference jumped out at me yesterday, this pair especially.

"Where to put money/time? 1. scanable text 2. mobile 3. facebook 4. photography 5. student comment 6. sharing ability 7. blogs #bigtenplus"

"Spend less time on 1. podcasts 2. twitter/linkedin 3. chats 4. online video (unless music, sports, instruct) 5. click thru news #bigtenplus"

The priority given to text is particularly nice to hear: I never feel like I can quite trust my own judgement on the issue, because I have a very strong preference for text over video which I suspect is a-typical. Or maybe not. There's work to be done re-writing and updating copy for our sites, though, to make them more web friendly, and scan-able.

It's easy to see the rise of mobile amongst our students in London - we issue them with very basic UK mobiles as emergency contact points, but in the last 18 months, maybe 2 years, I've started to see more and more students who bring their US smart phone with them, using them on an international data plans.

(I think it would be fascinating to be able to issue our students with UK smart phones and encourage faculty to develop their courses and assignments knowing that all their students would have a camera / video / online collaboration tool, modelling some of the research that's being done on using twitter and wikis and so on in teaching. I suspect we're not so many years away from effective smart phone ubiquity, but it'll be much longer before we reach a stage where we can assume/require that everyone has one.)

Relative order of Facebook / blogs / twitter is interesting, too - I'd have guessed blogs / Facebook/ twitter based on our experience, both metrics, formal feedback, and verbal impressions.

We haven't had as high a take up of our fb page as we'd initially expected - although far higher than the last time we experimented with it - but judging from the student feedback, that's at least partially an advertising / awareness issue: we could definitely promote it more. The blog is, so far, our most successful online experiment, but essentially we're only still using Twitter because a couple of us staff use it and find it useful.

On facebook I think it's that a lot of students use the service, but either don't know about or don't want to follow our page - Twitter is just a much smaller constituency of students using the service. ( Podcasts and video are both things that have come up as something we might want to introduce, but - maybe it's ok that we haven't got to them yet.)

Photography - plenty of room for us to improve here - and maybe linked to student comment, as I know we've had some truly superb photographers coming through the program, although I'm less sure what we might do to encourage them to share their images with us.

Plenty to think on...

* Photos by Timmy Toucan (RAF Eagle) and mrwilleeumm (G1 demo), used under Creative Commons, with thanks.