Homework is Hard!

That is, it's hard to complete efficiently. If I just read the articles, thought about them, took some notes, did the assignments, wrote about them, it would be easy. But this evening I've spent three hours bouncing back and forth between the readings, my resume and LinkedIn profile. Oh and Facebook and Twitter, but that's more just my own little attention deficit problem more than anything.

The readings are too relevant and helpful to me right now, about to set off of my next job search! I never thought I'd write that either. It's just distracting - I'm so forgetful now that if I don't do something right away, I'm worried that I won't ever do it. So I read Guy Kawasaki talking about how to use LinkedIn, and I feel I have to run off and implement what I like of his ideas (a lot!) in my profile right away, like making more information public and searchable.

One of Guy's tips reminded me that I have had LinkedIn used on me while interviewing a prospective employee. He'd looked up my profile and realized we were from the same part of the world. I knew that from his resume, but I was a little surprised that he knew it too! Since then, I've started doing a bit more online reading about prospective hires, but when I find unprofessional info, like a goofy public Facebook profile, I try not to let it affect my judgement of the person too much.

The Fast Company Brand Called You article is a great reminder that I need to work on defining and capturing my brand - I recently signed off an email to an old friend (who works in public sector IT in the region where I want to work, so it's important to get a bug in his ear) saying to "keep me in mind if you run into anyone looking for a generalist geek/communicator extrodinaire." I don't think that's quite it, but it's a start at a label for myself.

I was happy to re-read Penelope Trunk's piece on networking, as it hearkened back to a classroom discussion we'd had about the need for humor. Trunk writes it's not necessary to be witty, but to be nice and a good listener, to do some good networking. We were talking about humor in the context of blogging, but I think this translates well to blogging, as a way to network: if your blog posts are respectful and well written, and they show that you're paying attention to your blog topic/subject, they are going to be more interesting and valuable to the reader. (Trunk isn't blogging at Yahoo anymore, but you can catch up with her on her own site. She reminded me as well that I need to be commenting on non-school related blog posts as a way to increase my brand visibility. It's just a bit tough right now, because I'm supposed to be doing homework!

This is a bit off topic, but reading the Get More Out of Conferences piece left me looking around for the heavy use of Twitter at conferences these days...and then I realized it was written in 2007. Guess they hadn't heard of Twitter yet! (Ok, it's mentioned, but only as a post event tool)

So, the readings this week, all of them, have been really useful and inspiring. I'm frantically bookmarking the really good stuff in case we lose access to the readings after the course ends. And of course, I'm hoping that I'll remember why I bookmarked them!

What do you think your personal brand is? How are you promoting it? What do you think mine should be saying?

Photo credit Alessandro Pucci