building a brand

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You already have a brand! Here are 5 ways to influence it... (#CILIPNPD12)

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Yesterday I presented at possibly my favourite library event of all, CILIP's New Professionals Day. I love it because it gets so many people fired up and energised, and there's so much enthusiasm about the place. I was honoured to do the first talk of the day, and my presentation was about two things: firstly the fact that you don't have to be a super-librarian to get on in your career, and secondly that we all have a personal brand so if you do want to try and build that brand, there are steps you can take to do so positively.

I wanted to dispel some myths (particularly that we all have to aspire to be like the really well-known, uberlibrarians), following on from this blog post about whether or not we really have to market ourselves at all, which explains a lot of the stuff I talked about yesterday.

Here's the presentation (works best on full-screen):

You already have a brand! Here are 5 ways to influence it... on Prezi

I did a couple of things I've not done before, and I'll be doing both again as I liked how they worked - I got people to talk to each other (I know, hardly revolutionary is it! But I'd not done it before in a talk, only in a workshop scenario) for two minutes about what 'brand' really meant and it really seemed to energise the room, and I asked people to tweet definitions too, using some software in the Prezi which picked up the tweets in real-time. If you want to try the Twitter thing, here's what I used to do it.

There was some brilliant live-tweeting of the event (particularly by Annie_Bob) and people really seemed to get what I was trying to say, and be re-assured by it, which is great. In some cases (I'm looking at you Bethan Ruddock :) ) people actually restructured what I'd said into far better and more eloquently put points!  So as so much is unsaid in the presentation materials themselves, I put together a Storify of people's tweets.

Annie Johnson has also put together Storified boards of lots of the talks and workshops across the day, which can be found here.

What I was really trying to say...

Believe it or not, despite having thought about it loads, talked to other librarians about it loads, blogged about it previously and prepared a whole keynote on it, I have just now, this morning, 3 days after the event, come up with a sentence which encapsulates what I was really getting at with this first part of this presentation:

Ultimately, what gets you the job which pays your wages, is your ideas and the stuff on your CV which is relevant to that particular job. The whole process of building a brand, marketing yourself: that's a means to the end of getting more opportunities to add exciting and relevant ideas and things on your CV, rather than an end in itself.

Other blogposts about the New Professionals Day

If you've written a review or account of the day on your blog, let me know in the comments and I'll try and add to this post and collect all the links together.

So far I've found these:

The theme seems to be that people are taking actions based on what they've heard and done on the day, which is exactly what an event like this should make happen.

Thanks to Richard, Matthew and the other organisers for such a great day! I really enjoyed the other workshops and talks, particularly Emma Illingworth's session on CPD: she's a great teacher, skillfully letting us feel like we were coming up with the ideas... Her point was that we knew all this stuff already - sometimes, though, it's really helpful to have all the stuff we know drawn out of us, collated, and expressed.