Own it! Be professional AND personal!
During Friday’s class on owning our digital reputation, Professor Allison Kluger discussed the concept of becoming conscientious content creators for our digital reputations. Various biases define how we can be perceived by others online (first impression bias, negative impression bias, fixed impression bias). Anything we post these days lives on into eternity. Thus, conscientiously choosing what content to post is key to upholding our digital reputations.
I couldn’t help but draw parallels to a class I had just a few days earlier on building and broadcasting our brand on social media. In that class, Gary Vaynerchuk and Tyra Banks bestowed some much needed wisdom upon our class:
1. Technology is not changing us, it is exposing us. Take advantage of your social media presence before it takes advantage of you.
2. Know yourself and be self-aware. Reverse engineer your ambitions and choose social media actions to match those ambitions. A visible social media presence isn’t for everyone, so pick certain platforms that serve you and abandon the rest.
3. Always think about your audience before posting — both content and context. Different platforms have different audiences. Use this to your advantage to integrate into the mindset and psychology of your viewers.
4. Don’t change who you are. Think about the room you’re in.
I’ve always thought of digital platforms as a means for expressing my personal self rather than my professional one. I keep my Instagram and Facebook accounts private and use them to post photos for family and friends with “punny” captions. I experimented with Twitter in college, but my tweets have been mostly non-existent since. LinkedIn is the only platform where I express my professional self to the world (but I only created a LinkedIn profile as recently as 2014 and view it infrequently). And this is my first post to Medium, so we’ll see how this pans out… ;)
Both of these classes got me thinking: Should I try to craft a more holistic personal and professional brand through social media to enhance my digital reputation? I think the answer is yes, but it depends on the platform and what I want to get out of it.
Let’s start with Instagram because it’s my favorite. :) I’ve refrained from posting professional content on Instagram because I have assumed these posts will be uninteresting to family and friends. I also feel “braggy” posting content related to recognition or achievement. But with Gary V’s encouragement, I decided to test the boundaries and repost an image from @stanfordbusiness on my own account. I received strong support and encouragement from family and friends and even added my own “punny” trademark to make it my own. If I can conscientiously add professional content to the mix of personal posts, I can share more facets of myself and join my personal and professional selves together to create a more robust and well-rounded digital presence.
So with that in mind, let’s check out LinkedIn. Hari Srinivasan visited class on Friday and gave us tips on how to create a profile that will maximize views and engagement from others on the LinkedIn platform. I questioned him about this metric for success because I often get seemingly random requests from other — mostly male — LinkedIn users that I ignore. Why would I want to connect with strangers online? Why are they even trying to connect with me in the first place? Hari’s response was that LinkedIn works to limit this “noise” but relies on its users to compose their own networks how they see fit.
My LinkedIn network is purely professional and I think that is the reason I feel so personally distant to it. It feels sterile to me; I simply report my “baseball stats” and show little of myself beyond the surface. In an attempt to match the professional with the personal, I updated my profile picture with a recent image (the same photo from Instagram) and added a background picture with an image from one of my favorite places (Mendocino, CA). With these personal photos, my LinkedIn profile is starting to feel more like me. By conscientiously making it more personal, I don’t detract from the professional side of myself. I actually enhance it.
I plan to continue to hone and tweak how I present myself both personally and professionally on all the social platforms that I care about. Thank you Allison, Gary, Tyra and Hari for opening my window of opportunity to be a conscientious content creator. I truly believe this will give me a leg up as I head back into the “real world” upon graduation next month!
