Making a difference with digital media

Greg Schwartz – Personal Branding
You don’t own your own identity – personal branding is “stuff you do to present yourself to others”
Tips:
• Have a home base – someplace online that you can point people to – blog, webpage, ClaimID page, etc.
• Own your user name – consider what name you want to use carefully – not necessarily your own name
• Aggregate your lifestream – FriendFeed is a good single place for people to go to find out everything that you are doing.
• Join the conversation – make thoughtful comments, be as much the ‘real you’ as you can
• Follow what others are saying about you – Google alerts, technorati, twitter searches, etc.
• Be Authentic – be real, don’t effect an online persona
Experiences Implementing – Joy Marlow and Sam Davis, Columbus Metropolitan Library
Challenges in integrating 2.0 tools & tech into their websites – selling ideas to administrators and other staff members, our own learning curve, keeping up with new technology, bringing the customer along, being at the mercy of 3rd party vendors, terms of use issues (fair use of photographs, requirements for a linkback for some services, etc.), and unclear strategy. Solutions for those challenges include engaging your staff (learn & play program, based on the LL2.0 program from Helene Blowers), engage your customers (trust your users, listen to what they are saying – CML used a “power tools” page with a blog where they occasionally ask what tools they are using and where they would like to see the library), believe in what you do (be able to show how everyone will benefit because of your idea), and beta/experiment (test things and manage expectations).
They followed up with some tips & tricks to help you get through all of the above issues. Prototyping will help you sell your ideas to admin and staff without having to devote a lot of time. Let your ideas/applications be torn apart – put it out there, let customers use it and get feedback. Do not be afraid to fail – sometimes things don’t work, just take it down and learn from the experience – but at least try.