Are you branded?

I follow with interest the blogs of several of my former colleagues.

One young woman who is an exceptional practitioner of her trade is Stacey of the Librarians are go blog. In her latest blog post Stacey talks about the importance of branding for Librarians in a report of a conference she recently attended.

If you read Stacey's post and substitute Genealogist and Genealogy for Librarian and Libraries you will find what she writes most relevant to our situation.

In summary Stacey suggests:

1. Get yourself either a memorable name (obviously some are more memorable than others) or a memorable handle. Use it in all the realms that you want to be linked to your brand. 
2.  Be careful to maintain your brand, only write/appear as your handle when it is aligned with what you are trying to project about your brand
3.  Monitor your brand, create an alert so that you know when your brand name is being talked about or used, monitor traffic on blogs or websites, monitor when people attribute your thoughts in tweets or other social media. This also helps you to see what your intended or unintended audience's interest are
4.  Take some time to look at the branding of others and notice when it comes up. You can learn a lot by watching these people