Note: I started writing this post over a month ago during my winter holidays, but things sort of got away from me and I had no chance to complete and publish it until now. Gomen nasai.

Personal Branding: What’s private, what’s public? I’m sitting here by the beach in Hoian, Vietnam. The surf is crashing, the surfers are crashing. The computer thankfully, is not.

It feels wrong in many ways to be thinking about personal branding and online presence while in a place like this, but that contrast is sort of where my thoughts are on it now anyways. The act of doing it illustrates elements of my thoughts and concerns about the act of doing it. In a previous post I started to reflect on personal branding, and particularly focused on that little square centimeter of screen-space, my avatar. I got some really interesting feedback and discussion out of it. Immediately, my friend Kevin asked the question: “Unless you’re selling something, is there a point in having consistent or meaningful self-branding?”.

Awakening the Fire, by Kevin Ledo

Kev is an artist, usually a painter, and has been pretty active in promoting his work online. In his work, he most certainly can benefit from online promotion, in finding his audience. Mine is different. As an educator, I’m not necessarily driven to find a broad audience. My main audience is my students. Until a few years ago for most educators it was our students, and perhaps our immediate peers, who would have been the only audience. But now, I feel those lines are not so clear.

This blog is a clear manifestation of the multiplicity of audiences. I write it as a reflection, for my own benefit, no doubt. But it is online. It is public. I value -and to a degree expect- interaction with others around these ideas. My blog is not a private journal. It may focus largely on subjects related to education, but the interactions and readership I’ve seen clearly stretch beyond that field, and issues pertaining to education are clearly of interest to a wider spectrum of people. As I wrote about here, the increasing ways in which my life unfolds online, through twitter, facebook, other communities and now this blog, means that inevitably there is a pressure of convergence between professional and personal life. Hence the illustration of my sitting on a beach putting down these thoughts. A personal time, given over to professional thought. The more online I am, in more and more ways, the more transparent my life becomes, and the more the professional/personal lines blur. Sort of whether I like it or not.

So, in answer to Kev’s question, I suppose that subject to the expectations of your profession, when you interact online you may end up feeling as though you’re always potentially selling yourself to a future opportunity. In education at least, it seems that the huge majority of employers use a range of online tools to learn more about their potential peers. And knowing this, I can’t help but consider them part of my possible audience. That doesn’t mean that I need to edit my work to meet their imagined expectations. But I expect that everything about me that’s ever surfaced online will be permanently available. Transparency is here, no matter what you may delete (check the Way Back Machine for a rude awakening), and I do believe that’s mostly a good thing. And so my brand, whatever that is, gets increasingly complex.

Branding may no longer be this simple, but I think it's just as permanent. But why those cowboys want to brand their dog is anyone's game. Image: The Branding Iron by Thomas Hawk on Flickr.

A sticky point for me is the term branding I think. I like the way Elif put it to me, as a misinterpretation or exaggeration of the idea of presentation. It may be semantic, but it sticks with me. The idea of my needing a brand seems disingenuous. The notion of a brand feels like a catchy way to summarize myself for a presumed audience. Concern about branding seems to suggest spending increasing time and energy promoting, contextualizing and positioning what I do, as opposed to just spending more energy doing it.

Branding for me was easier in the past. When you’d search for my name, there I was, right at the top. The rise of a certain senatorial candidate from Maryland put a decisive end to that prominence. For a while he asked me to put a link on the front page of my site (formerly at http://www.jamieraskin.com) and then, when I lazily let it lapse for a few days, he registered the domain. I was not pleased. But if I ever wanted something to bury references to me online, having a senator with your name helps a fair bit.

If my brand, such as it is, is inevitably going to come gasping to the surface, I feel the need to take it by the reins. [pinterest]