Personal branding, why bother? I am so glad that you asked that question. For me, personal branding is just as much about determining internally what's important to you, what your values are, what kind of work you wanna do. As it is about the external, of promoting yourself and making it easy for the right kinds of people to find you for the right kinds of work. If you've looked at all through this course, at the assignments and learning objectives. You already know that particularly in the first part of the course, we're doing a lot of work on figuring out what makes you tick. How your personality is organized and what your values are. And I believe that that's important, because you have to know all of that and you have to have it clearly in your mind before you can go out and talk to other people about those things. So that is definitely one reason why branding could certainly be of benefit to you. Some of the exercises you'll find may not even be things that you will ever share as part of your brand. They serve more just as an internal road map for yourself. So that's one reason that personal branding is really important. And why you should bother. Some other reasons include the fact that building a brand will help differentiate you from people who do similar work. It will get your name out there and you will become associated with certain qualities. And we'll talk more about that later, but differentiating you from the crowd, very important. Building reputation, kind of similar to that. But you want when people to hear your name, you want them to associate you with certain kinds of things. For instance, I am associated amongst medical librarians with reputation management, with the work that I have done there. I'm actually famous amongst a very small group of people on the internet, I hope you're very impressed. But seriously, as far as I know I am the only person in the world of medical librarianship, amongst librarians anyways, who is doing reputation management work, and has been doing it for close to five years now. Now, watch, I'll get an angry email from somebody in this world who's like, I've been doing reputation management for 80 years. And in advance, I'm sorry if I get that wrong. But as far as I know, I am the only person, and that's not by accident. It's not by accident that medical librarians whom I've never met hear of reputation management and think of me. Or hear my name and say, oh, doesn't she do stuff with reputation management, or something like that? I don't make it a secret. When I'm giving a presentation somewhere, or I updated my class, I'll provide a link to the slide deck via social media, and I share that. I want to get that word out because I believe in the work that I do. I believe very firmly and very strongly that reputation management is important. Now, I have some colleagues who believe that it's kind of fake and don't think it's that important, and I respectfully disagree with them. I think that everybody should have the opportunity to put their best foot forward, and to always consider what they look like to other people. To make sure that the image that they are projecting matches their internal values. So I happen to believe it's very important, so when I do something new with it, I want to share that with people. And sharing that work, sharing the slide decks, sharing articles not written by me, but on the topic. That has helped to build my reputation in that area as someone who does reputation management the right way, and by that I mean ethically. And that has led to speaking engagements at other institutions, it's led to webinars. It's led to all kinds of opportunities, which is the way that this whole personal branding thing is supposed to work. Another aspect of why you should do personal branding is related to those, and again, that's providing awareness. I've said it before, I will say it again. I believe that everybody in this world has a gift to offer the world. And part of that is getting that word out, that hey, I have this gift, and I want to give this gift. So you're providing awareness to people, not only of about yourself, but you are gonna pick up on things. And certain things are gonna catch your eye like different articles that you read. That nobody else will necessarily pay any attention to you. And you can pass that on via social media, your different communication plans. And really help other people out, because they're not necessarily going to be in tune to the same things that you are because you're looking at it through a particular lens. So those are the reasons why I think that you should consider building your personal brand. And I'm sure there are a ton more and I hope that you will share those with the community. Again, we wanna build a really strong, supportive community, we wanna help each other build our brands. So any experience that you have with that, please share that with us. I hope this was helpful.
