Personal Branding for Librarians
Distinguishing yourself from the professional herd
Posted Tue, 11/06/2012 - 07:03
Printer-friendly versionThe trend of establishing and maintaining a personal brand has been a hot topic for some time with the public at large, traceable as far back as 1937 and Napoleon Hill’s self-help classic Think and Grow Rich, if Wikipedia is to be believed. Unsurprisingly, personal branding has also caught on with librarians, notoriously preoccupied as we are with our professional image, both as we appear to fellow librarians and as we appear to others.
American Libraries columnist Will Manley has traced “image” articles in the library press back to 1949 (AL, June/July 2007, p. 152), and WorldCat retrieved more than a dozen doctoral dissertations that have been published on the topic of the library profession’s image in the last 50 years, including two as far back as 1961 (The Image of the High School Librarian as Reflected in Textbooks on Secondary School Administration by Robert L. Edwards and The Image of the Librarian as Seen in Eight Library Career Novels by Virginia McNeil Speiden). In the late 1980s, the Special Libraries Association, under the leadership of then-president Joe Ann Clifton, even established a Presidential Inter-Association Task Force for the Enhancement of the Image of the Librarian/Information Professional (AL, June 1989, p. 487) (which could have profited from a companion Task Force on Succinct Titles for Functional Work Groups).
Personal branding is sometimes vastly oversimplified to mean little more than not uploading anything to Facebook you wouldn’t want potential future employers to see. But branding proponent Andromeda Yelton, now employed as a technologist at the ebook initiative Unglue.It, notes that personal branding is more proactive and intentional than avoiding lampshade-on-the-head photos.
In 2010, Yelton was a freshly minted librarian entering a gloomy job market. She knew competition would be stiff and decided she “needed to do something to make myself stand out” among oceans of applicants, as she told me via Skype. Her path to employment began with her decision to hone how she was seen by others to maximize her employability and emphasize the unique skills she brings to the job market.
Yelton began her branding experience by asking herself, “What do I want people to believe I can do? How can I get evidence out there? How can I learn how to do things I should know how to do?” This personal inventory allowed her to road test her capabilities, identify and address any gaps, and fine-tune how she presented herself to the job market.
A software programmer, Yelton focused on what she calls evidence-based branding (which in her case meant “writing code that runs on the web somewhere”), blogging, and other evidence of her technical skills. She added, “I don’t want people to take my word for it when I say I can do things, and my brand is centered on the evidence of that.” The position she ultimately landed is a good fit in part, Yelton believes, because of the personal brand she established.
Bohyun Kim, digital access librarian at Florida International University Medical Library in Miami, agrees with Yelton. From Kim’s point of view, “personal branding is about … acknowledging the fact that information about us online will inevitably represent us to others whether we like it or not” and involves “consciously taking charge of that information ourselves.” Kim adds that the many opportunities for social networking only exacerbate the confusion for new librarians.
To help librarians sort through the questions about branding, Kim organized and moderated a heavily attended, well-rated panel on personal branding at ALA Midwinter 2011. She was motivated by conversations in the New Members Round Table Discussion Group of ALA’s Association of College and Research Libraries about the challenges new librarians have getting a toehold in the library world. Kim noted that these challenges went beyond job hunting to concerns such as “how to interact with the profession in general”—including how to participate professionally, how to start a blog, and how to give back to others. In this sense, personal branding can function as a form of self-mentoring, a way to groom yourself into a profession you haven’t broken into yet.
The “exploded crayon” look
Not everyone who appears to have a brand agrees he or she is brand-driven. Ingrid Abrams, a librarian in New York City, has startling pink hair and garbs herself in bright, unusual fabrics and prints, appearing, as she puts it, “like an exploded crayon.” Her unique style gets her blogged and Tumblr’ed around the web.
But Abrams says her primary motivation is her clientele: She is a children’s librarian, and her colorful, fun clothing helps her “break the ice with 2-year-olds.” Abrams also ruminated that she may be reacting to having been a “serious child” and a teenager who went through a Goth stage, during which she wore dramatically dark clothing. Her style has become her de facto brand. After she was reassigned to a library on the tonier Upper East Side, her aunt refitted her in Talbots suits. But her coworkers laughed at her, and the clothes slowly migrated to the back of her closet.
Abrams also noted that as her career evolves, her wardrobe may evolve as well, and she may find herself in a position someday where she will feel out of place in her dress with the pink and red hearts, her dinosaur earrings, and her pink hair (though, personally, I hope not for a while).
Branding has also received its share of criticism. Yelton—echoing the general advice of most branding consultants—says that “your personal brand is an evolving relationship.” But Kate Sheehan, blogger at Loose Cannon Librarian, questions the ability or desirability of brands to evolve. While noting the value of managing your image in a Googleable world—“No one ever had to manage this stuff before”—Sheehan says branding “implies a static nature that is not actually helpful to people.” She adds that she “wouldn’t want to be tied down by the professional thoughts” she had five years ago.
New librarians seeking a clear personal brand should also take note that many librarians graduate from library school certain that they are headed in a particular professional direction, only to be surprised early on by new interests and opportunities—sometimes more than once in a career. I started out as a children’s librarian, a role that lasted exactly six months before I found myself bumping along a path loosely defined by technology and administration. (Within a year, the corduroy and denim jumpers I had sewn the last semester of library school went into the Goodwill box.) If I had overinvested in my “children’s librarian” brand—a great career path in theory, a poor match for me in practice—it would have been much harder to change course not once but several times over the past two decades.
Sheehan also argues that people may overestimate their ability to control how they are perceived by others. She observed that in the commercial world, “actual brands are learning you can’t control how people perceive their products.” Sheehan concluded by asking, “Why are we trying to imitate businesses?” If you’re branding because someone tells you to brand, step back and assess what you’re doing, and why.
Brett Bonfield, despite his own professional visibility as one of the authors at the blog In the Library with the Lead Pipe, also questions personal branding, arguing, “For most people, I think trying to control our own image is a fool’s errand. Most celebrities can’t control their own image, and they have a lot more time, money, and incentive than any of us do.”
Keeping your promise
Authenticity was another concern raised by everyone I spoke with. An oft-cited aphorism is that the image that marketers attach to a brand “is a promise to a customer.” If you create an image, you need to be able to deliver on it.
As an employer, I am all too aware that the hiring process is one gargantuan chimera. With the right references and good interviewing skills, it is possible to glib-talk your way into a job you’re not qualified for (not simply a career stretch, which is good for you, but a huge mismatch, which is not); in the end such a move will make you and everyone else miserable. Don’t be timid about your capabilities—a failing common to many women in librarianship—but don’t build a huge shiny brand based on skill sets you will never have or someone you will never be. That’s not a personal brand: It’s a Potemkin village. As Abrams said, “If you are hired as someone else, do you really want to spend five years pretending to be someone else? And how unhappy is that going to make you? Be yourself, and they will love you as you are.” And if they don’t, find someplace where they will.
Additionally, many wonderful job candidates don’t have distinctive, highly public personal brands for any number of reasons. A strong personal brand can be a sign of a poised, focused candidate who, like Yelton, is framing her public persona in a way designed to help her match up with the right job. But there are also many powerful, effective librarians who do their “moving and shaking” below the radar. We are blessed with an abundance of tremendous librarians in our profession, and quite a few of them lead from behind, through quiet example, low-key strategy, and sotto voce mentoring.
In the end, like many things in life, personal branding is nuanced and ambiguous. It can help job hunters stand out in a sea of applicants and provide new librarians a leg up on professional mores and values. Personal branding can also mask incompetence or mislead a librarian into thinking she has full control over how the world sees her. It’s possible that on a more symbolic plane, personal branding is a collective response to the overwhelming fiscal and technological upheavals of the last decade—a method for asserting control even while we feel the quicksand sucking at our feet.
Personal branding is half crucial life skills and half Barnum & Bailey hucksterism. It’s valuable but hardly mandatory, and not a good fit for everyone. Regardless, because we are librarians—simultaneously preoccupied, perturbed, and fascinated by our own image—personal branding will endure.
KAREN G. SCHNEIDER is a university librarian at Holy Names University in Oakland, California, and blogs at Free Range Librarian. Follow her on Twitter @kgs.
Establishing a Personal Brand
Five Questions to Ask Yourself
- What would an employer learn if he or she googled me?
- What kind of job am I looking for?
- What’s my personal mantra?
- If I asked my friends to describe me, what would they say?
- How can I make myself stand out in a crowded field?
Additional Resources (courtesy of Boyhun Kim)
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“Do you really need to market yourself? Community-verus-local impact”
thewikiman.org/blog/?p=1858 - “Surprise—A Personal Brand Is a By-product!” bohyunkim.net/blog/archives/1048
- Handout from the ACRL New Members Discussion Group (ALA Midwinter 2011)
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Comments
Great Article
Thank you so much for this article. I for one, am all for branding oneself. I am a new librarian and strongly believe that I got my first job as a librarian by properly branding myself. I used blogging and a youtube video that I had made. I would suggest that one use re.vu to create a resume. I suggested it to a friend of mine, and (after a year of applying w/ interview luck) finally landed an interview. The first thing her potential employer asked her was “I love your resume and how did you create it?” Re.vu is an awesome and effective way to visually share your qualifications. I would also suggest about.me and wix.com. This was suggested to me by a faculty member I work with who teaches business/marketing courses.
People have always had personal brands
We’ve just referred to them as one’s “image.” Many people have always taken a proactive approach, but others haven’t. Use of the phrase “personal branding” helps people understand the benefits of a proactive approach. Don’t be fooled, however, into thinking it’s a fad—it’s just a new name for something you should have been doing all along.
Taking a proactive approach to how people think about you is the way to increase the number of doors of opportunity that open for you. Now is the time to take advantage of all the new tools available online, before everyone else does.
Professional "brand" - What are we, cattle?
How sad that we have become victims of the corporatization of America - as in developing a personal “brand.” What are we, cattle? It boils down to one lump of fast-dissolving sugar - the fact that librarianship is on the endangered species list and it’s now survival of the fittest - those with the best “spin” and “personal brand” get the spoils.
Yup, we're cattle!
Amen, brother!
Confused and not in agreement
I tend to sign off as soon as I see a catchy term such as branding. (Wikipedia doesn’t bother me at all. Hey, L of C accepts that as a source for subject prosals now.)
These types of articles confuse me a bit. Is the message here that to be a librarian you should try not to appear as one?
I don’t think we have image issues. We look like librarians for the most part and, sometimes, some people stand out by not doing so - - but in most cases I think that’s because that’s who they are. So it’s the right thing, in my view.
When I walk over to our art department I see faculty who are somewhat similar in style and behavior. Same in the sciences: biologists and geologists look more outdoorsy than do chemists. Econ profs don’t look like English profs.
I want to look like a librarian. I am one.
Daniel
In a word, no.
"These types of articles confuse me a bit. Is the message here that to be a librarian you should try not to appear as one?" The article doesn't imply that anywhere, and in fact the opposite point is made repeatedly.
Vogue like a librarian
Amen, Daniel! We are professionals in our fields, not actors on some reality show. Who cares how we look? What matters is our ability to do our jobs to the best of our ability and uphold our promise to protect and make accessible all the information of the world for those we serve.
quick follow-up
In the last paragraph of the article: “Personal branding is half crucial life skills and half Barnum & Bailey hucksterism. “
How is presenting yourself well a form of hucksterism? I think that’s a terrible professional move or movement. Marc’s comments about presenting yourself well are, in my view, just the opposite of that and much more vital to our long-term success as a profession.
I think we encounter enough hucksterism in the sale’s pitches for vapor-ware, let’s not add that quality to more aspects of our lives.
No quick fixes, no silver bullets...
Hmm… at likely risk of cementing what some may perceive as my “personal brand” — as a cantankerous old fart who “just doesn’t get” contemporary society, technology, the profession, what-have-you — I do worry that for Karen S. and _American Libraries_ so prominently to feature an article on “personal branding” will signal to many that we have latched onto yet another silver bullet that will make the critical difference between finding nirvana as a librarian and flipping burgers at Mickey D.’s.
Yes, there are plenty of disclaimers and caveats in your story, Karen, but I do think we are a profession that tends to grasp at straws and look for magic fixes, when what we need to do is recognize the need for long, careful, and occasionally painful slogging to get ourselves and our profession where we want to be. There are no quick fixes.
Here’s a tiny example of something that the newly-minted librarian can do that would for this potential employer make a huge difference. Rather than engaging in elaborate branding efforts, focus instead on simply being articulate, credible, sensible, and thoughtful. These may sound like really *boring* attributes, but you would not believe the number of resumes and cover letters I’ve seen that I mentally filed under “forget”, because the writer
- misspelled a word (How many times must we say, “Please! Show your letter and CV to someone with a sharp editorial eye before you submit them”?),
- could not express a logical thought in grammatically correct prose,
- could not find a balance between too much and too little detail on her/his resume, or
- provided no sense of values, vision, or why she/he wanted the job… other than the fact that it was a *job*.
These things are not rocket science, and they should certainly not be beyond someone with a library degree. And in most of the places I’ve worked they are — because, paradoxically, so few people seem to take them seriously — the surest strategy to get you noticed. Trust me, these represent a much more effective path to standing out from the crowd than any amount of “branding” you might consider.
Or perhaps they *are* a “brand”? “Brand me competent”?
cheers,
- mt
***Wearing the sensible shoes proudly since 1978.***
Brand me competent!
Marc, I’ll have what you’re having… and perhaps we can share dishes. I did try to make that point in the article (that the best candidate isn’t necessarily the best-branded), but I agree with you that no brand, however shiny, will overcome a poor first impression from the employer’s point of view.
That said, it can be hard for new librarians to distinguish themselves from the crowd. A librarian with a distinctive skill might do well to learn how to emphasize it better.
But are we just avoiding the real issue?
I’ve not missed the irony, Karen, that those most prominently featured in this article represent precisely the sort who probably need “personal branding” *least*. I first heard the name Andromeda Yelton a couple (three?) of years ago when she submitted a superbly written, imaginative paper that was the hands-down winner of that year’s LITA/ExLibris Student Writing Award. I was at the time Editor of _Information Technology and Libraries_, and as you know, the winning entry in the Writing Award competition is published in ITAL. I’ve observed, casually, from afar since then as she has steadily become more and more prominent within LITA. Similarly, with Bohyun Kim: it feels as though I’ve seen her name all over LITA-L (among other venues) for at least a year or two.
My point? I’m willing to bet that neither of them really *needed* a “brand”. They already had one, and it could be very succinctly summarized as energy, imagination, competence. So, I guess we’re back to the original conundrum: if most people don’t observe the basics and only a few do, and if we agree ” that no brand, however shiny, will overcome a poor first impression from the employer’s point of view”, then aren’t those who spend a bunch of effort in branding themselves either wasting their time (because they don’t need to do it) or deluding themselves (because it won’t mask the larger issues they present)?
I might see the matter differently, if I were overrun by throngs of really outstanding applicants, but the sad truth is that in a pool of forty or fifty, I’ve usually struggled to identify the requisite three to fill out the interviewing short-list.
Is it just me, or is there really something terribly wrong with this picture?
I thought I recognized your
I thought I recognized your name from LITA/Ex Libris! I appreciate your kind words.
Maybe I didn’t (don’t) need a brand, but it certainly didn’t feel that way six weeks after I’d started library school in 2008, when the bottom fell out of the world economy. With so many unemployed librarians much more experienced than I, and so few jobs, I felt like I was going to have to work very hard to acquire and to demonstrate skills. In fact, the LITA paper was part of that: a chance to show people I had writing and technology skills. (OK, so it was also an excuse to explore an idea that had been on my mind…)
I don’t believe at all that a brand substitutes for competence. I believe a brand is about *substantiating* competence. It’s about communicating what you can do with enough evidence that people don’t have to take your word for it — they can use their own critical thinking skills and come to their own conclusions. I don’t want anyone to believe I’m a good writer just because I said so. I want them to believe it because they *saw me write*.
And it did, after all, take me a year after library school to land a job.
ADHD
What if your speech, level of activity, and creativity are mainly branded as as poor social skills and you have had confirmation that you are ADHD?
The medication actually worked in the way of helping me to finish all my sentences, avoid interrupting others, and write for longer periods—but, I get heart arrhythmia more frequently for periods up to 15 minutes and that was too scary.
I’ve been thinking about medicating for short intervals. Lately, I lost the chance to interview because I had worked for one day in the position I sought. I had been counseled to be silent, but silence is very difficult when I am anxious and stimulated to explore and plan about a new environment. Silence is also difficult because my second skill is making connections with customers, even the most difficult people.
We need a support group
I find the concept of personal branding to be an interesting up-to-date vehicle for driving a much needed message. As Schneider points out, librarians have had professional self-image issues for a long time. We don’t all need branding as much as we need a support group. For most of us, being the wind beneath our constituents wings is very fulfilling. We need to acknowledge the value that we contribute and communicate it - to ourselves and others.
This is a great article. Thanks for stirring the pot!
this is nothing new
When I was interviewing for my first professional library position, the library school was in the same building as the business school. All the female b-school interviewees were dressed in the same uniform: blue or black suit, white shirt, little string tie, and black heels. The l-school interviewees mostly dressed the same way.
I knew that I was not the “normal” l-school grad, so I decided I would dress the way I felt comfortable: skirt (not black), non-matching jacket, usually a brightly colored shirt, no tie, and non-black flat shoes or very low heels. After all, why look like a cookie-cutter person when I was not going to behave that way.
I interviewed at Bell Labs (horrendously bad fit, but a good practice interview) and a couple of other jobs. Finally I went to a ASIS(T) conference and had a few interviews there. One offered me a job in a solo library (starting the library for a tiny biotech firm). I took it.
Never once did I wear the “uniform;” mostly I wore slacks and a polo-type shirt. Only in one later job did I dress up—NASA—and it didn’t last long. In my final job before going out on my own, I wore jeans and t-shirts—like my clients and unlike the secretaries.
Always a maverick,
Judith Siess
First Chair, Solo Librarians Division, SLA
Commenting to agree with
Commenting to agree with Judith -any librarian worth their salt should know this already. And librarians should be teaching info like this to job hunters. Quite frankly, I’ve been pretty disappointed lately with the catch-up game librarians have been playing and the stale advice publications like American Libraries have been doling out. Maybe my impression of librarians is wrong…but last I checked, lots of people consider us to be info experts (I mean, that’s one of the standards we hold ourselves to), but yet librarians don’t know about personal branding? Either this author is assuming that librarians are WAY behind on trends like this and many people who read this will roll their eyes. Or lots of librarians really are very behind and the author is trying to rectify the situation.
If it’s the former, shame on the author. If it’s the latter, then my years of experience working with woefully un-and-under informed librarians wasn’t the nightmare I’ve been pretending never happened.
More on the Librarian "Uniform"
I attended Library School in the early 1990s - and dressing for/like our customers (clients/users/patrons/etc.) was convered in my management class. In general for interviews, you dress a small step up from what you expect to be everyday wear. When educating myself about job hunting over the years, the best advice was always the most specific. If trying to get into, then .
Anything that tried to be “correct” for all librarians was miserably outdated. Since “librarian” as a job description doesn’t really mean much more than “person who works in a library, hopefully w/ and advanced degree” why should anything else about us be the same for all of us?
The shockingly pink librarian in the article is the best example - it helps her relate to her clientele. A simliar appearance would probably work with a more artsy crowd as well (or better than the b-school buttoned down look/brand would).
I was once told that I was bold to wear a red dress to an interview. It was a nicely tailored linen shirt dress, and I wore a dark blazer over it (don’t recall if it was navy or black). I realized that if that dress (which was very conservative other than the color) was that much of a shock, I might not fit in as well as I thought I would.
perpetuating stereotypes?
Referring to home made Denim and courderoy jumpers as a children’s librarian uniform perpetuates a stereotype, not a brand. Or, is a brand by any other name just an updated stereotype?
Jumpers, stereotypes, catching up
I should note that my jumpers certainly were based on a stereotype — one that both reflected what I saw at the time, and one that I had in my head. The latter was one reason why that role was such a poor fit. “I thought it would be X” is a phrase I’ve heard repeatedly from people who end up changing gears professionally.
You lost me at the beginning,
You lost me at the beginning, by citing Wikipedia as a source.
If you can’t be bothered to verify information in a credible resource, why should I listen to anything else you have to say?
The Wikipedia article in
The Wikipedia article in question cites a number of sources I followed (by the way, Beverly is an excellent fact-checker, despite my typo with Mr. Hill — she even made me go back and double-check the number of dissertations I cited, and when I had trouble finding the 12th, she found it for me!).
Not all Wikipedia pages are acceptable quality — several years back I wrote about Wikipedia’s problematic editorial model for an IT publication, and I certainly review every page and then follow citations — but this page, at the time I looked at it, was satisfactory. I avoid being reflexively anti-Wikipedia… not a good match for my (somewhat vague) brand.
While I’m at it, big thanks to the ALA Library for their help. Like most writing projects, this represents a lot of background research, some of it based on very scarce and old publications.
throw out the baby with the bathwater much?
You rejected this whole finely written piece because of a wikipedia reference in the opening paragraph? Um, are you familiar with the phrase, “throw out the baby with the bathwater?” If not, may I refer you to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throw_out_the_baby_with_the_bath_water.
Like :)
Like :)
Excellent Article
As someone fairly new to the library field, this is an excellent article. I spent over a year trying to perfect my “brand” as I looked desperately for an entry level library job after graduate school.
There’s so much conflicting information regarding the “do’s and don’t’s” of job seeking and they can vary by field. What’s right in one field or even for a certain position, may not be right for another. I specifically liked your reference to the software programmer who has a clear way of creating an evidence based resume while someone right out of graduate school with a general MLIS (like myself) found that more difficult to do.
Your last paragraph and set of questions for establishing a personal brand seem to sum up the concept quite nicely and even though I’m getting settled into my field post-grad school job, I’ll be thinking about those questions to update my resume for the future.
As the software nerd in
As the software nerd in question, it’s worth noting that I have an MLS too, and see myself primarily as a librarian, though I happen to have ended up in a role with a lot of web development.
I do think some skills are easier to demonstrate in a clear, evidence-based way than others — software and writing are big parts of what I do and I can just put them online, which is a little harder to do if your primary skill is, say, leadership or advocacy or really awesome story times. But I still think the principle holds: it’s important to provide evidence of your skills (so others can evaluate them), and to think about what sorts of evidence you CAN provide, and how to generate that evidence if you don’t have it yet.
Evidence can mean putting the work itself online where applicable, but there’s lots of other ways, too! It can lie in the references of people who have worked with you, in videos or photos of your work, in news articles covering your impact, et cetera. What are you good at? What are the skills that keep showing up in job descriptions for the type of stuff you want to do? (Hopefully these lists overlap a lot. :) What sorts of proof can you generate that you have these skills, and how can you put the proof in a place people can see it?
The kinds of proof that can be generated depend on the kinds of skills, but everything you’re good at CAN produce some externally visible result.
Oops!
Another typo I should have caught: it’s Napoleon Hill (not Napolean).
Our spelling Waterloo
C'est fixé.
A small correction.
The 8th paragraph needs a correction. “the New Members Round Table discussion group of ALA’s Association of College and Research Libraries” should be corrected to “the New Members Discussion Group (NMDG) of ALA’s Association of College and Research Libraries.” (ACRL NMDG is not to be confused with NMRT.) Thank you!
Oops!
Thanks, Bohyun. I've corrected the now-oh-so-easy-to-see error. (Should have made use of those “personal brand” specs.)
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