Thing 3: Your Professional Brand

I have been busy both at work and home the last few weeks, so I have been completing the tasks for Things 3, 4 and 5 slowly but at the same time.

When the course started I was in the middle of doing a bibliometric report. I published my first blog post the day I submitted it.  I was filling in for my supervisor who was away for the last four weeks, so work has been busy.

I have been on LinkedIn for years and have used it on again off again. I updated my profile by adding my most recent job and title and also fixing some errors I noticed. Click here to view my LinkedIn page.

Then I went looking for a new photo... I have never been too good at getting photos off of people after they take them and I discovered the most recent photo I had were from a year ago and was not suitable to use on LinkedIn. 

We tried the camera on both my partner’s phone and mine, but because of the lighting in the house we could not get a picture that was not under/over exposed. So, then I go looking for a camera and discover that it has been taken on holidays and the only other option is broken. I arranged to borrow a camera and half an hour later we had a picture.

I have been in many different professional profile platforms and I have found the about.me platform the most annoying to fill out, but managed to complete the profile. Click here to view my about.me page.

When I joined about.me the first thing it asks is for a landscape photo (which I did not have)...I spend a few moments wondering what to do until I spot the leave until later button very small in the corner.

The rest should have been straight forward adding content about myself but was not as easy as it seemed. Half of this was as expected easy to fill in, this was the side bar profile, arranging the page layout and choosing the colour scheme I wanted.

The annoying part started when I started to fill in my information into the backstory section. The first time I tried to fill this out I was getting an error message and all the information I had just added was wiped. This happened three times and I decided to try again another day.

The second time was a bit better. But not by much I got an error message every two to three minutes. Upon receiving the message no matter which option I hit the page would reload and ninety percent of the time I would have to input all the data again. Five percent of the time I would only have to re-input some of the data. For the last five percent the data thankfully was complete.

I wonder did anyone else have this issue when using about.me?
It was not internet connection problems because I tried both a wired and wireless connections and internet ping test said I had full internet connection. I also tried two different computers.

The only straight forward thing I did for my backstory was choosing the colour scheme. I apologise if there are any typos in the data on my about.me page but after taking two hours to do, I decided I had spent enough time on the page.

What I thought was going to be the easy parts for these tasks turned out to be the hardest.

Part 3: 23 Things Course Rudaí 23.. 
The tasks: Create a LinkedIn and/or about.me profile, join Rudaí23 LinkedIn group and say hi, and create your professional brand (i.e. update my photo and information)