#Thing13 Reflective Post

 

As a reluctant and intermittent user of social media platforms over the years, doing the Rudai 23 course has given me an opportunity to revisit and rethink how I might benefit from more interaction with said platforms. I am in the position where my current job does not require a strong public social media presence, and in fact, it can often be discouraged in a way as I work for a large corporate with very firm ideas about its branding and image, and where social media presence is strongly monitored by a marketing team. Therefore, my “personal brand” has to be mindful of situation, which is why I created a Twitter bio that does not name my place of work and makes sure to mention that all views are personal ones. In a way it is limiting as a professional and I am curious how others negotiate their private and professional selves when creating an online personal brand?

However, this does not mean that social media and online networking and collaboration has no place in my day to day affairs. It is undoubtedly one of the most current and easily accessed sources of up-do-date information, I monitor a lot of websites, government departments etc for their latest updates and press releases and quite often these can be found on Twitter or Facebook feeds before they hit the various organisations’ websites. For this reason, I found the exercise in following various users on Twitter quite interesting and it is something I will try to hone and fine tune in the coming months so that I have a feed that will point me towards developments that I need to know about in a timely fashion.

Networking is something that I find challenging, and I am of the mindset that maybe Twitter or LinkedIn are things that I should be using more in order to reach out to other institutions and potential collaborators in a simple and informal way. This part of the course has not changed my mind on the value of Facebook as a professional tool for one’s personal brand – certainly useful for your overall Organisation to have a Facebook Page, and to use it to highlight Events etc and also just to maintain visibility in front of potential and current users. But for the individual, I still think that it’s function is largely personal over professional.

I have already covered the collaborative tools in my previous blog post so will not repeat it all here, but I definitely find them a positive and hope they continue to develop and improve.

Overall, I am still just “dipping my toes” and feeling my way around how I want to present myself to the online world and how I can best use others’ online presences to my benefit. It is definitely an ongoing process I think and not something that should be done in haste – it is something that should be carefully crafted to your individual requirements.

Thing 12 – Collaborative Tools

#thing12

The last collaborative project that I worked on was a report we were commissioned to write for an external organisation. Some of the work was face to face, as it was the responsibility of my department to produce the final report, but also some of it was virtually as other contributors came from other departments, some of which were in physically different offices.   It was a rather large and complex report, but as a large company we use iManage, which means files are saved in locations that everyone can access, there is version control on documents as well as the ability so see previously saved versions, there is access control based on user permissions, and along with the usual track lining facilities in Microsoft Word, it made the process a lot easier to manage.

However, there is  still a lot of “manual” control over a project this large – the report was broken down into chapters,  diagrams and graphs were doled out to marketing teams to create, and dropped in at the end, the bibliography and footnotes had to be carefully cultivated from all the disparate parts. In hindsight, and now having done the Rudai 23 online networking portion of the course, I think perhaps something like Trello might have kept a better handle on some elements of the process – and helped with the last minute checks that everything was in and in order before we reached the deadline!

On a more personal level I have used Google Docs for planning my sister’s hen weekend – a more formidable task that you might at first expect – but it was an excellent way of keeping tabs on all participants and which parts of the weekend they were included in, who needed accommodation etc.

Overall I would say that using a collaborative tool is most definitely a positive, especially if you might have any “rogue elements” in your team – e.g. the person who is just not good at communicating what needs to be done, what has been changed etc.  Or the person who is not good at consistently saving and backing up their work.  Or just for the simple task of not losing sight of a “Master Document”!

#thing10 #thing11 #Rudai23

Check out my twitter account and personal branding bio @LindaGorIre