When starting to develop your online brand, there is many things to consider, including how the world sees you. The first thing anyone looking at your public profiles will see is your avatar - the image you use to define who you are. As there are so many different social networks or areas with profiles, it’s easy to have fragmentation in your public avatar. A quick scan of my profiles has lead to quite a few:
- Ghost
- Github
- Gravatar
- Google+ (does anyone still use this? I just post to it to help google index my posts)
Across these I had 4 different avatars - all of which are probably not good for a public brand. Two have me with my daughter - I love her to bits but I’m representing me publicly, and don’t want my family to be involved in my brand and want to protect their privacy. The other 2 have beer in my hand, including a nice one of me a bit drunk at the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens. There is nothing wrong with beer, and nothing wrong with getting drunk (responsibly of course) but again with a public profile it’s good to avoid anything that could predjudice people against me - it’s easy to look at one photo and make assumptions about the people in it.
My new avatar was cropped from a photo taken of me recently - I did a scan of all my photos to find something suitable. Not overly boring and smart - this does represent me as a person, not me in a suit being formally interviewed - but shows a bit of personality.
