Starting a new blog in January included some careful thinking about my personal brand, but six months in is a good time to evaluate how things are going. The Continuing Professional Development program cpd23 this week is up to Thing 3: Consider Your Personal Brand and has some terrific advice and great links for doing that.

It turns out that the decision I made twenty years ago to use my birth name as a middle name was brilliant for making me findable when the World Wide Web was spun. There are other Joy Moll-s in the world (one seems to do quite wonderful things with dogs), but if there are any other Joy Weese Moll-s, I don’t know about them. Blogging frequently (every day in June, thanks to #blogjune) tends to put my blog pretty central in the search results for my name.

Profersonal is a new word to me, but that describes well what I want to achieve with my online presence — a warm and engaging personality with a full life circling around books and social media. Exploring the word profersonal sent me to Jason Seiden’s site which I’ve now subscribed to so I can learn to be more deliberate in my profersonal persona (that was hard to type — I’m guessing #fail would be the result of an attempt to say it three times fast).

I don’t have an objection to using my photo as an online identity except for the minor problem of not having one that I currently like. In the meantime, I have the purple J gravatar that I do like and putting it on a tote bag for the Book Blogger Convention seemed to work well. With the kind of memory I have, I’m more likely to remember symbol gravatars than face photos, so this may be a good identifier for a certain segment of the population. Here’s the best of both worlds, a photo of me with my gravatar tote bag:

One of the suggestions that Jo Alcock made in the Thing 3: Consider Your Personal Brand post was to ask others about your personal brand. So, what do you all think? What does the look and feel of my blog say about me? If you know me on Twitter (@joyweesemoll) and/or Facebook (Joy Weese Moll) how do I come across in those mediums? Am I consistent? Should I be?