About Your Strand
August 24, 2011
MOST IRISH people driving past trees adorned with strands of clothing know what it represents. And it's also true that people can often summarise their colleagues or their favourite things just by a single throwaway line.
It's important to consider this line of questions: "When someone speaks about you to someone else, what do they say? How would they refer to you? What would be the brief way they sum you up?"
If your gadgets define you, then you might be stereotyped as an Apple or Android fanboy. If you consider yourself "True Red" in Ireland, people will probably think "Cork" or "Liverpool" or even "ManU."
When writing an "About" page, you need to consider your single strand. You need to think that if you hung one set of rags into a tree, what would it represent. I wonder if I should revise my various about pages and ensure they coalesce around who I really am and what values I espouse. I'm different on LinkedIn from what people see on Google Plus. I try to be a dog on Flickr. I identify myself as being older than my mother on Facebook. At the time of my writing this post, my Typepad profile looks and feels eight years old.
I think it makes more sense articulating a well-focused attribute on each of these social networks. I'm looking with interest to the "about" pages that our creative multimedia students set up in Limerick Institute of Technology.