• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

Personal ‘brand management’ for social literacy

April 12, 2012 By Anne 2 Comments

The cynical way to say it might be that we’re all our own best spin doctors these days. There are a lot of ways to say it, though – e.g., protecting one’s public image, reputation management, maintaining your personal brand, or just online spin control – but there’s nothing cynical or unsavory about this skill, and it’s a life skill, not just an online one. Though it’s an important one for social media users to develop. The need for it reflects badly on social media only if we choose to see it that way. Because there are upsides to this call for self- and other-awareness, to having to think about how we present ourselves and how we appear in relation to others.

All student athletes at Pennsylvania State University have a required course their freshman year which includes image management in social media, PennLive.com reports. Taught by the assistant director at the university’s academic support center for student athletes, Sue Sherburne, it focuses on what their personal brand is. This would also make for a great family or classroom discussion for media and social literacy. Sherburne asks her students to come up with “four anchor words” that express who they are. She told PennLive that those four words are usually their core values. Then she has them take each word – for example, “integrity” – and evaluate their Facebook timeline, Twitter page, photo albums, etc. with that value in mind. The students are asked, “Do those posts, messages, and tweets express that value?” In the class, and I think ideally within a family, this isn’t a one-shot conversation. Sherburne said that students are asked throughout the semester how whatever they post online or say and do offline fits their “brand.” Whether we think of it in that commercial way, which is entirely appropriate for top athletes, or as the idea of being true to ourselves – face-to-face as well as in digital spaces – this is important social literacy for success in all aspects of life.

Share Button

Filed Under: reputation, Risk & Safety, Social Media Tagged With: media literacy, online reputation, reputation management, social literacy

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. Aggregated extortion, digital footprints' dark side & second chances | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    February 26, 2014 at 7:10 am

    […] “‘Personal brand’ management for social literacy” […]

    Reply
  2. Self-definition in social media: I am not my online profile | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    January 6, 2013 at 11:02 pm

    […] terms for (and lessons about) identity management online: “personal brand management” or “public image management” Permalink Post a comment — Trackback URI RSS 2.0 […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

NFN in your in-box:

Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

Subscribe to my
RSS feed
Follow me on Twitter or even better:
NEW: Follow me on MASTODON!
Friend me on Facebook
See me on YouTube

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

Categories

Recent Posts

  • Why I struggle mightily with the new Utah law
  • A solution for ‘awful but lawful’
  • New global service for getting nudes off the Internet
  • Then there’s the flip side of ChatGPT
  • For SID 2023: What youth want ‘online safety’ to teach
  • ChatGPT for media literacy training
  • Future safety: Content moderators and digital grassroots justice
  • Mental health 2023, Part 1: Youth on algorithms

Footer

Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for tweets, posts on our Facebook page, and key commentaries from Anne on her page at Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

Categories

  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research

ABOUT

  • About NFN
  • Supporters
  • Anne Collier’s Bio
  • Copyright
  • Privacy

Search

Subscribe



THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
Copyright © 2023 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.