Should I get my own website?

Over the last few months, I’ve been building up my profile a fair bit (in RL that is), speaking at conferences, helping running workshops, training people and so on. While I’m currently employed (in a safe job) and there is no immediate need therefore to ‘sell myself’, I have been wondering whether now is the time to create a ‘proper’ website with all the stuff I’m good at / have done career wise and that also aggregates some of my social profiles (not this blog naturally, as it’s my safe haven and therefore anonymous! Hopefully you won’t know who I am 😛 ).

Image via Wikipedia

Let’s look at the PROS and CONS:

PROS:

• ‘personal branding’ – (wank term, hate it). finally everything about me in one place
• medium-long term marketing of my services (if I ever go down the self-employed route, a website with a history will look better)
• improve tech knowledge – would be great to run wordpress on my own server for a change
• digital marketing – I know all about this as that’s the area I work in, so could set it all up with Google Analytics etc. and use myself as the ‘project’. I.e. it would be a good showcase.

CONS:

• can’t really be fucked. takes time and effort (I’m working on average 65 hours / week already)
• I’d rather play games or read in my spare time
• once it’s up, it’ll need updating. to be taken seriously and for SEO, I probably need to start blogging on there
• I wouldn’t know what domain to get (I did have one in mind but that’s already taken)
• I don’t actually need it right now – I’ve got an effective Linkedin profile that already does some of what my own website would do (tie in social accounts and so on)
• I REALLY can’t be fucked

Deleting Facebook Profile

I think I’m going to delete my Facebook profile. In recent months, I haven’t been logging in much at all – and to be honest, I’ve never used it much in the first place.

I’m a bit of an antisocial person and that includes online and lately I’ve been getting too many people bothering me (hehehe… it’s not that many, but too many for me!!). For instance, come Xmas, you get virtual Xmas cards on Facebook (fuck off ppl!). Then I get invites to join various shitty support groups such as ‘I lost someone I love to cancer’ etc. and to be honest

EVERYONE CAN JUST FUCK OFF!*

The only ‘social network’ I’ll be staying on is wer-kennt-wen, as it’s non-demanding. Also I’ve linked my yahoo account to it which I never check, so I can pretty much ignore it most of the time 😉

For professional reasons, I shall stay with linkedin and with Xing. But that’s about it. And I quite like my twitter so I don’t mind keeping that up. But twitter (non-anonymous) and this blog (anonymous) is about as much as I’ll want to communicate online.

The deletion shall happen some time during my Xmas break. I shall disappear into thin ether 🙂

*no offence. It just isn’t me. Not your fault, pal.

lenina is being Headhunted

Well, not quite. But for the third time since February, I’ve been approached about a possible job opportunity. this time via LinkedIn. It’s quite exciting and links to my thinking about spreading myself horizontally a bit more (online! filthy minds!). All this despite the fact that my online spread isn’t that good at the moment and it’s definitely on my ToDo list for, say, the next few months.

The thing is that I don’t really want to leave my current job as such. I still enjoy it, it’s close to where I live, and it does have some good perks (money is good too). However, there is a frustration in that I’m not in a position with a lot of influence or power. I’m not used to having to justify what I do and to make a business case for every single thing (having to justify why we need Firefox for instance, when all they had was IE6 FFS). They’re not very progressive and it stifles my creativity and my mind. It’s like having to deal with slow people, or children, carefully explaining everything from the very beginning to people who don’t have a fucking clue.

So, I was going to stay because of the perks and the job security, because I like the product/my colleagues, and, because I can learn a lot after all (e.g. accepting people who have expertise in other areas, working together with them towards a common goal etc.). However, in moments where I’m banging my head against the wall or having to deal with ignorance and slowness,  I feel held back and that my brain is withering away.

I ‘ve always been on the edge of whatever I do, and the success of a PhD means I have less respect for people who happen to be above me in the pecking order (basically I think I can do whatever they do and probably better). If I had a job where I had more responsibility and deciding power, and where people would trust that I deliver the goods, I think I’d be happier. I just don’t like answering to people too much, especially when they have no clue about my specific area of knowledge and expertise. It’s like me telling a car mechanic about alloy wheels.

I’m a bit more open to potentially being headhunted, then. It doesn’t have to be now – but I will work on my ‘personal brand’ and just keep my eyes open for whatever may come along.