Thing 3: Branding

My post on this topic is a bit late, and not just because I've been away on a mini-vacation to Denver, Colorado. This is an idea that I've struggled with for a while. I've always wanted to come up with a catchy name a la The Unquiet Librarian (Buffy Hamilton) or The Daring Librarian (Gwyneth Jones). Unfortunately, these, and other equally awesome "brands" are in use. :) I think the problem for me is that I work in a K-6 library, and the age and maturity range is so wide that to appeal to one of the spectrum is to alienate the other. If I try to appeal to the little peanuts, my very-grown-up-and-cool 6th graders will turn up their noses, and the reverse is true as well. To me, it is important that one's brand reflect one's self, and sometimes the public, professional self cannot be exactly in line with the personal self. I can come up with quite a few edgy, humorous, funky names names and ideas for an older audience, but when working with my students, I have settled on the idea that I will be sticking with blogging as "Ms. Davis." I know it's boring, but after much internal debate, I think it is the best choice for my audience.
That said, I did pay a lot of attention to visual style when setting up a book review blog for my students. I wanted it to be appealing to kids and easy to use, but without making it seem too juvenile. Here is what I wound up with: Book Snacks! What do you think? I've only just recently started it up with students, and many of the early comments are from students just learning how to comment on blogs.
Are there other elementary librarians out there who struggled with this, too? Another aspect to this is consistency across platforms. I don't feel that my school blog necessarily has to be connected to my facebook page and twitter accounts. I use those for personal and personal-professional purposes - not as a way to interact with students. I have toyed around with the idea of creating a facebook page for my school library to communicate with parents, but when I do that, I will not have it connected to my personal profile. If I decide to use twitter, I will set up a new account.

Finally, I also Googled my name, which is an unusual one. Surprisingly, there is some sort of pearl jewelery from Sotheby's on eBay that bears my name! Weird! Other than that, everything that came up is school-related, which is good. I got the occasional hit wherein my first and last names were next to each other on some team's roster, but there's really nothing I can do about that. I'm happy with my search results on Google, although it would be cool to have Book Snacks show up there, too.