Personal Branding for Nurses
Sharing here my insights on personal branding for nurses in the digital age.
Photo from @DollyParton (Instagram)
Days after her 74th birthday, the legendary Dolly Parton accidentally created a new viral challenge: show off your different personalities on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Tinder. She captioned it, "Get you a woman who can do it all."
This creative meme challenge was launched in January 21, 2020 and became viral as people accepted, recreated their own memes and posted them online. Even members of healthcare have joined the idea and make themselves a brand of their own. It may seem odd at first due to the fact that we have to create different “personality” in each platform, but this is the new reality that we have now in this digital age. The thing about posting online is that we are able to control what we want to show the digital world and having that power of control, we can decide on the narrative that we want to let our friends, colleagues and family members know about us. We let them know our principles, the causes that we pursue, the advocacies that we want to communicate with them or even just an avenue where we can express our deepest thoughts and feelings.
From this module, I learned that personal branding is something that we must always strive to achieve, not to gain fame and popularity but to have the platform to communicate ways of improving lives and serving others. Back then, I always take this opportunity for granted with the mind-set that my social media profile is still my personal space, but upon learning from this module, I understood the impact of influence that we can bring in making positive changes. After all, leadership is influence and through the responsible use of new age media, we can start building that influence to other people.
I took pride with the content creators Nurse Even (Even Soriano) and Tito Nurse (Hafiz Marsar) with their satirical and comical presentation of our daily nursing work. By portraying the daily struggles of a nurse in dealing with patients and their relatives and the other members of the healthcare team, they are unconsciously serving to influence the need for positive change in the way how the world should see nurses’ work. Now more than ever, the world is finally seeing the importance of nurses in the healthcare system. A big part of this may be contributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, but since time immemorial, nurses are always seen as the glue to the healthcare, the communication channels of other healthcare members and our patients. And now that our value is being recognized, in our own little ways, we still have to continue searching for opportunities for the best chances of being heard.