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_You are busy being pulled in all directions from pillar to post. The only quiet time you get is on trans Atlantic flights. And, I ask you to write a blog to help build and promote your thought leadership online? You tell me you have no time; that you will get around to it. You never do. How can you find the time to write when you don't have time to update your resume, add connections to your Linkedin profile or have dinner with your family? How could you ever keep up with daily or even weekly posts? You use excuses that your company would has privacy requirements; that the PR department would want to approve all postings. Of course there are the issues of non-disclosure and protection of intellectual property that your company likes you to follow. Not to mention the issue of coming up with something to write about. A total brain freeze arises when you try to think of a topic. What really is the point of starting a blog that ends up an embarrassment, when not updated, left floundering in the Socialweb? Finally, you wonder, exactly what is the point really when nobody will read it anyhow? Most professionals mistakenly believe that have to actually write something if they post blogs. They also mistakenly believe that all they have to write about their company's products and services. In addition they think that somebody has to actually read their blog posts. The point of blogging is to establish in advance an ongoing base of credibility and demonstrated expertise. Thus, when you need it, you will have it. For example, if you are down to being one of the final two candidates for a job, your blog may and its content may just be the tipping point for you. There is a foolproof way to write a highly successful blog that is no hassle, no time, and non-interfering with your daily life. Taking 8 minutes to do this will help to brand, position, and market you. The secret is to not write much as that takes time. It's that simple. Here are the steps in 8 minutes or less:
You will look like a knowledge leader by basking in the glory of the writing of others when you simply add a small but observant comment, opinion or viewpoint preceding the article. I have a client who started with great zeal to write, long tomes for blogs. With every promotion and new position his blogs grew shorter and shorter. I suggested he try the article approach and he did. Now he is a Senior Vice President and his blog posts says "here read this great article". That is the extent of his blogging but they are all great articles that he posts. What's the ROI you may ask?
For examples of what I am talking about, read my previous 3-4 blog posts prior to this one. _I just found a new cool bright shiny thing to play with! And I may even turn out better presentations as a bonus. Take a look at this. Prezi - The Zooming Presentation EditorPrezi is a cloud-based presentation software that opens up a new world between whiteboards and slides. The zoomable canvas makes it fun to explore ideas and the connections between them. _I speak heresy here as "transferable skills" have been the mantra of career changers since Dick Bolles wrote What Color is You Parachute in 1972. But they just don't completely work anymore. They are supposed to convince an employer that you can do his job though you have experience in a different function or a different industry or both. This has worked through at least 3 decades and 3 recessions up to the dot.com bust and 2001 recession. Then the game started changing. Back story first. What are transferable skills? They are a list of action verbs that best describe your abilities. Google it or look in Wikipedia. You will find lists galore or better still buy Parachute as it is the absolute best source. It really helps to be able to pinpoint exactly which skills are your best ones that you love and excel at using. It used to be that well a articulated set of skills were enough to convince an employer in an interview and on a resume that you were a good fit for the position. Or at least worth consideration. Fast forward to 2008 and the Great Recession. With an abundance of talent to choose from, employers now demand that a potential employee have a unique set of transferable skills and have used them specifically in their particular industry or field. They have a list qualifications they want and they check it off with every candidate's resume or profile they see. At the top of the list is knowledge/experience in the industry or field.
The stakes are raised, the options are narrowed, the doors are closing. Or are they? Not if you lead with the relationship and not the resume. People hire people they like or get to like by meeting them informally not in an interview situation. If you approach your job search in that fashion then your resume won't end up in some recruiter's file 13 (trash bin). That means you don't bare your soul and entire resume on social networking profiles like Linkedin.com, but rather use the sites to exhibit a well crafted and branded advertisement about who you are instead. People expect you to have profiles online so manage the message and talk about yourself in a way that minimizes the transition or career change you are trying to make. When you lead with the relationship then you can speak to your knowledge about the sector. You can demonstrate your experience by being able to "talk shop" about the sector and industry. That means you do in-depth research to be able to demonstrate your knowledgeable competency. Being able to drop names, mention studies, refer to articles, speak about key products and talk about trends makes you "one of the group". The effort it takes to explain and justify how your skills transfer doesn't measure up in comparison to the impression you can make just "talking shop". I have seen professionals hired without ever providing a resume. They finally filled out the employment application during the interview process. Leading with the relationship allows you to talk about your accomplishments and the sector you are trying to break into in a way that makes the impression that you can do the job. It is the best tactic to use to skip past your lack of actual experience in a specific industry. __A professional website's purpose is to raise your name search to the top of Google, provide a controlled, managed platform to deliver well branded information about you compared to Linkedin's cookie-cutter template. It utilizes great photography, graphic imagery and well-done content to paint the most flattering portrait of you, your talents, your background, and your value proposition. It is interesting how actual web development for individuals and small businesses is now a commodity and many template driven sites offer a both a platform and hosting to build to build a professional website not just a blog. I use the term professional website instead of the cutsy word online portfolio because that is what it is. I believe every professional needs one now to control their brand, Google ranking, and the message and image they project. A website will do that for you. Unless you are a big ecommerce site or online data repository, having a custom built website long-term costly as keep on paying with charges for every update and change. Use the free template-based sites provided by Google, Yahoo, GoDaddy, Yola, Wix and Wenode. What really matters now is content: both visual and written. And that makes photographers, web/graphic designers and expert content writers the key value contributors for websites. The ability to write great marketing and branding copy for beautifully photographed and illustrated products, services, and people is now king. What are the key things to consider when building a professional website and blog?
It's never too late to make a great first impression online with your own professional website! If you want to learn more about putting together a well-branded website, contact me for a free consult on my website http://www.pattiwilson.com _Maybe I should just leave this blog post to the title and leave it at that. Everybody gets it or do they? My mantra to my clients has been, "the key to standing out and getting ahead is to create a clear message about who you are and what you have to offer". I am just finishing up processing about 30 requests to join a linkedin.com group I founded awhile back. I have been amazed with the self-descriptions on the linkedin.com profiles and headlines that I reviewed. They were either job titles or a vague gushing exuberance of descriptive prose that could possibly define many professional including me. Here are some examples: "visionary leader and motivator of teams" "deadline driven project manager" "builds, transforms and leads global operations for technology companies" "premier relationship manager" You get idea. What surprises me, in the age personal branding banter that seems to be happening in chats, forums, and posts online, is that working professionals have not learned how to express their key attributes, and abilities in a clear, specific, and unique style. Many seem to resort to fluff and buff descriptions that lack substance and worthwhile information.
I would suggest whenever you write self-descriptions or personal marketing that you ask yourself if the wording is so vague, generic and superficial that is could define your competition. If that's the case, then work with someone to draw out and make note of your unique contributions through accomplishment stories that you tell them. It's an age old practice, the doing of accomplishment stories but it really works. I have never subscribed to the hire-a-resume-writer/brander who takes your 4 page filled out personal data form, goes away and writes a flourishing description of you. The trouble with that is that you don't own it and will not be able to easily to speak to those statements with greater detail and depth. Tell stories, take notes, get friends to listen and provide feedback and input. You will be pleased with the results that will translate into a resume, an elevator pitch and social profile. Thanks to Macstories for this list.
“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.” – via “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.” – Wikiquote, as quoted in The Wall Street Journal (Summer 1993). “We’ve gone through the operating system and looked at everything and asked how can we simplify this and make it more powerful at the same time.” – ABC News, Jobs on Mac OS X Beta “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” “I want to put a ding in the universe.” “I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.” “Unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don’t know any better.” – Wikiquote, Interview in Rolling Stone magazine, no. 684 (16 June 1994) “Bill Gates‘d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.” – The New York Times, Creating Jobs, 1997 “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.” – YouTube “My job is not to be easy on people. My jobs is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.” – All About Steve Jobs “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.” – Wikiquote, as quoted in Fortune magazine (4 January 2000) “Click. Boom. Amazing!” – Macworld keynote 2006 “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” – Inc. Magazine “That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works” – New York Times, The Guts of a New Machine, 2003 “Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?” - As quoted or paraphrased in Young Guns: The Fearless Entrepreneur’s Guide to Chasing Your Dreams and Breaking Out on Your Own (2009) by Robert Tuchman “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” – via “I mean, some people say, ‘Oh, God, if [Jobs] got run over by a bus, Apple would be in trouble.’ And, you know, I think it wouldn’t be a party, but there are really capable people at Apple. My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that’s what I try to do.” – CNNMoney “It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.” – CNNMoney “So when a good idea comes, you know, part of my job is to move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group of 100 people, get different people together to explore different aspects of it quietly, and, you know – just explore things.” – CNNMoney “When I hire somebody really senior, competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, Are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself. They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for them, what’s best for Steve, or anybody else.” – via “We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.” – Fortune “Almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” – Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Address “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” – Think Different, narrated by Steve Jobs “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” – Fortune “So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.” – Classic Gaming “The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.” – Macworld “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” - Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Address “I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…. It’s very character-building.” – Wikiquote, as quoted in Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company (2004) by Owen W. Linzmayer “I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.” – Businessweek “Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.” – Businessweek “I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.” – The Seed of Apple’s Innovation “It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much.” - The Seed of Apple’s Innovation “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” – Businessweek, 1998 “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” - Fortune, Nov. 9, 1998 “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” “It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing.” – Playboy interview, 1985 “I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach and knocked all my wind out. I’m only 30 years old and I want to have a chance to continue creating things. I know I’ve got at least one more great computer in me. And Apple is not going to give me a chance to do that.” – Playboy, 1987 “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” - Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Address “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?” – Steve Jobs’ famous question to John Sculley, former Apple CEO “The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore!” – Businessweek “The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.” - As quoted in Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company (2004) by Owen W. Linzmayer “If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth — and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.” – Fortune, 1996 “You know, I’ve got a plan that could rescue Apple. I can’t say any more than that it’s the perfect product and the perfect strategy for Apple. But nobody there will listen to me.” – Fortune, 1995 “Apple has some tremendous assets, but I believe without some attention, the company could, could, could — I’m searching for the right word — could, could die.” – TIME, 1997 Google+ has the quality of adult audience that Linkedin has with the ease of conversation, collaboration and connection of a Facebook. But, it has an interface and setup that is 100 fold better. Currently by invite only, if you know my email address request an invite from me, it has over 20 million users. At that rate it will reach 100 million in 5 months. It took linkedin.com 5+ years to do that. Watch this fun video for a compelling argument why you should join now not later. I subscribe to multiple global recruiting blogs and online recruitment and HR newsletters. Usually they tend to talk about how to find the A-players (see earlier blog) or using social media and other technologies. But sometimes an article will catch my attention as new and different that needs a response or strategy. This one in the June 15th issue of Recruiter Week grabbed my attention: Rise of the Micro-resume.
The article refered to a website and social service in China, Sina Weibo. This site in China will have more than 200M members soon and it is a cross between Twitter and Facebook. Here is an excerpt: On June 13, 2011, CNNgo.com reported that thanks to a massive February 2011 push by Sina Corp, China’s largest Internet portal, through the company’s “micro-blogging” site, Sina weibo—which means “Sina micro-blogging”, the Chinese are taking to 140-character “micro-resumes” like Peking ducks to water. (Visit Sina Corp’s English-language report.) Aside from the Groupon-type overly sardonic and cutesy metaphor, this was real news and a significant trend in the worldwide employment marketplace. Is this a precursor of things to come? Of course it is. Should you follow suit and reduce yourself to 140 character summary of accomplishments, skills, and abilities? Well, folks, I think its a beyond difficult to try to brand yourself in a one-line tag and not come out sounding like a slogan, but you have to try, at least. The better part of valor would be to follow the advice that is now nearly 4 decades old. Since the rise of the corporate man (or woman) the advice has been to identify and reach out to the hiring manager. I would say that this advice is even more relevant today. It's not enough to build a distinctive brand online with multiple social profiles globally, a website and blog. What is crucial is who sees it? To a recruiter you are a transaction until they decide you are the best fit for the job. But to a business friend and colleague, social media contact, or alumni that you have a relationship with then you are a real person that they know, and can vouch for. To a hiring manager you are tangible in the form of a resume or executive summary. What would give you the best chances of getting visible, heard, and interviewed: a 140 character summary or a fully branded online presence combined with a personal introduction? I build online branded presences for my clients all the time. They work. |
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