Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom: How to Collect Feedback on Your Performance

Everyone – even the most accomplished leaders – has strengths and areas for improvement.  When I talked to organizational consultant Ed Poole about professionals who rise quickly, he warned me of the danger of being “unconsciously incompetent,” meaning you don’t know what you don’t know.  You can avoid this by putting yourself in a position to objectively evaluate your performance.

This is easier said than done.  In fact, getting honest, helpful feedback from people with whom you have personal relationships can be extremely difficult.  This is because individuals who like us want to be supportive and are also afraid of hurting our feelings.

The only way you will get feedback you can use is to be very strategic in asking the right questions in the right forums, and to develop a reputation as someone who takes constructive criticism well.  Following are some suggestions for approaching superiors, subordinates, and clients/mentors

Asking Your Superiors: The annual or bi-annual performance review is a great place to begin.  Print out your last review and look at the goals and/or action steps outlined.  Then, set up a meeting with your boss and anyone else who supervises your work on a regular basis.  The goal of these meetings should be soliciting concrete feedback on your progress, and while they’re occurring, try to maintain a good balance between listening to what your superior has to say and playing an active role in the conversation.

Don’t be afraid to ask specific questions about any feedback you receive so that you know how to proceed.  Once the cycle is complete, your managers might be perfectly happy to forget about your performance until the next official review period. Don’t let them. Be proactive about setting up follow up meetings to review your progress, address potential problems, and incorporate new responsibilities and priorities.

When it comes time for your next official review, make sure your boss gives it to you. This may sound silly, but you’d be surprised how many organizations de-emphasize the importance of the official review. Remember, though, that it’s your right to request a timely appraisal. Think of the official review as an opportunity to sell your manager on your value to the company as well as collect up-to-date feedback on your performance.  To prepare, think about successful projects that demonstrate how you’ve improved in previously identified weak areas.  Also, brainstorm concrete examples that illustrate outstanding work, and practice communicating them so they’re on the tip of your tongue.

Beware of asking for superior feedback too often, for if you are in your boss’ office every ten minutes asking for reassurance on the most mundane task, he may begin to perceive you as needy and irritating.   It’s a fine line between appearing eager to learn and be guided and becoming the person your manager dreads seeing in the hall.

Asking Your Subordinates: 360 degree reviews that solicit feedback from subordinates are a terrific way to get a clearer picture of your leadership strengths and areas for improvement and ensure that your effectiveness increases over time.

A 360 degree assessment can typically be distributed to several raters of your choosing and includes a list of questions about standard leadership competencies.  If your organization has a 360 degree review process in place already, you should definitely participate.  If it doesn’t, however, it’s easy enough to purchase a commercial, web-based service that e-mails a survey directly to your raters.  Popular commercial assessments include the Leadership Practices Inventory and the Leadership Mirror.

There are a few important things to keep in mind regarding 360 degree reviews.  The first is confidentiality.  You must give direct reports the ability to provide comments anonymously or you will probably not get feedback that’s honest enough for improvement purposes.  If you only have a few direct reports (or even just one), then you might consider including peers so that individuals cannot be readily identified.

The second is follow up.  If you want your direct reports to continue to buy into the process and believe it to be credible, then you must create a specific action plan to address points of feedback that are consistent among several raters.

Asking Clients and Mentors: It’s also a good idea to periodically collect feedback from trusted individuals who work with you as clients or mentors.  For this, you might use a free online service like Rypple.  Rypple lets clients and mentors know you're looking for feedback or advice, and gives them a quick way to tell you what they really think on a particular question or issue.  Their identities are kept secret, it only takes them a minute to respond, and they don't need their own Rypple accounts.  You can then review the results and implement changes in real time.

This post was originally published on Intuit’s Quickbase blog.

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HOW TO: Determine and Sell Your Differentiation | Personal Branding Blog - Dan Schawbel

Employers and clients are looking for ways in which you are different from everyone else – your unique selling proposition (USP). And if you don’t know your USP, there’s no way you’re going to be able to articulate it and sell others on your abilities.

What do you bring to the table others can’t?

That’s the question you need to ask yourself. Try this exercise: Write down every skill, piece of knowledge, ability, and characteristic you have. I find it’s often hard to evaluate yourself, so ask friends and family to add to the list once you’ve given it a first shot.

This list becomes your “unique you.”

What do you need to market your “unique you”?

• Professional website or online portfolio
• Presence on relevant social networking sites
• Business cards
• Elevator pitch
• Accomplishment stories

What are “accomplishment stories”?

When you’re applying for a job, employers want to hear about the results you’ve had in the past and how you could repeat those results at their organization.

Take the top 5-10 bullets in your unique you list and write stories surrounding them.

Some questions to ask yourself about each skill:

• How and why did you obtain it? (Describe the entire situation, start to finish. You can always make your stories more concise later.)
• How can the skill be applied to situations other than the one in which it was first obtained?
• How have you continued to develop the skill since you obtained it? (For example, have you taken additional courses or applied the skill to an after-school job?)
• What makes it important to have?

Some questions to ask yourself about each characteristic:

• Is there an example (or two) of a time when this characteristic came in handy? (Again, describe the entire situation to the best of your ability.)
• How does this characteristic help set you apart from other candidates? (For example, would having a team member with this characteristic help the employer in some way?)

An alternative to accomplishment stories: case studies

If your goal is to land clients rather than a job, you can write case studies. These should contain the following sections:

• Problem/Situation
• Solution
• Results

Again, notice the focus on results.

So, what do you bring to the table that others can’t, and what is your plan to tell potential employers or clients about it?

Author:

Heather R. Huhman is a career expert and founder & president of Come Recommended, an exclusive online community connecting the best internship and entry-level job candidates with the best employers. She is also the author of #ENTRYLEVELtweet: Taking Your Career from Classroom to Cubicle (2010), national entry-level careers columnist for Examiner.com and blogs about career advice at HeatherHuhman.com.

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How A Strong Personal Brand Can Make You Rich | Brand-Yourself.com Blog

A few months ago Chris Brogan sent the world into a brief tizzy by revealing his services are worth up to $22,000 per day.  Startling number indeed.  Would you like to replicate even 10% of that daily haul?  If so, here is my take on how you can get there.

Whether you love him, hate him, or are easily intrigued by unique facial hair, you probably know of Chris Brogan.  He is everywhere.  My Google Reader feed tells me that chrisbrogan.com averages 8.9 posts per week, all free for anyone to read.  In 2008, Chris produced this personal branding e-book, and charged a whopping $0 for it.  The guy sends out this newsletter full of information and charges….you guessed it, nothing.

The result of all this incredible content being pumped out for free?  A lot of folks salivating to take it all in.  48,200 blog subscribers and 136,000 Twitter followers soaking it up 140 characters at a time.  Essentially, Chris has been building brand equity over time, keystroke by keystroke.

Today, it is easy to recognize Chris’ authority on new media marketing, and realize just how valuable it would be for a company to secure his uninterrupted focus.  Yes, even $22,000-for-a-single-day valuable.  So then…

The secret to building a money-making personal brand? Give great stuff away for free today. Offer even better stuff tomorrow for a price.

Chris Brogan isn’t the only one to have perfected this art.  Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV is on episode #862, and all 862 are available for less than a penny.  Guy Kawasaki has been giving away advice across platforms for years.  Problogger Darren Rowse essentially teaches a free course on professional blogging that you and I can read freely every day.

But, if you want 1-on-1 time with one of these three (or any other guy or gal who has taken the same path) for consulting or speaking – you might want to plan an extra trip to the ATM, it’s going to cost a pretty penny.

Now, on to you.  How do you compare?  What are you giving away for free today that will build a powerful (and lucrative) brand for tomorrow?  Are you…

• Blogging regularly?
• Making certain your tweets/articles/updates add value to your community?
• Engaging in conversation?
• Sharing the work of others as much as you promote your own?
• Building relationships, not empty follower counts?

What about at your day job?  The same principles apply at the office too, in an even more concentrated way.  Are you…

• Putting in extra time without being asked?
• Working on projects above and beyond your “job title”?
• Helping co-workers without expecting anything in return?

Essentially, Chris Brogan’s $22,000 revelation is the world’s most effective case study on the positive effects of a personal brand (no, not a contrived brand built just for appearance’s sake, but an authentic brand built organically over time).

Compile every public tweet, blog post, guest article and keynote speech – and imagine that instead, Chris kept all that “valuable” information to himself.  He’d still be the same brilliant dude today.  But, who would know it?  Without established credibility, what company would want to shell out even $22 for his day of work, let alone $22,000?

No, you won’t become filthy rich overnight because you gave away great insights and added value today.  Building a brand isn’t a sprint.  To do it right, you are going to be running a long, long time.  And don’t expect the path to be paved with riches.  But the destination? It just might be.

Create a Brand-Yourself.com Account to Manage Your Online Reputation!

Brand-Yourself.com is an award winning toolset that helps you proactively manage your online reputation and promote yourself across the social web. Create an account today to see how we can help you win new opportunities, jobs and clients online. It’s easy and it’s fun!

For personal branding advice from Ryan Rancatore and a great group of guest bloggers, visit Personal Branding 101. Or, connect with @RyanRancatore on Twitter and be sure to say hello.

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Personal Brands: Get Naked | Personal Branding Blog - Dan Schawbel

Are you playing “dress up” to match the expectations of others? Is there an ever thinning veil, between the real you and the ideal you that you’ve invented and are now struggling to project?

Are you still clenching to maintain the “first date” behavior code with recruiters, your boss or clients? Is your armor cracking (or scorching, if you saw Iron Man 2)? Is it becoming clear that the emperor (or whatever title you hold) has no clothes?

How did you get in this mess?

You pretended to be detail oriented, self-motivated and an early riser. You pretended to be an advanced user of Excel, Final Cut, Wordpress and Spanish. You said you were willing, in fact eager, to work weekends, late nights or be on call 24/7/365.

Are you faking it in hopes that you will be making it sometime soon? Are you keeping the lid on your volcano of real strengths that are now screaming to be exploited while you ply your trade with your weakest suit?

Or have you simply outgrown the persona you still attempt to play by being underemployed or dis-employed or just phoning it in?

What is the naked truth about who you really are and what you really want to do?

The closer you can get to the true you, the happier and richer you will be. Richer: as in making lots of money. Happier: as in rich in every way: spiritually, mentally, physically and once again, financially.

Why? To have phenomenal success in any field or even with any project, you have to have unstoppable, intrinsic and sustainable motivation. Problems have to appear as puzzles that you are delighted to decode.

A deep vein running through you must declare: I would do this even if I won the lottery. I might wear better shoes or drive a cooler car and take way better vacays, but I would still be doing “this” for work, for this company or my own company, and my clients, or whatever the “this” and the “who” are for you.

What is your IT?

A lot of us have names for your Highest Goal (Michael Ray), your Sweetest Fruit (Laurel Mellin) or Ultimate Outcome (me). These are just labels for your IT. What is IT? IT is the thing screaming to get out of your mind or body and put onto this planet. It is the truth you may be hiding from yourself, as well as others.

Here’s my embarrassing truth. I am someone who needs other people’s dreams and ambitions in order to be self-actualized. I am meant to help, encourage, find the right way, take the first bullet, stay up all night to get it done on time, and make the most money possible for the people I work for.  I respond so easily to the red light on the camera because I believe I am helping the audience. I teach for the same reason. In fact, it’s why I write to you each week.

My clients often write “thank you” in the memo of their retainer checks.

If I were a dog, I’d be a golden retriever – a working dog that loyally runs into the rushing waters of a cold river to get the stick and get it back to you. Simply put, my personal brand is this: I am a helper, with vision and grit.

If we stripped away all the varnish (and that’s the nice word for it), what is your naked truth?

Planet Earth is 71% water. Take a skinny dip into it, baring your real personal brand.

Author:

Nance Rosen is the author of Speak Up! & Succeed. She speaks to business audiences around the world and is a resource for press, including print, broadcast and online journalists and bloggers covering social media and careers. Read more at NanceRosenBlog. Twitter name: nancerosen.

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How to Be More Persuasive | The QuickBase Blog

By Alexandra Levit

We received some positive feedback about the recent post, How to Lead Without Authority, and in response I decided to do a little more research on the topic.  While doing so, I came across the work of Robert Cialdini, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University who has made it his life work to study the importance of persuasion in influencing workplace relationships.

In his bestselling books, which include the most recent Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be More Persuasive, Dr. Cialdini has identified six principles to help you be more persuasive in your everyday work life, including:

Principle of Reciprocity

Dr. Cialdini found that people are more likely to say yes to you if you have said yes to them first.  If you first show a willingness to get on board with your colleagues’ projects, then they will find it more difficult to decline support for yours.

Principle of Commitment and Consistency

People will agree to something if it complies with their existing worldview.  Therefore, if you liken your proposal to another idea your colleague recently agreed with, you will play to her internal desire to be consistent.

Principle of Authority

Obviously, it’s easier to persuade direct reports because you are the manager.  But even if you aren’t the boss, establishing yourself as an organization-wide expert on a particular topic will do wonders to increase others’ perception of your authority and render them easier to persuade.

Principle of Social Validation

The field of television advertising was built upon this principle, which states that people are more willing to take a recommendation if they are provided evidence that “others like them” are already doing it.  So if you want to convince colleagues, get some testimonials from those who are friendly to your cause and at the same level as those who you’re trying to persuade.

Principle of Scarcity

People find opportunities more attractive to the degree that they are rare or dwindling in availability. Your colleagues will be more likely to agree to your proposal, for example, if they believe that they have to “strike now while the iron is hot.”

Principle of Liking

There is no getting around the fact that people prefer to say yes to those they know, like and trust, so if you want to be more persuasive at work, take the time to strengthen your personal relationship with each colleague you hope to influence.

About Alexandra Levit

Alexandra Levit’s goal is to help people find meaningful jobs - quickly and simply - and to succeed beyond measure once they get there. Follow her @alevit.

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Follow Up, Follow Up, Follow Up!!! | Career Rocketeer - Career Search and Personal Branding Blog

“It’s been a week since my interview and I haven’t heard anything...”
“I had a great informational interview but that was the last I heard…”
“I had a phone conversation with a good contact in the company…”
“I have almost 100 people I’ve networked with in my job search so far…”
“I met someone, at (an event) that said they knew someone, but haven’t heard back…”

“…should I follow up?”

I teach an 8-week class on job hunting skills, and these are the most common questions I’m asked regularly. And my response is always the same: YES!!!

“But I don’t want to annoy them, or come across as a stalker.” …is a common reply.

In my experience, I’ve found that candidates think they are being annoying long before the recipient of their follow ups ever do. Professional, timely, pleasant follow up is key to setting yourself apart from other candidates they are pursuing.

Why should you follow up, and how do you do it effectively? Here are some ideas…

Most people don’t follow up, it’s a chance to set yourself apart. Even after a formal job interview, generally less than 25% of people send a Thank You note of any kind. Other meetings, phone calls, email contacts generally get little to no follow up from most people. Doing something different from the norm, in a professional and upbeat way, will virtually always create a positive impression. You have far more to lose by not doing it, than the infinitesimal risk of losing an opportunity by doing it. Especially if someone else does follow up, and you don’t, you will lose by comparison.

It’s another chance to cement a relationship. Whether it’s a casual networking contact, or a formal interview, the chances of gaining more consideration from them is very much dependent on building a relationship. If you only make an initial contact and they never hear from you again, it creates no reason on their part to invest any more thinking in helping or working with you. Building a relationship requires contact and effort in following up.

It’s another chance to mention something you may have forgotten before. Although you don’t want to launch into an in-depth explanation of something else in your background in a follow up… a succinctly worded phrase or sentence adding value to your earlier discussion can help in improving their impression of you. It’s another chance to provide additional or new relevant information.

Keep it brief! Too often, if someone does follow up, they either ramble on too long on the phone, or write too long in an email or letter. After the first minute of engaging in some way, patience begins to run out and there is either no chance of making a positive impact after that, or you are actually increasing the risk of annoying them. Even an extremely short “Just wanted to thank you again for your time” will have a more positive impact than 5 or 10 minutes of going further into in-depth information. That’s true in a phone call or written communication. It’s best to carefully plan exactly what you want to convey and say it as briefly as possible to make the best impression.

Be professional! Regardless of how friendly your meeting or prior discussion may have gone, never assume too casual a relationship. Even though a hiring manager wants to like you to hire you, or a professional networking contact enjoys talking to you, in order to take additional steps with you they need to feel confident that you will always be professional with others they introduce you to as well. The referral process, and the hiring process is still essentially a business transaction. Don’t take it too lightly.

Switch it up! Effective, and consistent follow up doesn’t mean a steady stream of phone calls every other day. That does become annoying. However, you can have some form of contact with them regularly to keep you fresh in their mind and build a further relationship with them in the process. Within a day of any of the scenarios listed at the top of this piece… Thank them. You might send them a Thank You card in the mail, or email a brief note, leave them a voicemail, or call and thank them for their time. Then, in a week or two, connect again, but in another form, and in two to 4 weeks again in yet another form. Keep the process going, but you end up actually talking to them directly only every couple of months.

If they are hearing from you regularly, but in various and unobtrusive forms, you are building a relationship, not haranguing them. Building that professional relationship has everything to do with their perception of your persistence, your follow through, your professionalism, and their interest in you.

Should you follow up??? Yes! Definitely! Absolutely!

…but do it right!

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Author:

Harry Urschel has over 20 years experience as a technology recruiter in Minnesota. He currently operates as e-Executives, writes a blog for Job Seekers called The Wise Job Search, and can be found on Twitter as @eExecutives.

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Who Are You: a Generic Job Title OR a One of a Kind Executive? | Career Rocketeer - Career Search and Personal Branding Blog

Since January I have received several dozen senior level referrals from clients, especially one’s in HR administration, who have told their friends about my business philosophy “One Size Does Not Fit All.” (http://www.perrynewman.com/) After working with me they have come to understand that this is not a slick marketing slogan, but a highly effective approach to creating personalized marketing documents and social media profiles in a market dominated by resume mills fronted by job posting search engines.

Unfortunately over 50% of those referred to me have already spent from a low of $399 to upwards of $1000 to get a resume written in a style that they were told by the company’s salesperson 'IS THE ONLY FORMAT' that will land you job offers. After making this very costly investment and seeing minimal results they have a difficult choice to make, live with the mediocrity they paid for or try to get it right without breaking the bank. Thankfully most don't need costly major surgury just affordable personalization.

What is striking is that I (and most people who review resumes for a living) can look at a resume from a resume mill and in less than 15 seconds tell you exactly which one it was purchased from.

Is this ESP? No. Its simple; most of these companies use one single style for all their clients to produce a resume that presents a job title, i.e. a CEO, CIO, CFO, Director of Marketing, Operations Manager, lawyer, civil engineer, purchasing manager etc. I think you get the picture.

This is not to say these resumes are not well constructed; and I must admit the wording and sentence structure are erudite and professional. The problem, in most cases, is that every CFO, CIO, CEO resume looks the same and lacks a personal touch.

What I also found strange was when I spoke to these referrals and asked them how they were referred to the service they told me it was from a free resume critique offer they accepted after inputting information to get access to the services executive level job posting/job match search engine.

They told me that after attaching a resume they received an email critique with a nice sales pitch and no guarantee. I then asked a few people to send me the critique, and I registered with a few services myself submitting a resume they wrote under a different name and email address and then noticed all the critiques were boilerplate generic with slightly different words… This is a straightforward assessment of your current resume, and not a judgment of your skills and qualifications… Here is the good news: My first impression of you is that you have an impressive array of skills and experiences. You’re a qualified (widget maker) with a lot to offer an employer. Now, here’s the bad news: Your resume and the content is not up to the standards one would expect from a candidate like you. I saw the same general remarks for a low level candidate with limited skills and experience, a mid-level manager who is mediocre at best, and an executive who was fired from his last two jobs with cause. Sound familiar.

So what can you do to avoid getting a pedestrian product for a king’s ransom?

1: Get a verbal critique of your resume, not just a cursory written email review.
2: Inquire as to the exact qualifications of the person who is critiquing your resume, and ask for specific examples of what they feel needs to be changed, why, and how they would handle it.
4. Ask how many different styles of resumes they work with, and which ones would be best for you and why.
5: Avoid layers; make sure the person who critiques your current resume is the same person who will write your new resume.
6: Your resume is not like receiving Social Services. You should be the one to choose who writes your resume instead of having someone who you don’t know and does not know you arbitrarily say “we are assigning writer XYX to your case.”
7. Ask if there is a money back guarantee of at least a partial refund if you are not satisfied with the final draft and a free rewrite if you are not getting results after a specified period of time.
8. Have someone you trust who knows you professionally look at the resume and see if it captures what makes you unique and special and then discuss their opinion with the resume writer.
9. If you want someone to critique your resume with you over the phone and tell you if it needs minor adjustments you can do on your own, major revisions, or is good as is, email a copy with your phone # to perry@perrynewman.com

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Author:

Perry Newman, CPC CSMS is a nationally recognized executive resume writer, career coach, and certified recruiter and social media strategist renowned for his ability to produce resume, social media profiles and job search strategies that get results. You can view sample resumes at http://www.perrynewman.com/ and email him your resume at perry@perrynewman.com for FREE resume critique.

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Job Search: Communicate Your Specialty « Career Brander

Harry Beckwith is one of the great business minds of our generation.   His particular expertise is  around branding and modern-day marketing.  He is a NY Times bestselling author and head of strategy for Beckwith Partners. His firm services industry clients in 37 states and 16 foreign countries, ranging from boutique professional firms and venture-capitalized startups to 24 Fortune 200 companies.

Below is an excerpt from one of his books called The Invisible Touch.  Although primarily written for corporate branding advice, it clearly applies perfectly to personal branding.

___________________________________________________________________________

Communicating Your Special Expertise

A surprising lesson, learned the hard way.

Our doors opened in 1988 and we immediately acquired our first client, a national collection agency. For several months our work helped generate business for them. One afternoon in the following year, however, the client’s marketing director called with bad news. He was leaving the company and a new director would be replacing him-a danger signal to a service like ours.

Six months later, we received confirmation of the signal.

“We’ve chosen another agency.” the new director said.

“Oh Who?”

“We are a family business,” he said. “Mater & Pater specializes in family businesses.  They were hard to resist.”

Being diplomatic, we did not let this client know that no marketing or advertising agency specializes in family businesses. Or that “knowing” family businesses in marketing is like “knowing” brunettes in shoe sales: useless.  Unfortunately, “apparent” specialized knowledge mattered to that prospect-as it does to most.

The unique value of even worthless specialized knowledge can be explained by the fact: Every industry, like every person, believes itself-it’s markets, processes, challenges-to be unique.  Businesses and people believe that previous experience with similar businesses and people help, even when it doesn’t.

The title “specialist”– however fraudulent, irrelevant or even comical–packs a persuasive wallop.  You cannot justify, or argue with, the success of hair salons that specialize in blondes, benefits consultants that specialize in law firms, or ad agencies that “know” family businesses.

…..however irrational it is, understanding and capitalizing on this “specialist bias” can launch a small firm faster than any other single tool.

FIND YOUR SPECIALTY—NO MATTER HOW NARROW IT IS—AND COMMUNICATE IT CONVINCINGLY.

How well do you communicate your specialty?

To secure your next job, you will need to convincingly communicate why your skill set, experience and “apparent specialized knowledge” make you the best candidate to meet the hiring company’s needs.  Remember, perception can quickly become reality.

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TheWiseJobSearch: Keys To A Great Email In Your Job Search!

Most opportunities you have to present yourself to a hiring decision maker will involve sending an email.

The form and substance of that email will have a great deal to do with whether you get a response or not.

As a recruiter, I receive a lot of emails from job seekers looking for leads, looking for help in their search, or pursuing specific job opportunities I’m working on. On average, I receive between 1000 and 1500 emails per month. In those emails, I’ve seen the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

What gets my attention? What gets a response? And what really gets my interest? Three different questions, with three different answers. Here are some observations, opinions, and ideas about how you can improve your chances of getting a response to your emails.

What gets attention? – Often an extraordinarily bad email gets as much attention as a great one. It often amazes me how poorly or cryptic people write. Generally, it’s not a good idea to send a cover letter as an attachment since it rarely will get opened at all. The greatest cover letter in the world has no impact if it doesn’t get read. The body of your email is effectively your cover letter. Considering how important it can be, I’m stunned how casually people treat it. I’ve received emails that have only said: “I am sending u my resume” and have their resume attached. I’ve had worse ones that are full of texting abbreviations. In my opinion, it would be better to not write anything at all, and only attach a resume than to write overly casual, overly cryptic, or non-sensical notes. First impressions DO matter.

What gets a response? – If someone sends a professionally written, clearly customized introduction for help or in response to a position I’m recruiting for, I will invariably respond to them even if they are not a fit for the role or the profiles I generally seek. If they made the effort to present themselves in the best way they can to me, I believe they deserve a respectable response. If they send what is clearly a standard form letter that does not necessarily apply to me directly, or if they carelessly sent something with no effort at professionalism, I will often not bother responding to them.

What gains real interest? – Brevity is a virtue, and connecting dots is key. When I’m processing the many emails I receive each day, I only have a very brief time to decide what to do with each one. If I open an email that has several long paragraphs, I will rarely read past the first line. If there’s a resume attached, I will open it and quickly decide if this is someone I want to examine further, but because the email message was too long, the note has no impact on my decision to go further or not.

If someone writes a couple very brief paragraphs and has written something that very quickly and easily helps me see why I may be interested in pursuing this person further based on specifics related to the position I’m trying to fill, or generally as the types of people I target, it has a tremendous impact on my decision.

Whether you send an email to a recruiter, an HR representative, or to a hiring manager, connecting the dots for them as quickly as possible has everything to do with gaining their interest. Help them see the connections by directly linking their requirements with your specific experience. Some people make it even visually easier on me by creating a short table with my requirements on one side, and their related experience on the other.

Secondly, give one brief reason you stand out from everyone else. Give an accomplishment, brief success story, or a unique qualification that emphasizes why you should be considered.

Clearly showing your related experience and what makes you stand out from the crowd will cause me to follow up with you every time.

Relevance and Impact!

A good email can make a tremendous difference in your response rate. Take the time and put in the effort to make it work for you!

Posted by Harry Urschel

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How Advertising Creeps Me Out — and How Social Media Can Help

A recent development in advertising has really rubbed me the wrong way. I know it was supposed to be a good and helpful thing, but it felt so Big Brother-ish that I felt annoyed and almost angry at the company who clearly thought it was a good idea to perpetrate what felt like a violation. I really think social media could have been a much better set of tools to achieve better results for the advertiser.

Here’s what happened to me: I used Register.com to register a domain name. I know, it isn’t the cheapest domain registrar, but it has been reliable with excellent customer service, so I’ve been a customer since the 1990s. The other day, I was poking around for new domain names (because one can never have too many domain names), and purchased one. Then I went off on my merry way surfing the web for other things.

Much later on, I was on a site entirely unrelated to domain names and an ad on the side of the page I was browsing caught my eye. It contained the exact domain name I had recently purchased, but with a different suffix. It was telling me that I could purchase a variation of the domain name I already had. And right away it creeped me out. Upon closer inspection, it was an ad from Register.com. My geeky, I’ve-been-doing-this-stuff-for-years brain knew that this ad was most likely generated by tapping into the cookies on my browser, and that someone, somewhere, got the wacky idea that customizing my advertising experience would be a good thing — not just tailoring the ad to my interests (travel, parenting, Internet services) but literally lifting what I now felt was my domain name and putting it in the ad. Even though it was supposed to serve me and entice me to purchase more, I was annoyed.

How Social Media Can Help

Where do we draw the lines between connected and disconnected? Where do we draw the lines between opting into personalization and customization and having it automatically appear because our activities online are being tracked and tagged? My thinking on this is if a company wants to get social with me as a customer, it should use social media tools, not cookies and automated tools to track my every move and then spit information out to me based on some kind of algorithm.

What I would have rather experienced with Register.com could fall under a number of social media marketing tools and tactics. These are simple things that, at first, might seem like unrelated to the sale of a domain name, but hear me out.

More on Social media

• 99Tribes: Expand Your Twitter Tribe Web Life
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• Microsoft and Facebook Unveil Docs, but Why? Web Life
• CloudContacts Integrates Twitter’s @Anywhere Platform Web Life

1. When I bought the domain name, it would have been nice to be led to a page that thanks me for the purchase and encouraged me to connect with the company on Facebook or Twitter.
2. Once I “liked” the company’s Facebook Page, I’d pay attention to specials or discounts offered via the Page. I’m fine with consuming messaging from a company via their Facebook page, even if the messages are merely reminders to buy that domain name that I’ve been thinking about.
3. If I followed the company on Twitter, ditto. I’d be happy to see a discount code running through my Twitterstream that I could act on immediately, perhaps prompted by the nudge: “Hey, thinking about getting a new domain name for that project you’re working on? Act now…”

I probably wouldn’t visit a Register.com blog or subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed. As a consumer, my plate is overflowing, but it’s easy enough for me to connect to a company I like and have a varied stream of messaging from them in my two most frequently used social networks.

Isn’t that how social media marketing should work versus old-fashioned, clunky and invasive advertising? Let’s connect, feed me some valuable info over time interspersed with marketing messages and some coupons or discounts, and I’m a happy camper. Trust builds between us. I’m not creeped out by your connections to my communications streams. It’s a win/win scenario.

What do you think about the old ways of advertising and the new ways of connecting to customers via social media?

via webworkerdaily.com

Posted via web from AndyWergedal

Establish and Maintain Your Online Identity - identity management - Lifehacker

If you're not actively building your identity and establishing a presence online, you're letting search engines cobble together information, good or bad, and write your public story. You need to establish and maintain a healthy online identity.

Photo a composite of images by nksz and bezzaro.

Your online identity—or lack thereof—becomes more prominent by the day. People rely more and more on search results to help build a picture of you and you want the picture to be a good one. You want search engine queries to direct to you and your accomplishments, not your virtual doppelgangers. If you have a name as common as my own, that could mean a sculptor, photographer, felon, aspiring actor, swimming champion, high school point guard, or any other number of people who share your name.

If you've been thinking about whipping your online identity into shape, but don't quite know how to start or what to cover, the following guide will help you establish yourself and make sure all search engine roads lead to you, and not that other John Smith—the one in cell block 4D.

Buy a Domain Name

It was the gold standard of establishing your online identity when the Internet was young, and it remains so today. You need a personal domain name. Services come and go, taking profiles and postings along with them, but a private domain gives you a permanent address that can outlive the hosts and services you point it at. If you bought www.YourName.com in 1998, it may have pointed at 14 web hosts, one Blogger account, and now points to your Twitter profile, but it still represents you from every place you've used that URL. Blog posts, business cards, long forgotten comments left on articles read years ago—all direct people back to you. Photo by sundstrom.

Registering a domain will usually run you around $10 a year, less if you register for multiple years. You can find all sorts of deals throughout the year, as companies give away domains for $3 or other low prices, offer a free domain with a year of cheap web hosting, or other such deals—unless you're already signing up for a web host and getting a deal, it's hardly worth waiting around to save a few bucks.

Domain registrars are a hotly debated topic. I've never had any problems with any of the multiple domain registering services I've used over the years, so I can't add anything to that debate. I can say that registering a domain is ridiculously simple, and if you've got 10 minutes and a credit card you can—and should—do it right now. Visit one of the registrars below to register your domain name. Deals, as noted above, vary widely over the course of the year. Make sure to check all of them to see what the best deal is for your needs.

• 1&1 Domain Search
• GoDaddy Domain Search
• NetFirms Domain Search

While it's ideal to snag YourName.com, don't overlook the .net, .org, and other less-used domains. You can frequently bundle them together when you're registering, grabbing multiple variations like YourName.net/.org/.me and more, for a much lower price than you would if you registered them individually.

Direct Your Domain Somewhere

A domain is worthless if it doesn't go somewhere. Don't misunderstand—you don't need a highly trafficked blog to satisfy the requirements of your domain "going somewhere", it just needs to point to something that represents you. If you don't have to the time or desire to maintain a personal blog, point it at an established social network profile, or better yet, a simple personal portal. Photo by svilen001.

Ideally your domain will point at something you control, like a personal information portal, a personal blog, or something similarly small-scale. If your requirements are modest, and you just want a place to bring together the various fragments of your online personality, an excellent choice is Flavors.me.

Flavors.me offers simple personal portal creation, highlighting your other web locations. It's entirely drag and drop, and extremely easy to customize. If you're not looking to keep up an active site and blog on your own, it's a great compromise between having no site at all and having a building one from scratch. You can link in all the different pieces of your online identity to one place—Twitter account, social network profiles, photos sharing websites, etc.—and spend no time maintaining it.

While we're big fans of the polished and easy to use interface of Flavors.me, you might also want to check out similar services offered by Chi.mp, UnHub, and Card.ly. All make it easy to build a simple personal portal to park your domain at and give people who visit your domain something to look at and a way to connect with you. Photo by Sara Wayland.

If you want more out of your personal domain than personal portal splash pages like Flavors.me can offer, check out our feature on how to host your domain with free apps. There you'll learn how to set up a personal blog or direct your domain towards an existing blog service.

The important thing is that you have a domain—a permanent marker for your online presence—and that it points to something, whether that something is a simple splash page that directs people towards your other activities online, or a full-service blog and information portal you invest lots of time into. Your virtual address needs to provide search engines, prospective employers, and snoopy friends with all the right text and relevant links to propagate your good name.

Link, Link, and Link Some More

Search engines are—to grossly simplify the matter—just giant indexes. Indexes only index what they find, and give the most weight to the things that appear frequently, linked in a relevant fashion. Grabbing a personal domain and pointing it at your personal portal is a great start, but personal branding is not "If you build it, they will come." It's a situation where, "If you build it and consistently link, they will come across it." Photo by gerard79.

The more a link to a web site appears on other web sites—non-spam, non-virus, non-porn sites, that is—the more weight search engines will give it. If no link exists anywhere on the web to www.YourName.com it's practically invisible. On the other hand. if you've included links to your URL in your Facebook profile, your LinkedIn profile, attached to your profiles on link sharing sites like Reddit and Digg, and included it in your commentor profile on sites like, say, Lifehacker and Gizmodo, the crawlers of major engines like Google and Bing will come across it again and again cementing the link between Your Name and YourName.com.

This might sound like work but it's not. You're already on the web and you're busily interacting with it. You're at Lifehacker, you're reading this article, and you're probably leaving comments—we have an awesome and active community! Unless you work for the most Draconian of employers, what's stopping you from using your real name and your website address in your profile here? Think of all the places you visit, leave comments, share photos, and otherwise participate in online communities from Flickr to Reddit to comments on your favorite blogs. All of those popular places are excellent springboards to give your online identity a history and weight with search engines.

The easiest way to build your online reputation is to attach your real name and a link to your web site to the things you're really passionate about. If you love snowboarding and post to snow boarding blogs and forums, start using your real name instead of BoardGuy9000. Join discussion forums related to your profession and hobbies—English teachers, for example, would be well served to join the popular English Companion Ning. We can't possibly list all the different networking opportunities that exist for all professions, but we'd urge you to seek them out for yours. Not only is the networking and exposure to new ideas and material invaluable but it gets your name and web site out there. This isn't a call to get spam-like and throw links to your own blog and site all over the web, indiscrimiately. This is a reminder that just having a personal site linked to your account profile is enough to start giving your real name and identity some traction.Photo by clix.

For some non-profession-specific places to park your virtual identity, hit up the following sites and—at minimum!—sign up and fill out a bio.

• Facebook - Make sure to turn on search engine indexing in the privacy settings.
• Twitter - If you've written Twitter off as some weird place where people talk about how much they love lamps and poop hammers, you'll want to revisit it. If nothing else, use Twitter as a way to update the world about the things going on in the rest of your life, like updates to your blog, or new photo sets you post to Flickr. If you don't want Twitter to be the first hit for your name, read up on how to keep Twitter from overtaking your search results.
• LinkedIn - Don't neglect to search out professional contacts you already have for an instant network.
• Flickr - Whether you use it for practical business purposes or creative personal reasons, Flickr is heavily indexed and a great way to get some instant link love.
• Reddit/Digg: Submit and comment on articles relevant to your work, link to your own work when relevant.
• Delicious Bookmarks/StumbleUpon/Google Bookmarks: Bookmarking sharing and discovery services are fertile ground for sharing links to your work and your personal site.

While you'll find no shortage of blog-sharing directories, places to pimp your RSS feed to a wider audience, and other marketing tools online, getting your name and site URL in the prominent places we noted in the list above should do the trick, without the hassle of making site promotion a part-time job.

Do Not Go Gentle Into the Digital Night

Personal branding and identity management is an undertaking for which there are few sins. One of the minor sins is being annoying in the promotion of your site—nobody likes a link whore!—but the biggest sin, the cardinal sin, of identity management is silence. If someone looks for you online and cannot find you at all, they might assume that you don't have an online presence or that they're looking in the wrong place. If they look for you and find evidence of you all over the web but nothing from the current presidential administration, you're sending a big message. Photo by riesp.

What message? The message that you're old news, you don't keep up on what's going on, and there has to be someone out there more interesting and relevant than you. If the only thing online that points to you are old blog posts from 2005 and a stale social networking profile, you might as well be walking around with a cassette player and some floodwaters on, exclaiming "We put a probe on Mars? Who's this Obama guy?"

You don't need to spend hours a day sharing links, posting to your blog, or updating the world through your Twitter feed but you do need to look like you're alive. Your online presence should not be an archeological snapshot of the life you had in the last decade but an active window into the life you're living now. Update your social networking profiles, indulge your interest in photography and take a few minutes a day to participate in Project 365, share links you find interesting on Twitter, and otherwise connect your real life to your virtual one.

It might seem overwhelming to start managing your online identity, but it's likely not anymore "work" than the amount of energy you're already putting—albeit less focused and organized—into your online pursuits right now. Photo by soopahtoe.

Use the following checklist, referencing the article above to refresh where you need to look, and you'll be done with the basic setup in 20 minutes:

1. Register a domain name.
2. Point the domain at a personal portal or blog.
3. Use your real name and a link back to your domain when you participate in online life.
4. Stay active. Share pictures, post links, leave blog comments.
5. Enjoy your established online identity!

If you have a tip, trick, or experience with personal branding you want to share, sound off in the comments to help your fellow Lifehacker readers build up their online identity.

Send an email to Jason Fitzpatrick, the author of this post, at jason@lifehacker.com.

via lifehacker.com

Posted via web from AndyWergedal

Why You Must be Specific When Talking to a Hiring Manager | CareerEnlightenment.net

Ever buy a car? Wanted it to be unique? How come as soon as you put your money down you start to notice the very car you just bought, down to color and rims, is all over town?

RAS! The Reticular Activating System is located in your brain stem in the back of your head. Among its many functions, it helps filter information that is coming toward you at a rapid clip.

So, the RAS dampens stimulus and it filters what we want to see or not see. Basically, we program ourselves to filter something in and something out!

The RAS filter looks at your past experiences as well as the current problems you may be facing. After a quick evaluation, the RAS helps you to determine what important info is and what can be ignored.

For example, a cave man might prime their RAS by intending to find strawberries for dinner.

A hiring manager might be priming his or her RAS by worrying about how to solve a particular business challenge today.

Your RAS is primed to learn everything you can about job seeking which is why you are more likely to pay attention to blogs posts like this!

See where I’m going with this concept?

We’re All Wandering Around Worried About Our Problems

Our challenge, as job seekers, is to understand there are many other job seekers going for the same jobs. Right now it is particularly hard to stand out from the crowd.

You want to get noticed and be the one to get the job? Show up in the hiring managers RAS!

If a hiring manager is looking for a network engineer who can solve a particular problem, then any network engineer, who says, “I Do That,” will be seen. That network engineer could be you!

So you really need to be specific when you are talking with hiring managers.

Knowing what their RAS is primed to be paying attention to will give you special notice.

When researching companies make sure you answer these questions:

• The name of the hiring manager
• What business problems this person is facing at this moment
• How you might be able to help him or her solve this problem

How Am I Supposed to Know What Your Problem Is?

Easy. LinkedIn has a very nifty thing called “companies” where you can actually research an organization and its employees. There is plenty of info about a person’s role and responsibility:

• Follow the same groups they belong to
• Look for similarities on the profile
• See what status updates this person is publishing

Remember— know very clearly what someone is primed to pay attention to before reaching out. When you do your research, you’ll find your interview interactions will be WAY more meaningful.

So the next time a career counselor asks you to be more specific about your skill set, you know they are coming from a place of science. They are matching your skills with a future employers RAS.

via careerenlightenment.net

Posted via web from AndyWergedal

Best of Branding: Top 5 This Week | Brand-Yourself.com Blog

I have a new column! on blog.brand-yourself.com

Top 5 This Week, Tuesdays

Welcome to the first of many Top 5 This Weeks posts. I search the web daily to find articles to help folks find jobs. Here are my google reader stats for April: From your 96 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 5,683 items.

I’l bring the best to you each week. – @andywergedal

Here are this weeks Top 5

1. Dressing For Success For the Job Interview – [EmploymentDigest.net]

What you wear to an interview is largely based on the position, the company’s preference, and your wardrobe. Dressing formally can give the impression of being rigid and uncomfortable if it is not what you are used to wearing. Dressing too casually can give the impression of laziness and that you really do not want the job.

2. Top 10 Reasons to Have an Online Resume – [EmploymentDigest.net]

Cost – The cost of postage keeps rising, and multiply that cost by the number of Cover Letters and Resumes you send out – it really adds up.

3. Lying on Resumes … Topic Never Gets Old – [Your Best Impression]

Err, yea… Don’t lie. It is amazing that we need to even need reminding.

4. Is This Simple Resume Mistake Costing You Interviews? – [Blue Sky Resumes]

The problem might not be your resume content – it might be your file format. Of the resumes we receive to review each day, 10-20% are not saved as Microsoft Word documents. This is job search suicide!

5. Two Questions Behind Every Job Interview – [What Would Dad Say]

What is really happening in the interview is actually quite simple. There are only two questions in the mind of the interviewer:

1. Do I like this candidate?2. How can this person impact my department, company– can he/she do the job?

From Interviews to cautioning liars we span the various perspectives in the job search. Be sure to check out the Top 5 This Week each Tuesday on brand-yourself.com.

via blog.brand-yourself.com

Posted via web from AndyWergedal

How to Scale Your Personal Brand, Earn More and Get a Life

You’ve worked so hard to establish a reputation, but now it’s backfired…and, you’re in personal branding hell.

Building a strong personal brand—being known as the go-to person in a specific niche—has it’s ups. Everyone turns to you for information, for ideas, for thought leadership, for advice, for strategy, for connections, for presentations, for favors, for opportunities, for jobs, for partnerships, for salvation.

But, if the way to choose to leverage your personal brand is to trade time for money…

You may well have just built a personal brand that feels more like a cage than a stage.

Because, there are only so many hours you can bill for, so many planes you can get on, so many individual conversations you can have before you…and your life…implode. Especially if you’ve also got a family you actually want to see, friends you love to be around, other activities, passions and hobbies you love to engage in and a commitment to taking care of your body and your mind.

If your personal brand requires you to trade time for money, at some point, you’ll need to make a life-critical decision.

Either increase your rates to a level that let’s you earn enough to live well in the world, while working a balance of hours that affords you a life outside your living. Or, keep your rates accessible to most, forcing you to work a ton of hours…and risk the neglect-driven atrophy of all the other parts of your life you claim to hold dear.

There is, of course, a third option…scale your brand independent of trading time for money.

Keep a certain amount of face-to-face time, especially if that experience makes you come alive (it does, for me). But, then build a plan to scale your business and your income around solutions and experiences that do not require you to trade time for money.

Examples include:

1. Commodotize knowledge & Filter Access – Brain dump what you know into a format—books, videos, info-products, virtual courses—that allows you to share what you know on a mass scale and likely a far more accessible price, without you having to deliver that knowledge repeatedly or provide unlimited or individualized access directly to you.

Lewis Howes’ course on LinkedIn Marketing, Dave Navarro’s Launch Coach products, Naomi Dunford’s small biz marketing programs, Chris Guillebeau’s Unconventional Guides and John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing products are great examples.

2. Train For Bucks – Train people to leverage your knowledge to become independent consultants, then charge a substantial fee for that training. Yes, you may well end up training your competition, but that just means you need to keep growing, learning and improving to stay one step ahead. Plus, if you change your mindset from scarcity to abundance, you’ll realize…you’re actually training your future collaborators and teachers, too.

Legendary copywriter, John Carlton, is a great example, making the leap from writing copy for clients to training people to become copywriters with his Simple Writing System. Or, Pam Slim and Michelle Woodward, two well-known coaches who now virtually train others to make a better living coaching.

3. Build a Team – Bring together a team of people, share what you know, delegate levels of responsibility, then empower and trust them to go out into the world, then go beyond your expectations to help you create even better solutions and bring them to market. This is the foundation of every company that grows out of the unique abilities of an individual.

What Jason Fried did with 37Signals is a great example. Or, how James grew professional writing company, Men With Pens.  I did this, too, in my last brick and mortar biz, Sonic Yoga, building a team of amazing teachers and community leaders around me, so that I ended up working only about 5-10 hours a week by the time I sold the company.

4. Be a Catalyst & Aggregator – Leverage your brand to bring together, organize and help market others in complimentary disciplines, forming a collective effort that draws more potential clients with shared needs to your blended efforts. Then, create integrated in-person and commoditized solutions that reach across a broader swath of your clients’ needs.

Brian Clark of copyblogger has executed on this and the above approach masterfully with his company, Unglued Media, bringing in people like Tony Clark (no, he’s not Brian’s second cousin) and Sonia Simone as partners, then teaming with Chris Pearson (DIY Themes), Darren Rowse and Chris Brogan (Third Tribe Marketing) and others to build an online training and product powerhouse.

These are just a few ideas. Point being…

Be very conscious about the way you scale and leverage your personal brand. It’s the difference between living well or living hell.

As always, would love to you know what YOU think…

via jonathanfields.com

Posted via web from AndyWergedal

Tips for Saving Time while Building Your Personal Brand | Personal Branding Blog - Dan Schawbel

Are you one of the many who use lack of time as a reason to put-off building a personal brand by writing provocative thought leadership articles, books, starting a podcast, frequently updating your blog, or submitting guest posts on other blogs?

If you don’t have the time now, when will you have the time?

Lack of time is an unfortunate reality for most of us; today, everyone is stretched then by family demands, financial pressures, job expectations, and an “always connected” Internet/cell phone world.

Nevertheless, each year, new subject area experts appear as competitors in every area.

What’s their secret?

Since everyone shares 24-hour days, and no amount of wishful thinking is likely to reduce your workload, there are mainly just 2 things you can do to find the time to build your personal brand:

1. Commitment. Commitment means making your personal brand a priority in your life, not just something you do when you finish your “real” job. Commitment involves recognizing the importance of creating a personal brand, making difficult choices, and cultivating the habits needed to create the content you need to establish a a compelling personal brand in your field.
2. Efficiency. After making the commitment to build your personal brand, you have to cultivate the habits of efficiency. Efficiency involves multiplying your time by accomplishing in 30-minutes a day what would normally take you 60 or 90 minutes a day. Efficiency involves writing strategically, so your words and key ideas can be leveraged as broadly as possible.

The following are some ideas learned from authors and subject area experts whom I’ve interviewed during the past 18 months.

7 time-saving personal branding tips

1. Time limits. Try writing your blog posts in 30-minutes, or less. Stress builds, and productivity often gets clogged, when you take a writing task too seriously. The solution is to commit to writing your blog posts in 30-minutes. Words are far more likely to flow when you spend your time writing, rather than over-thinking the topic before you begin writing. Writing quickly also gives you more time to review and self-edit your post before sharing it with the Internet.
2. Technology. One recently self-published author I interviewed purchased an inexpensive, hand-held digital recorder and dictates blog posts and sections of chapters while driving to client meetings or stopped at traffic lights. When he gets back, he plugs the digital recorder into his computer, and his voice recognition software program transcribes his dictation and prepares the first draft.
3. Expanding topics. Although the practice is by no means universal, more and more individuals are building their personal brands and leveraging their writing by expanding blog posts into articles, ebooks, and chapters of brand-building books.
4. Condensing topics. The same idea works in reverse; blog posts can be condensed to their essence and reused as tip sheets and sidebars in articles and books.
5. Reformatting. Content ideas should transcend media; ideas that first appear as blog posts can be addressed in podcasts and YouTube videos. Likewise, after creating a podcast, you might be able to convert the topic into 2 or 3 separate blog posts addressing aspects of the podcast. Each media has its own followers. More important, each time you re-address a topic, you’re likely to come up with new ideas.

   

6. Live connections. One of the easiest ways to develop new content is to present an on-going series of free interviews and teleseminars which are recorded and transcribed.  Live events create deadlines that overcome procrastination and prompt action. Your enthusiasm builds, and your voice changes, when you’re projecting to a live audience, and the ideas flow as they tend to during conversations.
7. Crowd-sourcing. Many profitable personal brands have been based on tapping into the power of others, often by providing an opportunity for others to share their expertise and ideas. By soliciting success stories and examples of mistakes made and lessons learned, or even just commenting on the videos found on the TED.Org site, ( not only taps into the power of story, but provides a foundation for your critical analyses and observations.

Personal branding sense demands efficient content creation

The above are just a few of the ways you can save time while building your personal brand with helpful and relevant content. There’s no time to waste! If you want to succeed in the Web 2.0 world, you must establish your personal brand, and personal brands dependent content. Your ability to build your personal brand is, ultimately, tied to your ability to save time creating content. Do you agree? What’s your favorite time-saving technique? Do you have a tip you’d like to share with others? Submit your ideas as comments, below.

Author:

Roger C. Parker shares ideas for planning writing, promoting, & profiting ideas and strategies in his daily writing tips blog. His latest book is #BOOK TITLE Tweet: 140 Bite-Sized Ideas for Compelling Article, Book, & Event Titles.

via personalbrandingblog.com

Posted via web from AndyWergedal

Networking – You Need A Heart Of Gold

What does it mean, generally, to have a heart of gold?  I checked the lyrics from Neil Young’s song with the same name and I’m not sure he has it nailed down.  The Kinks (greatest band of all time) have a song also with that name.  Their key lyric says:

But underneath that cold exterior, I know you’ve got a heart of gold

So, officially, I’m going to say a “gold heart” is good and, if you have one, you will make others feel good.

And I guess this post in the end is about intent.  If you are out networking with a particular purpose.  To win.  To succeed.  To be the most connected person at the event.  Well, let me suggest that you slow down a bit.

Because your heart is likely a bit lighter in color.  Like a silver perhaps.

And if that’s true, you have an opportunity to make some adjustments.  To consider the needs of others and to consider that maybe there are some folks out there that could specifically use your help.  Tomorrow.

If you’ve become a bit myopic.  Consider taking a break.  Consider taking a productive day off during job search.

Photo Credit, Bennett Graham

via timsstrategy.com

Posted via web from AndyWergedal