I wanted to let you know about my participation in a workshop summit tomorrow in downtown Boston. Dan Schawbel personal branding expert and author of the bestselling book Me 2.0, along with Sheryl Victor Levy, owner of Savvy Strategy, and I will be presenting a seminar on Personal Branding for Job Seekers. The event is titled “Discover your Brand”
Dan will address the concept of the personal online brand, and he’ll provide tons of data and case study information to explain what it is, and what it is not. I’ll take a deep dive approach and focus on Blogging as one of the methods in which someone can leverage social media for career management. Sheryl, who is a marketing and coaching expert, will talk about social networking strategies for job seekers.
Over the next few weeks I’m going to share some of my presentations on this blog, some on SlideShare and Brainshark’s Content Network, and leave some for those who want to hear me in person.
So how can job seekers leverage blogs? Do job seekers need to become bloggers? Can blogging land you a job? What should a job seeker blog about — and avoid blogging about? Which blogs should you read? What about commenting on blogs — how does that help? What tools do you need to make this work? We’ll cover these topics at the session tomorrow.
Note, I’ve been delivering workshops on these topics for a few months now, so I have a lot of materials to draw from. I also coach people who are looking to leverage social media for their job searching processes and for their small businesses. I’ve worked with some large corporations too — but I find that the ability to make profound change is greater when I deal with the owner of a small business, or with a motivated professional who needs to improve his or her career and wants to understand how tools like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs can help — and where they don’t help. Is this related to Enterprise 2.0? Loosely, but not directly. In a future blog post I will draw some parallels between online branding and virtual team collaboration.
When I prepare a talk, I consider many questions. Three in particular that I make explicit to the audience: When the talk ends, what do I want you to know, to feel, and to do? I’ll write the answers on a slide and share it with the audience. This way they know what my objectives are and they can measure the effectiveness of the talk. Do they know what I wanted them to know? Did they feel the way I hoped? Will they do what I suggested? Two of the three is usually good enough. The “Do” is the most important. Three of three is a home run!
Tomorrow’s session has the following objectives:
An essential element of my message is that there are many different ways to leverage social media (Blogs in particular — for tomorrow’s session). People are different. Some of us are good writers. Some learn by listening, others by talking. Some like to read long papers, others don’t. So a one-size fits all solution rarely works. I’ll present a 5-step process where people can choose to do any or all of the 5 steps based on how comfortable they are. As long as they do one more step then they are doing now, they’ll get value out of the activity.
I’ll encourage experimentation, but I’ll set very clear expectations about what works and what does not — especially as people just get started. And most importantly, I’ll want participants to take some actions. There’s a lot they can do on their own, and if they need help, there are many people hanging a shingle and offering to help. I’m here for those who are interested in my services. Just drop me a note and we’ll talk.
The following is the general framework that I’ll be working from and elaborating upon. I take each element and expand their component pieces. Here’s a picture that will give you a sense of how to orient your thinking when considering the relationship between branding and job seeking. As always, comments are welcome.
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Thinking about having Gil speak to your group? DO IT. I just got back from today’s Personal Branding Summit and was very impressed with Gil’s blogging model. I’ve been blogging (http://www.SolutionMarketingBlog.com) for a while now, but I still learned a great deal from Gil. Great job – thanks Gil.
– Steve
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Wow! Thanks Steve! I appreciate this endorsement — especially from a seasoned pro and former analyst such as you.
Great job, Gil! Thanks for sharing your ideas and insights.
Question: A big part of the personal branding idea is to establish a single, easily-understood picture of what you are, professionally. For someone with clear aspirations, this is good news. What about all those job seekers who aren’t so clear on their aspirations, or have a few different potential paths to follow? In our current market, does it make sense to paint a narrow bullseye?
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Dan,
Thanks Dan, I’m glad you were there and that you blogged about it too. You ask a fantastic question! (I expect no less from you).
I can very much relate to the question myself. I spent many years as an enterprise architect, I was also an event producer, developer, product manager, consultant, teacher, and analyst. I seem to know a thing to two about personal branding and social computing behaviors too. When people ask me what would be my ideal next job, I’ get stumped. I just want to do what I’m doing now, but get paid for it
. On the other hand, in this economy, I’d be glad to take a job that is just shy of my ideal — something that leverages my other talents. So I struggle with the question too.
The “easy to say” answer is that it is all a balance. You can’t be a dessert topping and a floor wax — (can you?). The “hard to implement” answer is that you have to find the level that seems to work for you and the people you want to connect with. If your “brand” is too limiting, you may close off opportunities, if too broad you may confuse your audience. Even if you can manage the multiple personalties, the world might not be as sophisticated. So I’d err the side of being focused. But am I erring?
Honestly, I’d love to hear from other reader about their thoughts on this — since I don’t think the simple “it’s a balance” answer is going to be satisfying.