Successful Blog

How to Build a Yellow Ferrari Product YOU Resume / Brochure

by

Make New Rules — Don’t Be the List

Somewhere along the line, you probably learned rules about writing resumes pr asking for sponsorship. You probably learned about starting with your objectives and your history. What I’m about to tell you is going to break rules … make new ones instead.

The old resume was all about you, anyway. In today’s world, the new rules are all about them. Think about the person or people you are writing to or for. They’re the only ones who count.

It’s easy to think of a resume as a list — three suits: two blue, one gray — of what we’ve done. We tend to think of a resume off as one more painful requirement of job acquisition. We tend to think of a request for sponsorship as a list of what we want. That thinking sets us up for major missed opportunities. With a few tweaks, your resume or your request can be a dynamic tool in your business or career strategy.

You may need the list, but you don’t have to be the list.

Make your resume or your request more like a marketing brochure.

Most people will do what we want if we can prove it’s to their benefit.
That’s your quest.

A Yellow Ferrari Product YOU Resume or Brochure

Imagine that you’re a product — a yellow Ferrari.
Build a spec sheet quantifying your performance stats — those THEY care about.
Ask a helpful — not hypeful — marketing person to help you write copy about your soft skills — the skills THEY care about.
You’re well on your way to serious attention.

Include your product history — tell only what THEY will care about — on page 2.

Use Time and Technology to Show Not Tell

In the age of computers, we should be sending out fewer resumes and requests, not more. Ten well-investigated contacts beat out 100 attempts to knock on the wrong doors. Computers make it easier to seek, find, and learn about the people you want to do business with — be they clients, sponsors, or employers. Use the technology show them, not tell them!

  • Make a generic Yellow Ferrari Product You Brochure.
  • Set aside time daily to identify 1 or 2 client, sponsor, employer candidates whose goals match your goals.
  • Research each candidate to understand how your goals and their goals align.
  • Use that information to personalize the sample document for each specific candidate.

When we research a company before we approach them, it changes the way we write. It changes our pitch, our volume, our tone and word choice. We see how our personal skill set might add value in their context rather than talking in a manner that’s shooting blind.

A Sample Outstanding Product You Branding Brochure

Turn a resume into a Yellow Ferrari Product YOU brochure.
PAGE 1: Why not start with …

This document prepared for [Company XYZ] by [Person ABC] a web strategist who can offer tested experience to [goal MNO]

Career Accomplishments — Delivers results.
This is a short bulleted list of quantitative results, such as sales numbers, profit numbers, great hires, Google results.
Always numbers first.

Core Competencies — Tends the Intangibles.
This is sections of qualitative skills, such as team skills, management skills, publishing skills, interdepartmental skills.
Key ideas highly organized.

PAGE 2: With your skill set laid on page 1, you can list your chronology simply with far less detail on page 2. Depending on your industry, you might offer it as a short narrative summary in place of or above the breakout chronology — the way some restaurant menus do. [Be careful. More traditional industries won’t find that inspiring or cute.]

Use It as a Promotional Tool

Change the way you look at your resume and you’ll soon find a world of uses for it. Use it as you do your business card. I’ve sent mine to a business friend with a note saying, “Let me know if my voice might help you in the meetings with the publishers you told me about.” Design Page 1 into your blog’s About Page to let your readers know more about you, your brand, and your business.

Most importantly look over what you feature to focus on what has contributed most to your success. Know that just the act of doing so will make talking about what you do more fluent in the future.

What would you expect in a Yellow Ferrari Product You Resume / Brochure?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Related articles
Building a Personal Brand YOU
Brand YOU — Capitalize on Your Strengths
Personal Branding: Strengths Assessment Tool
Brand YOU –What’s the BIG IDEA?

Buy the ebook.

Register for SOBCon09 NOW!!

Invest, Learn, Grow!

Open Mic 7pm Chgo Time: Mark Davidson on The Art of Self Promotion

by

Join Us Tonight

JOIN US TONIGHT AT 7PM

Guest host Mark Davidson, Social Media Promoter

Man about Twitter, Internet strategist, and social media manager, Mark Davidson, will be here to talk about nuances self-promotion and Twitter.

Oh, and bring your questions and sample links with you.

The rules are simple — be nice.

Do be nice. 🙂

–ME “Liz” Strauss

How to Find Your Tribe in One Word

by

relationships button

Two weeks ago, I wrote about finding your voice when the tribe has spoken. Losing a job is a sure a way to feel we’ve lost our tribe, but it’s not the only one. A relocation, a divorce, a huge setback of some sort, or some way of thinking can make us feel apart.

Lots of folks have lots of reason for feeling we’re on the outside.

It’s almost overwhelming. The world can seem to be one huge tribe and we can seem to be the only one who’s not a part. Of course, that’s flawed thinking. Ever met a group of people who could agree on anything huge for very long? The whole world is too big to hold a meeting about who belongs.

It’s not how the world sees you. It’s how you see yourself that counts.

Which tribe do you want to be part of? You get to pick. Now is a better time than any other to get the word out about who you are. We have social tools to launch a campaign and so many ways to find a new tribe.

The key to it all is in one word — chosen and used wisely.

Connect — Online and Off

  • Connect with the things that made you successful in the past.
  • Connect with the things you want to accomplish in the future.
  • Connect with people who are positive and who see the person in you that you like.
  • Connect with your family and friends and talk about what they’re doing.
  • Connect with positive people who can teach you.
  • Connect with people you find interesting and smart.
  • Connect over coffee, at church, at any venue that invites learners.
  • Connect online and off.
  • Connect with people who enjoy helping you connect.

Every person you connect to is an opportunity to find out about what you’ve been missing and what you can learn to survive.

Keep these thoughts in mind when you connect.

A connection is not as simple as clicking on the “follow” button. It’s finding out about a person, learning what you have in common, showing what you have to give, not what you need to get.

Solid connections are built by listening and then sharing back. Taking the time to connect with fewer, quality people can be more efficient — each person you get to know well can open the door to a whole network of friends.

The Three Rules of How to Connect

  • Connect with an open, hungry, beginner’s mind to the situations that teach you.
  • Connect with an open, generous, fearless heart to people who want to help you.
  • Connect with purpose to the future that you couldn’t imagine until now.

How will you know when you’ve found the tribe where you belong? You’ll not be thinking about who you are when you’re with them, you’ll be thinking about what you’re learning and what you can offer them.

And if you have a tribe … your tribe will strong if you invite new folks in.
How might we reach out to help someone who needs that first connection?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!! Buy Liz’s ebook to learn to the art of online conversation.

Register for SOBCon09 NOW!!

Connect to a Power Network.

Sponsor Love: Buzz Corps and Allstate Join the SOBCon Sponsor List!!

by

Sponsor Love Is Contagious

At SOBCon09 What fun to announce this! SOBCon09 has two new sponsors!!

My relationship with Buzz Corps started with track I managed for BlogWorld Expo. I asked Geoff Nelson if he would speak on a panel about the sponsoring deals Buzz Corp makes For, By, and With the community of Blogger. One of the first things he said to me was that he and his partner Chris Aarons are champions for bloggers because they believe they learn most of what they know from blogs. We got to know each other at Gnomedex and through the months after — Geoff, Chris, and Nick, their third partner talked to introduce our event. I’m thrilled Geoff and Chris will be joining us at SOBCon.
Their contribution will provide

  • funding to help the conference — allowing us to better serve participants
  • visibility and new conversations for Buzz Corps
  • Geoff’s participation — a chance for participants to find out how Buzz Corps works with bloggers and perhaps how Buzz Corp might work with them.
  • A new kind of expertise brought to the SOBCon table.

Kudos to Beth Rosen who helped connect me back with Marcia Hansen, a woman I sat next to at BlogWell. Marcia and I got a chance to extend our relationship recently and now Allstate is sponsoring SOBCon. I’m delighted that Marcia will be fully participating in our event including

  • funding to help the conference — allowing us to better serve participants
  • visibility for Allstate
  • Marcia’s participation — a chance for participants to find out how Allstate is using social media.
  • The Allstate entry in the “Show the Sponsors Challenge”

Because They Invested in Us We Can Invest MORE in YOU!

Thank you to our new Sponors!!

Thank you also everyone who took the Blog It Earn It!! Discount

If you don’t have your promo code, please leave a link to your post below (with your email in the form) and I’ll make sure that you get it.

We’re sincerely grateful to everyone who makes this such an incredible event!!

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Register for SOBCon09 NOW!!

That many incredible people make it incredible!!

Beach Notes: Blue Ocean Strategy

by


by Guest Writer Suzie Cheel

Des emerged yesterday morning only just awake saying “I have a great idea- I’ll tell you at the beach!”

As we walked down to the water’s edge, Des began to talk about his idea and related it to

the book, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and make the Competition Irrelevant by W. C. Chan and Renee Mauborgne

He then decided to illustrate this by drawing how he sees red ocean / blue ocean in the sand.

The beach is such a great place for seminars!

Des was saying at this time of global economic anxiety, instead of trying to compete harder in the Red Oceans of existing market focus we should look for or create Blue Oceans of new opportunity.

An example from the Blue ocean strategy book is how Yellow Tail wines, from an until then little-known company Casella Wines, took the American alcoholic beverages market by storm.They did this precisely, not by competing with powerful, entrenched wine companies, but by way of a market strategy which targeted people the US wine companies had ignored or neglected.

His example of a Red Ocean (red because of blood in the water) was where so many many people selling services in the social media field target younger audiences, the growing market of baby boomers using social media is not being similarly targeted.

What is your blue ocean strategy?

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh

Visual Authenticity: How Do You Show Your Promise?

by

The Promise of What’s Inside

As a book publisher, I looked at hundreds of suggested book covers. Sometimes the most well-designed were the ones that got turned down immediately. They might have been beautiful, but they didn’t do the job.

The cover’s job is to communicate what’s inside. It makes a promise of what you’ll find if you explore further.

People say “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover.” But we we’re not wired right, nor do we have time, to do an indepth study of everything and everyone before we decide.

I know that this can seem controversial, but to me how you look speaks volumes to someone who might be your next client. — William Love, VividlyDrawn

The one who visually communicates what he or she offers
is far more likely to get an offer. The connection happens before a word is said.

Disconnects, Visual Authenticity, and First Impressions

Yesterday, I had two meetings at The Image Studios. the professional image communication consultancy in Chicago. We accomplished several things.

Kristin, Colors, Clothes

Meet Kristin Evans wardrobe consultant. Kristin and I sat for about an hour discussing what I do, how I live, and how much time I like to spend on things like clothes. We took a phrase from my friend RoxanneDiana. I want “a high maintenance look with low maintenance management.”

Then we went to a three-way mirror. Kristin pointed out the shape of my face, the width of my shoulders and my waist, the length of arms, my torso, and my legs. Then she explained how to use clothing pieces to get the best look for what I’ve got — to draw the eyes up, to even out my height, to make the mathematics work.

We covered my hair and clothes and put colors around my face to find the color palette that works best with my skin tones … I’m delighted to report the colors I’ve chosen for my new blog design are in that group.

Kali, Diversity, and Reversity

Meet Kali, the founder and passionate entrepreneur. Kali and I talked about my goals and her goals for several hours. She talked hair and took photos use the computer imager to choose the hair style that suits my personality — the authenticity words I’ve chosen to describe myself, when no one’s looking. We’re not there yet … keep watching.

We also talked about diversity and “reversity.” We explore the idea that by teaching diversity, we’re focusing on the wrong thing. We’ve built a culture that teaches us to “allow for” differences, but don’t teach folks the skills they need or enough avenues to acquire them.

For example: We say that men, women, people of various colors and cultures, Boomers, GenYers, you and I should be understood. But any amount of diversity understanding for me — that I only sound uncertain, that I never learned to small talk, or that I only look as if I don’t care — won’t change the fact that those “differences” make it harder for me to succeed. What I need is the skills and information to reverse those perceptions.

First Impressions, Mixed Messages and Trust

First impressions are made of context and trust. If people see one thing and hear the same thing, the impression resonates with trust. If what they see and hear don’t match — I say “yes,” but shake my head “no.” — they have to reconcile the differences.

It’s hard to trust mixed messages.

When we offer visual and verbal authenticity — communication is easier for all of us. It’s a great promise we deliver on. Like the book and cover, what’s inside starts the process.

I’ve started with a new t-shirt.

t-shirt by Reflect
Elpoep gnizama tcartta i -- t-shirt by Reflect

How do you show your promise? I’m working on it and I’d really like to know.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Register now for SOBCon09

Put your promise into action.