Knock Em Dead—Social Networking

For Job Search & Professional Success

Martin Yate

• Publisher: Jumpingdude Media
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780991270484
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Learn how to integrate social networking into every aspect of your job search and then leverage your social media presence for ongoing professional success. Build professionally relevant networks and a desirable, flexible brand that evolves with your growing experience, while you build and nurture networks that help you navigate a long worklife, and gain greater control over your destiny.

PART I

YOUR SOCIAL
NETWORKING BRAND

CHAPTER 1

HOW TO LIVE LIFE ON YOUR TERMS

… And Get What You Want Out of Life

Mastering social networking isn’t brain surgery—it is a professional skill that, once integrated into your life, will help you navigate the twists and turns of a long career and enrich your life in other ways.

In this book, we’ll talk about the social networking skills that will help you execute a successful job search with the help of robust professional networks and develop new career management strategies. There’s a commonsense logic behind every social networking tactic you’ll learn, and they’ll all mesh seamlessly together into a practical strategy for managing the progress of your career. You can get a social network–integrated job search started within a week, and reap the rewards for the rest of your career.

Focused Social Messaging

The first lesson we learn in the professional world is: “Your customers are always right,” and the second lesson is: “Find out what your customers want and then sell it to them.” The same goes for social networking. It is important that the messaging of your social media profiles and social networking activities reflect a brand that employers find compelling. Your social networking activities can make a significant contribution to your success in life, but first you need to appreciate corporate priorities, and then brand yourself as the kind of professional who understands and supports them.

The corporation is a complex piece of moneymaking machinery that delivers products and services for its customers in exchange for income. In turn, every job is a small but important cog in this complex moneymaking machine. If the company can redesign its machinery to do without a particular cog (automation) or can find a cheaper/younger cog or outsource your job to Mumbai, it’s going to do so.

Most professional jobs, like yours, exist because the company hasn’t yet been able to simplify them enough for export to a country with cheaper labor costs or automate them out of existence altogether. This is because, in your professional area, problems arise that require both technical expertise and judgment to solve. Consequently, employers first look for someone who has the technical skills to execute the deliverables of the job, and then the supporting transferable skills that empower a candidate to solve the problems that typically occur within that particular area of expertise. On top of this, the employer hopes to hire someone who understands the professional territory the job covers well enough to anticipate and prevent many of these problems from arising in the first place, and to solve them efficiently when they do arise.

No matter what your job title, essentially you are always hired to be a problem solver within a specific area of expertise. Think about the nuts and bolts of any job you’ve held. At its heart, that job is chiefly concerned with the anticipation, prevention, and solution of problems. Over the coming pages, this fundamental insight will help you develop a resilient social networking brand that resonates with employers’ needs and implement the social networking tactics and strategies that will help you establish your credentials and get more interviews and better job offers.

Take Control of Your Career

Your parents were born into a world in which hard work, dedication, and sacrifice led to long-term job security and a steady, predictable climb up the ladder of success. But for you and your peers—as well as for those of your elders still employed—the world has changed. Companies still expect hard work, dedication, and sacrifice, but you are expendable.

If you are ready to become the architect of your own success, this new digitally dominated world is a place of enormous opportunity. But if you aren’t prepared to take responsibility for the success of your professional life, a first job turns into another identical one a year or two down the road, and then another, and after seven to ten years all you’ll see are the backs of people who were your peers at the start of your career. Then in your forties, you will realize your so-called “career” has just been an ongoing series of very similar jobs that are taking you nowhere, and by fifty, when wage and age discrimination begin to kick in, you’ll be lost and depressed because somehow it all passed you by. Where such people go wrong is in not being prepared to develop the career management and networking skills that give them control over the quality and outcomes of their lives.

Enlightened Self-Interest and Social Networking

Social networking is only important to the degree to which it serves your needs, so we have to put it in the context of a central idea in career management strategy. You have one life to live, so don’t waste it on blind loyalty to companies that do not care what becomes of you; instead, adopt a commitment to enlightened self-interest: putting your survival and happiness first. This means placing your financial security and personal fulfillment front and center in your life. Stop thinking of yourself as a “company man” or some poor sap looking for a job, and start to think of yourself as a company, a financial entity that needs to maintain a steady cash flow for (if you are at the start of your career) fifty years or more. The first step in taking control of your professional destiny, your life, and your economic well-being is exercising the same forethought, objectivity, and self-interest as a corporation.

Start thinking of yourself as a company—as MeInc.

As MeInc, you have products and services to sell to your customers (employers). These are the professional skills and experience you accumulate as you work. These products and services have to fulfill the needs of your customers, or the sale will go to a competitor. To remain competitive over the course of your career, it will help to structure the activities of MeInc along the same lines as successful corporations; you’ll need:

•Research & Development (R&D): To identify and develop emerging skills with the maximum marketplace appeal. You have to monitor evolving market demands on an ongoing basis to develop the skills that employers need. This will help you establish a social media presence (or brand) that keeps current with marketplace demands.

•Marketing and Public Relations: The social networks you build are your most powerful tools for establishing professional credibility and ensuring that MeInc becomes visible as a desirable brand to an ever-widening circle, expanding outwards through your department, the company, your local professional community, and beyond, as your career plans dictate.

•Strategic Planning: To monitor the general health of your profession and your employer in particular. This enables you to plan and time the strategic job changes that take you to new employers, and to change careers—on your timetable. Working with R&D and Marketing, your Strategic Planning activities will complement the social networking activities that help you monitor professional opportunities and strategies for researching the pursuit of completely new revenue streams.

•Finance: Live up to your dreams, not your income. You live in a world dominated by 24/7 advertising media, and your exposure encourages you to fritter away your income on the instant gratification drummed into your head by advertising. To control your destiny and make your dreams come true, you have to break free of this indoctrination and invest yourself, your time, and your income in the activities that will make MeInc successful and give you the opportunity for a fulfilling life.

•Sales: The varied communication skills that enable you to put together a resume that works, generate job interviews, and turn those interviews into job offers. Beyond this, Sales includes tactics for gaining job security, winning promotions, and using your social networking skills to execute job searches and career changes on your own timetable.

Social Networking and a
Financially Secure and Fulfilled Life

To succeed in life, you have to take responsibility for achieving your goals and guiding the development of your career. Social networking is one of the most effective and flexible tools you have at your disposal to make this happen. In a job market revolutionized by technological change, integrating a social media presence and effective social networking strategies into your career management plans will dramatically improve your chances of living the life you want to live. In the next chapter, we’ll get started by talking about the skills that form the basis of your social media brand.

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CHAPTER 2

THE FOUNDATIONS OF
CAREER SUCCESS

There are certain words you see in almost every job posting: communication skills, multitasking, teamwork, creativity, critica...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Social Networking: The Key to a Successful Future
• Part I: Your Social Networking Brand
• Part II: Building Your Social Networks
• Part III: Your Social Network–Integrated Job Search
• Part IV: Leveraging Your Social Networks
• Index