How many pages is your resume? Probably no more than three pages if you're mid-career with years of experience. So much experience, in fact, all the business social networking platforms available to add depth, breadth, and diversity to your business network didn't exist when your career started. Heck, online business social networking options probably weren't available even half-way into your career. While that's reality, being left out of the advantages business social networking 2.0 can provide when your age is closer to 25 times 2.0 doesn't have to be.
With opportunities social networks provide in putting your name in front of new people, increasing visibility to your skills, and connecting to others who can help advance your career goals, social media channels shouldn't be ignored by anyone who suspects they're not in the last job they expect to have!
This is top of mind because I'm talking on behalf of SMCKC with a group of mid-career professionals this morning on "11 Steps and 11 Weeks to Create a Mid-Career Business Social Network." This video is a post-presentation review of the flip charts I used for the session (another in those social media-oriented presentations where I couldn't use a computer).
I'd love to say my business social networking immersion started several years ago with a coordinated plan, but it didn't. It began with a need to build an identity outside the major corporation where I'd spent all but the first years of my career. That critical career need, a proclivity for creating work-related content over the years, a perfectly-timed presentation from a corporate blogger, and instigation from my career coach, Kathryn Lorenzen, were the vital ingredients in launching a business social networking presence well into my career. The effort included:
- Getting the Brainzooming blog started
- Building a professional presence across social media channels
- Ultimately being able to turn The Brainzooming Group into a full-time business.
The result of this effort has been my two-page resume has effectively grown to tens of thousands of pages, with elements of it seen by more than a hundred thousand people in the past year. It's comprised of expertise-related content and references widely available on many websites. This impact has come from slow progress over a number of years; progress which, quite frankly, is so slow it regularly stretches my patience level. But that's what diving in and learning as you go feels like. Plus there's been so much more learning and progress than if I were still crafting an elegant plan which never got implemented.
If you're really serious about building greater diversity and depth in your network and letting a bigger audience in the business world know about what you know, I'm hard pressed to come up with a higher yielding approach than adding a social media presence to your career plans! – Mike Brown
If you’d like to add an interactive, educationally-stimulating presentation on strategy, innovation, branding, social media or a variety of other topics to your event, Mike Brown is the answer. Email us at brainzooming@gmail.com or call 816-509-5320 to learn how Mike can get your audience members Brainzooming!
