Get a Job! 10 Steps to Career Success (©2013, Inkwater Press), by Kathleen Brady provides the framework for how to conduct a successful job search. She offers a step-by-step guide that allows you to be self-aware and build on your desires and strengths. It addresses: launching a job search; assessing your abilities, skills, and achievements; creating an effective resume; conducting market research; building a strong, sustainable network; applying for jobs; interview strategies; evaluating and negotiating offers; and conducting a self-appraisal.
Strong branding can create awareness, provide authentic value, motivate members/customers to act, and build long-term member/customer loyalty built on trust. Capture the Mindshare and The Market Share Will Follow (©2013, Palgrave Macmillan), by Libby Gill, guides organizations through the process that allows them to articulate their brand so powerfully that they’ll stand out from the herd of competitors. Through case studies and success stories, the author details how you can enhance and differentiate your brand in a crowded marketplace by mastering seven core methods, which include:
- Clarify Member Benefits: Focus on your member benefits, not just your products or services. Use clear and compelling language and lead with your members’ best interests, not your pedigree or technical specs.
- Commit to Your Member: Clarify your commitment to value and for member success. Keep the big picture top-of-mind, but don't forget that each and every touch point has a significant impact on loyalty. Make every contact count. Enhance the value that you deliver every way you possibly can.
- Collaborate with Your Member: Pass information to the member. Ask members questions, learn about what they need, and pass that information both up and down the pipeline so that others in your organization can help. Share facts, data, solutions, as well as contacts, relationships, and social and even emotional intelligence.
- Connect with Your Member: Plan, design, and execute communications strategically along every connective touch-point that you can identify. Study your communications interface with each and every prospect or member and identify these touch points specifically, including any websites, request forms, email systems, phone systems, voice mail, and other automated response technology, newsletters, text messages, faxes, in-person meetings, conferences, presentations, white papers, etc. Review and redesign each and every touch point so that your communications content and style packs real value and builds a relationship with your prospect and leads them to want more of what you offer.
- Compete with Your Competition: Be upfront and recognize, analyze, explain, distinguish and actively outperform your competition. Go beyond the obvious, direct competition— that is, the organizations offering products and services that fill a similar need as yours. Identify and address the less visible, indirect competition. Pay close attention to new technologies, and upstart challengers seeking to pounce on your marketplace, and slip in under the radar of the established players in your area.
- Communicate with Confidence and Certainty: Get up, get out of your chair; get moving! The maximum competitive advantage almost always goes to the people who are extroverted, confident, assertive, even aggressive, in the workplace. Practice, practice and practice some more, so that you can readily communicate with confidence, even if you feel outside you comfort zone. Be prepared and come to meetings armed with critical data and information, industry updates, news headlines, and even sports scores so you can participate effectively. Sit in the front, dress appropriately, act as though you are worthy of the attention (without being obnoxious). Take command and stay in control.
- Contribute to the Community: Get involved in the community and actively support social causes. Encourage and even reward your employers to do more to support charitable activities. Choose one or more charities that complement and fit with your brand. Contribute substantially and meaningfully with money, time, and people. Donate your products, pro-bono services, or other institutional or technological capabilities. Engage your management, staff, and employees actively and frequently and genuinely support the goals and objectives of the charitable organization.