The 50 Over 50 Project is a ”Community of Career Advice” focused on 50 folks over age 50 who are in a career transition. Summarize YOUR career dilemma as a comment to get helpful pointers from this blog community.
If you are old enough, you remember the semi-entertaining movie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It was a big milestone in Sean Penn’s early body of work. I twisted that movie name into the hopefully catchy title for this post which pertains to ”quick self promotion.”
All people in career transition or folks who are trying to sell their expertise need to be “comprehendable.” I don’t know if that is a word, but I ran into someone the other day who sells professional services. I asked him what he did. Ten minutes later I was bored and confused.
The small business services person (he is the one who provides the actual consulting services) rambled for minutes upon minutes about what he could do or has done. What he didn’t know is that I tuned out to his rantings after about 30 seconds of vague generalities.
Because I have interviewed thousands of people I was able to ask pointed questions to extract from him some specific examples of his work. But that is the point. I shouldn’t have had to “work so hard” at pulling out of him what he does and how that might remotely help me.
He also had a written piece which included a 30-word description of his offerings. But he works in big, big niche and his description was so vague I still wasn’t sure what he did. In a glance, (which is all any of us get–my book calls this “your 15 seconds of fame”) I just wasn’t sure what he could do for me.
So dear blog readers, the old formula applies as you position yourself as an expert: ‘Keep It Simple Stupid.’ And fast. No matter how good you are and how tightly you address your specific niche, you are still competing daily with the hundreds of emails, messages, texts, calls, tweets and friend/connection requests, etc., etc., etc. (to quote Yul Brenner).
I remain eager to see your drafts of your elevator speech, Unique Selling Proposition, or TwitterVator Speech (the combination of the elevator speech with your USP in 140 characters or less).
You can offer them anonymously here as a comment and the community will help you to craft your pitch. Or, you can contact me privately outside of this blog for free help on this.
Social media is great. But, as you have noticed, there are a few (million) folks out there using it. Let this community of career advice help YOU stand out….
America’s Job Coach
