What Is A Facebook Friend

What Is A Facebook Friend I think Im sometimes misunderstood when I present about using tools like Facebook and LinkedIn for marketing purposes. Heres a post from Lauren Yant that I totally agree with: Facebook drama, part 2. If you have any inclination to use Facebook as a marketing tool, please read this post.   You may not totally agree, but it is something to chew on as you develop your personal relationships. Today my publisher is having an Amazon book day for the book I recommended a few posts ago, 42 Rules for Driving Success with Books.   If you buy it today you will get over $1,000 in other stuff (see this page) pretty cool offer. What Is A Facebook Friend I think Im sometimes misunderstood when I present about using tools like Facebook and LinkedIn for marketing purposes. Heres a post from Lauren Yant that I totally agree with: Facebook drama, part 2. If you have any inclination to use Facebook as a marketing tool, please read this post.   You may not totally agree, but it is something to chew on as you develop your personal relationships. Today my publisher is having an Amazon book day for the book I recommended a few posts ago, 42 Rules for Driving Success with Books.   If you buy it today you will get over $1,000 in other stuff (see this page) pretty cool offer. What Is A Facebook Friend I think Im sometimes misunderstood when I present about using tools like Facebook and LinkedIn for marketing purposes. Heres a post from Lauren Yant that I totally agree with: Facebook drama, part 2. If you have any inclination to use Facebook as a marketing tool, please read this post.   You may not totally agree, but it is something to chew on as you develop your personal relationships. Today my publisher is having an Amazon book day for the book I recommended a few posts ago, 42 Rules for Driving Success with Books.   If you buy it today you will get over $1,000 in other stuff (see this page) pretty cool offer.

Fundamentals of Personal Branding - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Fundamentals of Personal Branding - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career Before you can make money, you must make meaning. What you mean must fulfill a specific unmet need in a well-defined target audience, AND be perceived as special and valuable. Your target audience is the people who can hire you, buy from you, invest with you or refer you to people who are able to make your goals a reality. For example, consider this personal brand. Linda is a trustworthy realtor who specializes in properties under $450,000 in Laguna Beach, frequently serving families who are relocating from out of state. She has a caring attitude and a gentle, advice-giving manner. She offers her friendship as much as her services. This uniquely informs her personal brand. Anyone can buy and sell houses. Linda’s personal qualities are what attracts her target audience. Her social media profiles and posts, her photos and shares, even the companies and causes she likes, reflect the person she really is, the PERSON you want representing your interests. If you saw her Facebook page, you’d see a heartwarming story about two golden retrievers that got lost and then found, an update on her fundraising efforts for the local high school’s cheerleading trip, and a photo album filled with tranquil meditation spots. If we go to your page, what would we know about you? What meaning would you have in our lives? For a decade as the host of International Business on public radio, I spoke to the world’s most important people in business, politics, labor and government. What does your personal brand have to do with my hosting International Business? Well, for a decade on International Business, new experts and people with important things to say were always welcome. But here’s the hitch. There were a lot of great people we missed out on, because we couldn’t easily find them. Or, their   materials, online presence and websites didn’t communicate what was special about them. The same problem may be haunting you on social media, at networking events and even in your daily life. There are people who might very much want what you have to offer, but they can’t easily find you â€" or you don’t stand out as special. Of course, there is a lot of competition that could crowd out your voice. There are probably many people who do, have done or could do what you aspire to. Consider that every diamond is different, even the best have flaws â€" and diamonds just keep going up in value. You are that diamond, albeit a diamond in the rough, perhaps. In your personal branding efforts, the facets of your true, unique and valuable self are what you leverage. By the end of this post, I promise you’ll know where to look to find your special qualities. Let’s start by defining the term personal brand. In brief, a personal brand is your reputation or image. But it isn’t a reputation or image that ACCIDENTALLY crops up about you. A personal brand is the reputation and image that you intentionally create, manage and communicate about, in a way that an audience finds engaging. Consider how many big brands communicate how special they are â€" even when their product is pretty similar to the competition. Starbucks, Target, Coke, Apple, BMW. These brands have personalities that are clear, consistent and compelling. Among personal brands, you may recognize: Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, Malcolm Gladwell, Martha Stewart, Charles Schwab, even Sir Richard Branson. They are famous for what they believe, and the way they think and act. Dimensions of YOUR personal brand include your skills, experience, expertise and the products or services you represent. Your travels, hobbies, classes you take, and projects might be important facets of your brand. However, your resume and activities are NOT the sum total of your personal brand â€" anymore than your resume and hobbies are the sum total of who you ARE. Your values, personal qualities and nature â€" including the way you naturally think and act distinguish you. You might be hard-working, stylish, easy-going, analytical, poised, creative, intuitive or a combination of five hundred and fifty five traits researchers believe describe every person on the planet. Because it is often so difficult for people to see what is really special and wonderful about themselves: I developed a series of exercises that uncover who you are â€" and help you develop some of your less obvious but attractive dimensions, so you can make them apparent to your audience. That’s why so many people find that the personal branding PROCESS is such a healthy personal DEVELOPMENT program. I promised you’d learn where to look for some of your special qualities that will help you create a powerful personal brand. Now take a piece of paper and write down the answer to these three questions. 1. What one positive quality have you had since you were little, that pretty much everyone notices after spending time with you? 2. What one word would you use to describe the way you approach problems? 3. Why do people enjoy spending time with you? Perhaps this quick review of the some of the fundamentals will help you develop a more powerful personal brand. Author: Nance Rosen  is the author of  Speak Up! Succeed. She speaks to business audiences around the world and is a resource for press, including print, broadcast and online journalists and bloggers covering social media and careers. Read more at  NanceRosenBlog. Twitter name:  nancerosen

How to Make the Perfect Startup Pitch

How to Make the Perfect Startup Pitch By Brian Neese The perfect startup pitch helps entrepreneurs separate their companies from a growing amount of competition. Startup activity in the United States increased in 2016, continuing an upward trend that began in 2015, according to the Kauffman Foundation. All of this comes after startup activity reached its lowest point in the last 20 years in 2014. A more competitive market reinforces the notion that startups need more than a good business idea to become successful â€" entrepreneurs must convince others to invest in their business. Making that case persuasively is as much science as it is art. The following sections offer some guidelines and examples for developing the perfect startup pitch. How to Make a Startup Pitch Research Make sure you research and double-check every detail of your presentation. You should have an understanding of your product or service, the market and how these two areas interact. “What is your competitive advantage?” asks Bruna Martinuzzi, president and founder of Clarion Enterprises. “Show them how what you are pitching is better than what your competitors are offeringâ€"or at least, how it is different. Also show potential entrants in that space. What is your shield against those?” You also need to understand your audience. Silicon Valley author, investor and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki advocates using LinkedIn to look at everyone’s background and find points of common interest that you can use. Layout Design is critical to a startup pitch. From graphics and other media to a polished startup pitch template, you can capture your audience’s attention. Pay attention to how you showcase your startup visually. This is the age of billion-dollar startups like Tumblr and Fab, which have “simple, beautiful, intuitive design at their core,” according to the Young Entrepreneur Council. Another important point to remember is to be brief. Kawasaki recommends observing the 10/20/30 rule. The optimal number of slides is 10. You should be able to give your whole pitch in 20 minutes. The ideal font size is 30 points. Hook Keep in mind that venture capitalists and angel investors are pitched to every day, according to Forbes contributor Erica Swallow. You’ll need something unique and compelling to capture their imagination and attention. “People are going to make an instant decision about your pitch,” Kawasaki said. “They’re not going to want to see your entire background, they’re not going to want to get to know you, they don’t want to be your friend. You are either hot or not, interesting or not. It’s that quick.” Problem Every business focuses on solving some type of problem. Describe and/or quantify the problem to help your audience understand that a change needs to happen. This presents the opportunity that your startup will capitalize on. Unique Solution Your company needs to have a powerful and unique solution to the problem you’re trying to solve. “Investors aren’t often interested in ‘me too’ ideas,” Swallow said. “Capture their desire with something new, differentiate yourself by your unique value â€" what can your company offer that no one else can?” Team The members of your audience are investing in you and your team as much as they are in your company. Martinuzzi recommends adding a team slide that is relevant to your presentation. Introducing your team can help investors trust the people who make up your startup. Traction Use any metrics that demonstrate the traction your startup has made in the market. Investors want to see sales or proof of concept to understand how consumers will see your product or service. Other metrics include marketing efforts, cost of production, business figures and more. Close Provide a call to action for your investors. Swallow mentions asking for a business card or a chance to meet with an investor individually. Practice Pitching is not an innate talent; rather, it’s an acquired skill. “It takes about 25 times giving the pitch until you’re really smooth with the pitch,” Kawasaki said. “This means you have to pitch all the time.” The Young Entrepreneur Council recommends finding a group of strangers willing to listen to your early pitches. You can sign up for Startup Digest and watch for public entrepreneur meetups and pitch events. You can volunteer to speak at a local high school or college. By working on your material in low-pressure situations, you’ll become more comfortable and better prepared to make your perfect startup pitch. Follow Up Think about how you’ll follow up. You should also prepare yourself for a positive or negative reaction. Follow up with everyone, but identify your top targets and react to them quickly. Have your team help you close with investors and create a relationship as fast as possible. Best Startup Pitch Examples A collection of some of the best startup pitch decks is available at Attach. Here are a few particularly noteworthy startup pitches. Airbnb: The residential lodging company was seeking $150,000 at a $1.5 million valuation ($150,000 for 10 percent equity) in 2008. After a meeting with seven investors in Silicon Valley, five responded with rejections and two did not respond. Airbnb was valued at $30 billion in August 2016. Buffer: Dharmesh Shah, who was an early investor of social media software company Buffer, considered the traction slide the most important. “We quickly realized that as first time founders, this was probably our only way to raise any money: By focusing everything on the traction slide,” he said in OnStartups. Foursquare: “Decks don’t have to be super formal,” Dennis Crowley, co-founder of technology company Foursquare, told Business Insider. “It’s okay to stray from the ‘business school 10-slide pitch deck template.’” Crew: “Moving our traction slide from the middle of our presentation to the beginning, made a huge impact for our story,” said Mikael Cho, CEO of technology company Crew. “We started speaking with new investors and it proved to be something that stood out. The first few times we presented this story, we received multiple invitations for follow up meetings. We could feel the emotional difference in this version of our presentation compared to the first version.” Crafting a Pitch or Presentation Notre Dame of Maryland University’s online bachelors degree in business uses case studies, consulting assignments and a capstone course to give students real-world knowledge to use in their business career. Graduates are able to pursue entrepreneurial activities, leadership positions and career advancement in roles such as business analyst, accountant and public relations specialist. The program takes place in a fully online learning environment. If youre working on your own startup pitch, youll want to check out this video for more tips: Image credit.   Image 2.

Personal Brands Targeting the Customer Journey - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Personal Brands Targeting the Customer Journey - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career One of the best pieces of advice any business owner can receive is to specialize. Be it in the medical field or as a chef, it’s really the niche markets that prove to be profitable. Yet so many places try to please everyone only ending up with a few mildly happy individuals instead of a strong, multitudinous collection of brand champions. As it turns out, finding this niche is more about understanding your customers and the stories that would ultimately drive them to you. Known as the customer journey, these stories are how you better market to the audience you know will be a solid foundation for your company, be it the mom that forever needs dependable detergent or the young adult looking to fit in. Isolate these, and you’ll isolate your core market. Becoming the Customer Before spending whatever you can on a full marketing campaign, sit back and envision the numerous customer journeys that would ultimately lead customers to you. Why would they ever need your brand? Keep in mind that the answer doesn’t have to be a single event. This brainstorming period should bring in every moment you and your team can think of that would result in the purchase of your goods. Only after you have a complete list should you whittle down rarer instances in favor of those that are more common. Let’s imagine you sell Chapstick. While it certainly is plausible that someone had their Chapstick taken from them by airport security on their trip down to Florida now leaving them mildly upset, such a situation is rather specific and won’t apply to everyone. Instead, a better choice would be going with the story of a person that is forgetful and has misplaced their Chapstick. Rather than wasting time searching, it would be much easier to simply buy another one. Going further with this idea, you’ll also want to verify that the story you pick also matches the purpose of your product. Continuing with the Chapstick idea, following a customer journey of someone losing theirs would be a perfect fit if your Chapstick is then marketed as a revolutionary new design that lessens the chance it will be lost in the future. If that’s not your angle, a forgetful customer isn’t going to be your ideal niche audience. It could also be that perhaps that person isn’t a Chapstick user but maybe they have dry lips because of something they’re experiencing (nervousness, transition from humid weather to a dry climate, outdoors all day for any number of reasons).   Is there a package that meets their needs during their journey that would be something they would consider? Everything you do should have a purpose. Finding Stories Apart from collecting anecdotes from your coworkers, it’s always a great idea to reach out to the community itself. If you have an idea of what angle you might want to shoot for, find out if it’s viable by questioning current and potential customers. If you’re coming from a blank slate, simply ask for stories. Once collected, you can sift through everything to try and pinpoint a common thread that the current market is failing to optimize. By taking advantage of this by building your brand to fill that gap, you’ve found yourself a specific purpose that will drive business. From there, you can expand safely. The stories you go after don’t have to be in the form of complaints. They could come from a simple, “why did you choose x brand?” or “what made you go with x instead of y?” This way, you can gather a plethora of emotions, as well. Not every brand wants to fear monger and not every brand wants to paint the world as an always happy utopia. That being said, like the stories being able to potentially point out a weakness, these stories can also potentially point out an emotional state that the customer base lives in. Though you don’t have to use this exactly, it can be a great compass and give a starting point to even consider looking at what the “opposite” of that situation is and how that draws in or is a part of your customer’s story. Like most great businesses, to know your audience is to know yourself, and to know your audience, you must first figure out their motivation to seek you out above all other brands. Once discovered, this tiny message is enough to build an entire ad campaign off of that uses emotions and shared experiences to drive company success. With the major brands already using these customer journeys to stay ahead of the curve, it’s not impossible for a smaller brand to head in the same direction in a quest for prominence.

Why cheating at university needs to stop - Debut honestly

Why cheating at university needs to stop - Debut honestly This post was written by an external contributor. Anca Coman argues why you should never consider cheating at university.   Listen, we know university is hard. Essays can be a slog, and its not always the case that youll breeze through to a 2:1. So sometimes to avoid struggling, people choose to not do the work themselves, and pay someone else to write their essays for them. This sort of behavior is becoming more and more common. Research shows that cheating at UK’s top universities has risen by 40%. In addition, the number of students that have been caught cheating at Russell Group Universities has increased by a third in only three years. Cheating can lead to unsolvable consequences in the long run, even if youre not caught. Your future career aspirations could be compromised as a result. So heres why you should think twice before hiring someone to do your work for you. The consequences are severe Were stating the obvious here, but if you get caught cheating, then the procedure is rightly harsh. Ranging from suspension, all the way to permanent expulsion from your university with no award, or the chance to return and study another degree. It would mean a waste of your time and money, and would also be hard to explain to future employers when they ask why youvre never completed your education. Do you really want to go down that road? All that debt will be for nothing Lets be honest, £9,250 per year is not an unnoticeable sum of money. Most courses are divided into three years, which leads us to roughly £27,750 for the whole academic journey. If you cheat in your assignments, the money that you compensated will have no role in your education. Youre paying for valuable knowledge. But if you cheat, youll only be obtaining a degree thats stained with someone else’s work. Stepping on your integrity Cheating is a softer form of stealing â€" if you’d steal, how would people treat you? Wed wager not with a not a lot of trust or respect. Paying someone to do your work is dishonest, period. You can say goodbye to your loyal image, as people won’t forget what you’ve done. Even after you finish studying, your actions may come back to haunt you later in life, perhaps even in your workplace. As Rachel’s mom from Friends would say: ‘Once a cheater, always a cheater!’. Say goodbye to future jobs Careers require the necessary skills to succeed, skills that you learn at university through completing assignments. If someone else does the work for you, you wont ever develop, and therefore you wont succeed in the working world. For example, how would you demonstrate your capability of becoming a copywriter, if youve never actually written an essay yourself? Its not worth missing out on learning these vital skills for the sake of a few credits. Cheating is unfair to YOU! Its clear that theres a correlation between doing good deeds and your mental health. When you do something right, you raise your self-esteem and feel proud of your achievements. If you work fairly on your assignments, you can be proud of what youve managed to accomplish. Cheating will not give you this satisfaction, as youll have played no role in creating the work. You’re putting yourself in an unfair position if you cheat. If however you work hard and honestly, youll not only improve intellectual skills, but also your psychological wellbeing. Work hard and honestly for your degree, youll get there in the end! Download Debut  and  connect with us on  Facebook,  Twitter  and  LinkedIn  for more careers insights.

Where do you see yourself in one year

Where do you see yourself in one year Creating a planfor what you want is difficult. Sometimes we dont know the answer because we dont know the options. Developing a plan requires that you know yourself and the situation well. Your plan may be to stay where you are, but dont grow stagnant. Make sure you identify ways you can grow and learn. It is about continuous improvement. We need to understand or at least try to understand where the world is going- challenging, yet not impossible. What are the trends impacting your occupation and industry? Be honest, if you dont know, find out. Warning: this may require that you speak to other people. You may also want to consider using a tool to help you organize your thoughts. Using SWOT can be helpful.Download swot_analysis_template.pdf Consider the implications of not creating a plan. Will you fall victim to the decisions of others?Will you feel like you have no control? This is your life, you are in the drivers seat. You can have control, but you need to start being responsible.

How to Find the Best Resume Writing Services in DC

How to Find the Best Resume Writing Services in DCResume writing services in DC can be found all over the world but how do you know where to find them? Do you have a friend who is good at writing resumes or are you a pretty decent writer? Well, what if you have all three talents combined?This could happen to you if you were considering doing freelance work. There are lots of companies out there who use writers to write resumes for them. If you could find one of these companies, you could be paid really well.So what are the best resume writing services in DC Canada? I'd suggest looking online first. Just type in resume writing services in DC and you'll find plenty of sites to choose from. After you've narrowed down the list, go on over to the home page and find a list of the most popular companies to do work for.Check each of the companies out carefully. After all, this isn't going to be an easy job and you need to be sure you're going to get the best value for your money. Some resume writing services in DC can charge as much as $25 per hour but the rates will vary based on the company you choose.Another thing to consider is the availability of the available support team. Each company has their own set of guidelines and requirements for their applicants. What may be acceptable with one company may not be acceptable with another.Resume writing services in DC can also have experienced writers on staff. These companies have been in business for years and have a lot of experience in the industry. They also understand what it takes to get a resume across.So, why not choose the best resume writing services in DC? You could save a lot of time and money because they'll make sure you get the right job for you. It will take a little extra work but it could pay off in the end.Resumes are an important part of the job search. The resume is the first impression you get from potential employers. This means that you want to make sure you make the best impression possible when y ou write a resume for a company.