Grab your Golden Opportunities – There for the Taking

 Clients and employers grant opportunities to people they like and trust. Do they like you? Are you trustworthy? Yes to both? Do other people know your good points?

As with any social media sites, you get out of LinkedIn™ what you put into it. Your online profile is, after all, your public identity. When was the last time you modified your LinkedIn™ profile? Do you even have one, outside of basic information or a pasted-in resume? Or, if you’ve got a good profile, when was the last time you updated it?

Are you missing out on golden opportunities?

Your profile is your ethos, your character, your credibility…your brand. Your profile should be a living, breathing thing, an organic and ongoing communication between you and your business contacts, clients, employers and contractors. Any time you achieve a course credit,

a happy customer or a new position, you can add a line or two to inform your viewers. Any time you have new knowledge your readers would find useful, share it (see my post “Be Visible – People Want To Meet You” for more on that). Your online presence opens doors to new chances for work, and LinkedIn™ is the most-searched professional site.

Replace obsolete data with current documentation to apprise others of your capabilities and achievements. I know it’s tempting to keep older items; it’s rather like storing a box of old treasures in your attic and finding the trunk 20 years later. “Oh, wow,” you say as you hold up a musty birthday card you wrote to your grandfather when you were eight. “I remember this – what a wonderful day that was.” Well, that’s great for personal possessions, but not for LinkedIn™ profiles. No one will spend hours reading minutely detailed profiles going back decades. Remember, the medium is the message, so keep it current, clear and…concise. Readers will understand your mastery of language (and therefore your skills) if you can relay your relevant and specific points in pithy detail.

The “Key” to Prospects

Add keywords. Your profile, and similar ones, are searched by those looking for specific talents and experience, so it’s essential to ensure your profile is indeed found. List keywords in your summary, headline and job experience. They can be added to your education fields, volunteer work and other sections. Ensure the same words appear in three or four places for a better chance of being picked up in searches.

You can be found even in today’s heavy-traffic market. Opportunities are out there. Being proactive with your profile and presence is a good place to start. Your credibility is on the line (of text). So be persistent and “keep at it!”

Be Visible - People Want To Meet You

LinkedIn’s tagline is “Relationships Matter.”

I believe LinkedIn™ is the best social media site in the world for online business networking, for jobs, for resources and more. I do not say this lightly. I am not known to gush about anything, anywhere. However, this site has done so much that is right, has thought so hard about the needs of working individuals, of corporate recruiters and of small and medium-sized business owners, that any of us would be hard put to find a site that matches it.

However, like any other endeavour in life you need a strategy on LinkedIn, and it’s an easy one. I can tell you what it is in one short sentence. Meet people halfway.

Join discussion groups and let others on the site get to know you: your personality, your business experience, your skills and interests. Let them know how you can help them – with advice, anecdotes, opinions – and what you have to offer. Do you want to be employed or sell something or move to a new city? Once other members get to know you, you may well find them rooting for you or even offering you a job. All you need to do is make the effort to meet other members halfway.

Yes, I’ve said that twice now. It’s so important that, one more time, I shall repeat it and then expand on it: meet others halfway. Your basic strategy is to use LinkedIn regularly so that others will notice you and want to meet you online. Part of this is making connections. Another is joining discussion groups and maintaining a presence on them. Be interested in what others are saying on the discussion threads, join in two or three conversations on each site (not many of us have the time to follow them all) and keep returning to those discussions, reading other people’s comments and adding more of your own. Name people when acknowledging their great advice, even when it’s for someone else. It’s easy – here’s an example of what you could post to a discussion: “John, I think Suzie’s advice about direct mail would fix the problem. Another thing you could try is…” You get the idea. People will realize you’re paying attention to them. As well, click the Like button occasionally when you don’t have much time to jump into the thread. Eventually, other members will come to recognize you on the site and some will become good LI friends. Give and ye shall receive.

Here’s the thing. Those members putting in the time to talk online really, really appreciate it when someone listens, and the way to show them you are listening is to address them by name or to Like their statements. Another important way is to comment briefly when you find one of your connections has posted something that appears on your Home page. Add a comment or a Like right there, and presto, you have given your connection a wider audience because now all your other connections will see that member’s post and your comment on their Home pages. You’ve given your connection some exposure. Your contacts will eventually return the favour, and more importantly, they’ll remember you.

After some time on the site, you can begin letting others know what you do for a living, what your product or service is, any new business ventures or hopes for new employment. If you have been consistently helpful and polite (hey, you can be funny too sometimes – we’re all human and like to smile), then others will want to refer you, make helpful suggestions, even meet you. Many members have found business and jobs this way.

LinkedIn is a virtual world that becomes part of our real world via our connections. Ensure your photo really reflects who you are, keep your headline and summary up-to-date and engaging, and add rich media and links to your blog or website.

Keeping your profile vibrant does the same online as does getting dressed in the morning and heading out for a social event in your town. You would not be a wallflower at an afternoon conference or an evening networking event, would you? You’d be pleasantly attired, smile and introduce yourself and chat, asking people about themselves and telling the occasional anecdote, right? You got it – you behave in the same way on LinkedIn, starting with having a great photo, headline and summary. Make sure that photo is head and shoulders or head to waist, with only you in it (and please, don’t crop yourself from a picture where you’ve got your arm around your buddy – it look like what it is; i.e., that no effort has been made to create a special picture). Remember, first impressions count and hundreds of potential business connections or employers are going to see you, so dress and present as you would for a real meeting. 

Reap the rewards of your efforts, just like you do at those Thursday evening networking events. And hey…enjoy yourself.

Carol Guzy: Photographer of the World

"[Cameras] are only tools. It's the people in the pictures and those who view them that are important."

My last post discussed an artist who studied for his chosen career, only to find himself in a different line of work and loving it…and being very good at it.

Carol Guzy is another such a one: she is a nurse-turned-world-famous-photographer!

How did this come about? Well, halfway through nurse training, Guzy received a gift certificate for a photography course and discovered that cameras ignited her passion in a way nothing else could. So, after completing her medical program, she switched her energies toward a photography internship at the Miami Herald. After working at the Herald for a number of years she moved to the Washington Post to cover foreign and domestic news, and has since travelled the world, taking memorable photos and gaining a following.

In the last 25 years, Guzy has covered events in Kosovo, Rwanda, Mali, India, East Germany and more. She has caught scenes of plight such as the exodus of refugees, Mother Teresa’s funeral and abandoned pets of Hurricane Katrina. Some of her awards include several Pulitzer Prizes and Photographer of the Year Awards, and as well as National Press Photographers Association for Best of Photojournalism. Her techniques include not missing an image by waiting to set things up. She often quickly clicks the shutter on a hunch without making sure that all elements are perfect.  She says imperfections can be fixed, but that there is no solution for missing the moment.

Guzy’s talent appears to lie in the fact that her images tell stories even in the absence of words.  Her photographs don’t just supplement newspaper articles – it’s as if the newspaper texts supplement her images. Take a look below at some of her incredible shots. Some of these events were difficult for Guzy to see and photograph, but she believes her previous nurse training has given her the experience and empathy to follow through and be present at difficult times in human lives. She says: “There’s a quote I love. It goes: ‘Tell me, I’ll forget. Show me, I may remember. Involve me, I’ll understand.’” She believes it’s important that everyone knows what’s going on in the world.

Designer of Today: Bruce Mau

Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we 

all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration 

of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you 

stick to good you’ll never have real growth.

Bruce Mau

You can begin your professional life intending on one career – say, as a schoolteacher – and use those skills to walk a diverse career path: author, keynote speaker, counsellor. Actually, one schoolteacher – Sting – ended up as the lead singer in a famous pop band and later became an actor, multi-instrumentalist and writer. So it goes with many careers – people start out as one thing and build on that or take their acquired skills on to ventures new.

This is not to say it’s a bad thing to stay put in one career – after all, Doré and Escher did and they achieved the utmost sublimity (see my earlier posts on them). But for others, branching out from one career enriches their own needs and impacts our world on many levels.

A number of creatives build on what they begin and Canadian designer Bruce Mau (1959-) is no exception. He studied in Toronto’s Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) before working in the field of graphic design and eventually moving on to architecture, film and conceptual philosophy. His early work was in advertising, working at Toronto’s Fifty Fingers design firm and the U.K.’s Pentagram in London. It was in London during the Thatcher years that Mau woke up to design in the fields of political issues, as well as how interdisciplinary art forms could interact, with designers venturing into writing, film and other areas to merge parity, societal and literary endeavours. Mau realized the possibilities for his art were boundless. He had a taste for unconventional practices and processes and began to think about how to implement his design concepts independently.

The famous Zone books illustrate graphic components such as highly colour-saturated landscapes with textured images and outstanding displays of typography mixed with voids of white space that, in the 1980s, were innovative and enhanced the effect of the message.

Mau founded several companies: Public Good Design and Communications when he returned to Canada from the U.K., and later Bruce Mau Design (BMD), and the Institute without Boundaries. Whilst at BMD in the 1980s, he worked on a large compendium on critical thinking about urbanism. Zone 1/2: The Contemporary City became one of his most notable works and featured philosophers such as Paul Virilio and architects like Rem Koolhaas. The Village Voice review of this book tells us that Mau aimed “to do an object that wasn't an illustration of the content, but a model—something that performed and behaved like the city itself. As if you're holding the city in your hands and experiencing the city through the book over time.”

Mau continued to work on Zone books, including Zone 3/4/5: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, until 2004. Mau also produced work for the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Andy Warhol Museum and at the same time became a lecturer and thesis advisor in such notable facilities as the University of Toronto, the California Institute of the Arts and the Wexner Center of Columbus.

An honorary fellow of the Ontario College of Art & Design and member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, Mau has received awards such as the Toronto Arts Award for Architecture and Design (1999), the Chrysler Award for Design Innovation (1998) and an Honorary Doctor of Letters from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2001).

In the late1990s, Mau wrote An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth that advises designers and other artists on how to remain inventive and be the best they can be. A couple of my favourite tips are:

“Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.”  

A beautiful way to encourage daring and banish fear.

And

“Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.” 

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. Mau…for reminding me that it’s okay to use pen and paper!

Trivia Break

In 2006, Mau was involved in the interactive Stock Exchange of Visions, a travelling installation which arranged for thinkers from diverse fields and nationalities to come together to provide insight into their vision for the future of our planet, each building on each other’s ideas. The installation has moved along to various cities.

Currently Mau’s company is The Massive Change Network, a joint venture with his wife Bisi Williams. The idea behind “Massive Change” was to interview 100 artists, thinkers, craftspeople, technicians and even simply laypeople not involved in arts or engineering at all. Mau believes all of us are designers whether we realize it or not, and that everyone is taking on more responsibilities in more areas of work and therefore involved changing the world.

“They're all designers according to us,” Mau says. “Some of them didn't think they were designers, but they use the word 'design' more intelligently, colloquially, than we do as designers ourselves.” With work transcending traditional professional boundaries, “they just blew all those categories away,” he continues. The outcome is “design simply as a critical methodology for solving problems.”

Bruce Mau’s monograph, Life Style, was published in the year 2000, the start of the new millennium.

Designer of Today: Erik Spiekermann

Fast-forward to appreciate contemporary designers—I’ll begin with a brilliant typographer since this is an interest of mine and since much of the world takes types and fonts for granted (which only proves how extensive, essential and adaptable they are).

Award-winning typographer Erik Spiekermann has created several important typefaces,both on his own and with fellow designers. He works from his native Germany as well as previously in the U.S. and U.K. and his type-family innovations contribute to the design world and the planet at large and have been well received, with his conceptions being used by large corporations, by publishing houses, and by pretty much everything in between.

An example of recent corporate type design is that of the

German railways—Deutsche Bahn—which Spiekermann designed with Christian Schwartz and that received the highest design award in Germany in 2006,  the Federal Design Prize Gold Medal. Other kinds of design by Mr Spiekermann include  underground transit maps.

Mr Spiekermann founded MetaDesign and FontShop in earlier years. During his FontShop years, the FontFont typefaces were designed and the firm was the first mail-order firm for digital fonts, way back in 1989.  At MetaDesign, types were created for Berlin Transit, Audi, The Economist,  Düsseldorf Airport and other large corporations.

As well as being a designer Mr Spiekermann is a professor and author. His current company is Edenspiekermann. He has won such awards as the Gerrit Noordzij in 2003, European Design in 2007 and many others including a Lifetime Achievement award in 2011 and an honorary Royal Designer award; as well, he is the first designer to be chosen for the European Design Awards Hall of Fame.

Trivia Break: New York’s Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, acquired
FF Meta, Spiekermann’s best-known typeface, for its collection.

“Encountering the Deutsche Bahn brand should be pleasant and uncomplicated…as clear a visual image as possible. Edenspiekermann analysed all means of communication and how best to apply them. How, for instance, should maps and travel information leaflets on trains be presented? Are the contents easy to understand for customers?

The new design system by Edenspiekermann reinforces the visual identity…of guaranteeing consistent quality – from buying an online train ticket through to the platform staff. In addition this allows all other DB activities (acquisitions, investments, collaborations, joint ventures etc.) to be easily integrated under the umbrella brand.”

Erik Spiekermann