It’s Not a Job Search, It’s a Permanent Campaign

This post originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review website.

Political campaigns used to be short, frenzied run-ups to an election — after which the winning candidate would turn to the stately task of governing. But over the past few decades, politics and policy began to mingle. Political advisors took White House roles, and polling began to drive decision-making — “The Permanent Campaign,” as journalist (and later Clinton staffer) Sidney Blumenthal presciently dubbed it in his 1980 book.

The advent of 24-hour cable news (and later, the Internet) opened a gaping maw, ravenous for content. Politicians knew they’d be dissected constantly, not just during campaign season, with querulous Crossfire hosts debating who has “The Big Mo” and who’s on the downswing. Most people — even former political operatives, like me — can agree this is bad for democracy. But candidates have accepted it as the new normal and, with savvy teams PR experts on call, they’re making do.

The real problem, though, isn’t the impact on politicians.

It’s the fact that everyone else — including regular professionals — is also now expected to perform round-the-clock personal brand maintenance, and most people don’t even realize it.

Sure, they probably have a Facebook account, and they may even be on Twitter. But they don’t recognize that these are no longer personal communication tools, or a means of strengthening weak ties across their networks. Instead, they are the criteria by which you will be evaluated in the future. Just as Michael Deaver ensured that Ronald Reagan always stood in front of a perfect, picturesque backdrop — and set the standard for all subsequent leaders — you’re now responsible for curating your image.

And unfortunately, it’s not enough just to worry about it at “election time” — i.e., when you’re seeking a promotion or looking for a new job. The permanent campaign truly is ongoing, and all successful candidates (of the job or political variety) need to recognize a few new truths:

Your reputation precedes you. Any employer with a modicum of common sense is going to vet you on the Internet before even bothering to talk to you. In a world where too many job seekers fabricate parts of their resumes, the Internet can provide valuable third-party verification that you are who you say you are. It’s also your opportunity to set yourself apart. If your only online presence is eBay sales or race times from your running club, you’re going to look like an amateur.

If you’re invisible, you’re probably a fraud. Resumes and even clever cover letters will become increasingly meaningless when employers are looking not for words, but for demonstrated knowledge and results. If you’ve got a strong online personal brand, you’re in. And if you don’t? One firm I consulted for almost didn’t hire a a qualified senior executive because — lacking almost any online presence — they strongly suspected he had fabricated his background. He hadn’t, but the elaborate process of verifying his story nearly cost him the job.

You progress or you stagnate. It’s a fact: the rest of the world isn’t paying nearly as much attention to you as you’d like. You’ve spent the past few years developing new skills and capabilities — yet your employer and colleagues are oblivious. The only way you can demonstrate your new expertise to a broad audience — one that might want to hire you, in fact — is to brand yourself as a public expert, just like a candidate for office would. Online, create a stream of valuable content by tweeting, blogging, and being quoted by media outlets. Offline, cultivate your reputation through involvement in professional associations, public speaking, and networking.

Many people don’t want to deal with the hassle of a “permanent career campaign.” They think it’s too much work to contemplate their personal brand, maintain their social media footprint, or cultivate relationships when they’re not on the make for a new job. Those are the people who will lose. Whether or not you want to play the game, it’s happening around you. Here are three ways — cribbed from the candidates who know best — you can win your personal campaign:

1. Monitor. Keeping track of media mentions formerly meant a fleet of bleary-eyed interns coming in at 6 a.m. and clipping, gluing, and photocopying a packet of articles. Thankfully, Google has eliminated this cruelty, which I myself once endured. Set up a Google Alert on yourself, your current company, and any prospective firms on your watch list today.

2. Control the dialogue. Politicians have learned that if they don’t put out material to fill the airways (press releases, pitches, and miscellaneous storylines), the newsmedia — or their rivals — will do it for them, and that’s not going to be pretty. Someone is going to control the dialogue and it might as well be you. Start writing your blog posts or recording your podcasts now.

3. Create your fan base. When a candidate is attacked, they have defenders — armed with talking points — ready to rebut the negative charges. And they also have a proactive battalion of “letter to the editor” writers, peppering their local papers with laudatory missives. Who’s in your fan club? Start reaching out now to trusted colleagues, friends, and allies. If you have a professional goal, they can help by talking you up, searching for leads and more.

Putting forward your personal brand requires ongoing vigilance. What are your campaign strategies?

Dorie Clark is a strategy consultant who has worked with clients including Google, Yale University, and the National Park Service. She is the author of the forthcoming What’s Next?: The Art of Reinventing Your Personal Brand (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). You can follow her on Twitter at @dorieclark.

How to Take a Month Off

This article was originally posted on the Harvard Business Review blog.

It’s an elusive dream twinkling in executives’ eyes: what if I could take an entire month off? The lure is obvious: the chance to truly unwind, to recharge your creativity, and to visit faraway places you can’t reach on a week-long jaunt. For many Americans, especially, it’s just not possible because of draconian vacation policies (my first job out of college gave me two weeks a year, which I had to “earn” over time, so I virtually couldn’t take any time off for an entire year). But for others — those with more generous employers, longtime employees who have saved up their days, or entrepreneurs calling their own shots — the hesitation is internal: What would happen to my business while I’m gone? Wouldn’t I alienate my clients? What if there’s an emergency? How can I afford to be gone that long?

Those were my excuses, too, and the reason my longest vacation since the end of graduate school — well over a decade ago — had only lasted ten days. But last fall, I changed all that and spent a month traveling around India with my girlfriend. No question: my “mega break” entailed sacrifices and a lot of planning. But it also afforded me an opportunity few of my countrymen get to experience: seeing Mumbai firsthand, from its gilded corporate headquarters to its slums, and traveling throughout the less-visited southern part of the country. In fact, it was a cool enough experience that I’m planning to do it again — and perhaps you should consider it, too. Here’s what I learned about how to take a month off:

Plan far in advance. When most people say that taking a month off just isn’t possible, they’re telling the truth: it’s not feasible in the immediate future. There are too many work commitments and other obligations to fulfill. But all that drops away if you’re planning really far in advance. I informed my clients nearly a year out that I’d be taking a month off in Fall 2011 — a time so remote, it probably didn’t seem real to them. By the time September rolled around, they were twitchy at the thought that I’d be gone soon — but they’d already agreed to it, and I hustled to get everything completed for them before I left. You’ll want to think about your work obligations (can someone else cover for you?), your social media (I scheduled an entire month’s worth of tweets on Hootsuite to cover me while I was away), and pet/house care (through social media, I found a retired meteorologist from Virginia who wanted to explore New England and offered to stay at my place).

Decide how reachable you want to be. This is a crucial question to decide early on. It’s not much of a vacation if your clients are pinging you every day — but how far do you want to go in the other direction? Will you check email or voicemail at all while you’re gone? Sometimes it’s a matter of logistics — my cellphone worked almost everywhere in India, but that won’t be the case if you’re trekking through the Amazon. I warned my clients I’d be completely off the grid, but did end up checking email about every four to five days, depending on whether our hotel offered easy access.

You’re going to lose money — deal with it. This is perhaps the most painful part. Everyone knows trips are expensive; the airfare alone to India costs over $1,000. But, given human psychology and our innate aversion to loss, the really tough stuff is the earnings you forfeit. I was working with two retainer clients that fall; by taking the month off, I shrugged off $20,000 that would have otherwise been in my pocket. A speaking engagement in New York would have netted me thousands more; I referred it to colleagues. But if money’s your entire frame, let’s face it: you’d never go anywhere because it’s a lot more cost effective to stay home and work. It’s bitter medicine, but if you truly believe that life is about experience, you’ll have to swallow.

Give yourself permission to wander. I thought I might have time during my travels to write up a new book proposal. Didn’t happen. I thought I might pen a few blogs about my experiences on the road. That didn’t happen either. In fact, it was all I could do to check Facebook now and again. But in my month of travel, I read a dozen books about Indian history and culture, business, and sociology — fuel for an entire new wave of ideas. Two days after I returned to the States, I sat down and penned what turned out to be my most popular blog post ever for HBR. Often, innovation and creativity don’t follow a linear path (as I discuss in an interview with fellow HBR blogger Michael Schrage). You may not accomplish what you explicitly set out to do — but what you see, read, and learn will make your ultimate work richer.

So — are you ready to take a month off? What’s necessary to make it happen? And where are you going?

Five Ways to Get Clients Now

This article was originally posted on The Huffington Post.

We all want to build a sales pipeline. You know — plant the marketing seeds, nurture them, and watch them bloom into lucrative clients six months, or a year, or five years from now. The best business relationships require trust, and can’t be built overnight. And many marketing activities — no matter how powerful — simply don’t generate customers immediately. It’s a rare business that, even after a glowing New York Times mention, has its phone ringing off the hook the next day. More often, brand-building is a process of accretion–one article, or one radio ad, or one witty tweet will simply not do it alone.

But what if you can’t wait?

Ideally, our bank accounts are stuffed with cash reserves, so we can calmly sit back and write our white papers with the confidence that massive revenues are right around the corner. But sadly, that’s not always the case. Almost every business has faced a time when it needed to drum up customers ASAP. World brand domination is nice, but payroll and rent come first. What marketing activities can you undertake right now to juice sales and bring in new clients? Here are five tips you can start using today.

1) Suggest new ways to help your clients. The oldest — and truest — adage in business is that it’s easier to win a repeat sale from an existing customer than to locate and persuade a new one. Yet too often, we overlook this fact in a panicky bid to “bring business in the door.” First, concentrate your efforts where they matter most — your present client base, that already knows and trusts you. The key here is that you’re not “upselling” them — using a formulaic “Would you like to supersize that?” approach to your relationship. You need to take the time to think through what your client genuinely needs, and how you can help meet those needs. Reach out and have meaningful conversations — what business challenges are they facing now? Your law firm may have done IP work for a company, and it turns out they need litigation support now. Your IT company may have solved a client’s database issue, but now they need help integrating it with their new web hosting service. You’ll never know if you don’t ask.

2) Ask for referrals from your clients. For many people, asking for referrals seems invasive, rude, pushy. Their loss! You win when others hesitate to ask for referrals. Your clients (tragically) aren’t automatically focused on finding you more business, because they have more important things to worry about (like their own businesses). But that doesn’t mean they don’t want to help. In fact, social psychology research has shown that one of the best ways to enhance someone’s positive feeling toward you is to ask them for a favor. The act of helping you makes them feel more invested in your future. But it’s up to you to remind them. Your best clients like you and will go the extra mile — you just need to ask.

3) Ask for referrals from every person you know. Asking clients (both current and past) for referrals is a great bet, because odds are, they know other people like themselves (Sales VPs, nonprofit Executive Directors, etc.) who could benefit from your assistance. But if you’re really hunting for leads ASAP, cast the net wide. You’re not going to make any progress with cold calls, because you’ll be treated like a random and annoying telemarketer. Therefore, you need to focus on the circle of people who already know you. Your uncle, your dentist, and your childhood baseball teammate all want to help — and they may have surprisingly relevant connections. Reach out with a phone call or personal email, and be sure to specify what kind of clients you’re looking for.

4) Book speaking engagements. Publishing an article or op-ed in a targeted publication is great source of long-term credibility. But it’s unlikely to generate immediate business. Instead, focus on getting in front of potential clients through a speaking engagement. Chambers of Commerce and trade associations gather your target audience in one place — fish in a barrel. Your job is to provide enough value and insight in your talk that they realize their company can’t live with you. Unlike a static newspaper or magazine article, the give-and-take of a speech lets potential clients “try before they buy” and get a real sense of your attitude, skills, and philosophy. Plus, you’re already positioned as an expert, with the imprimatur of the organization hosting the event. Start sending inquiry letters — and then making follow-up phone calls — to book a speech today.

5) Don’t lower your prices. The final tip concerns what not to do. The first impulse of many businesses during challenging economic times is to cut prices, throw a big sale, or otherwise buy into the idea that customers will flock to you if you magically find the right price point. Don’t do it. This philosophy is the refuge of the weak. There’s nothing wrong with creating special deals if you do it strategically, rewarding customer behavior you’d like to incentivize (for instance, a restaurant known for its breakfasts offering a short-term discount on dinner, to encourage customers to try them later in the day). But don’t simply slash prices wantonly — or else, you risk never being able to bring them back up to present levels, handicapping yourself for months or years. You don’t want to compete on price, anyway. Unless your customers are literally homeless and out on the street, they’re able to make purchasing decisions — they just may not be choosing your business, and you have to ask why. Don’t risk being pigeonholed as the low-price, low-quality option. Instead of asking how much you should cut the price, think about ways to offer more value to your customers in terms of your product offerings, relationship, or customer service. Over the long term, you’ll be rewarded handsomely.

Dorie Clark is CEO of Clark Strategic Communications and the author of the forthcoming What’s Next?: The Art of Reinventing Your Personal Brand (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). She is a strategy consultant who has worked with clients including Google, Yale University, and the Ford Foundation. Listen to her podcasts or follow her on Twitter.