Call For Women: Let’s face it; we are...

Call For Women: Let’s face it; we are all BRANDS in today’s market place. To compete successfully in today’s job market, we have to work at creating Brand Awareness in order to be discovered by our employer of choice.  Michelle Beckham-Corbin, owner of C3: Creating Connections Consulting, LLC brings over 20 years of working with Brand launches at Procter & Gamble and with many businesses and individuals to define Brand Identity and to integrate social media marketing strategies into business/personal marketing programs. The goal is to be discovered and one of the best marketing tools around for folks in transition is a stellar LinkedIn Profile.

Have a friend, wife, sister, cousin, mother looking to be discovered in today’s employment world?  Tell them about C3’s “LinkedIn 101 For Women in Transition”.

Women have unique learning styles and enjoy the benefit of small, collaborative training classes.  C3 provides Hands-on learning lab classes for groups of up to four women. Personal attention is given to each of the participants’ LinkedIn profiles so that the class becomes individualized and not a general step-by-step process found in many large, public group training seminars.

C3’s LinkedIn 101 For Women covers the following topics:

• Role of  LinkedIn & Social Media in Job Search
• Managing Your Profile Settings- Maximizing Privacy
• How to Create a Winning Summary Statement
• How to Optimize Your Profile for Search Engines
• How to Find Contacts
• The Correct way to Send Introductions
• The Importance of the Status Update
• How to Find Key Groups
• How to Get Recommendations and Why This is Important
• How to Search Key Company Info for Contacts, Corporate Data, Hiring Managers, Jobs

Michelle Beckham-Corbin is on the Board for the IHM Job Search Ministry, a satellite group of the Job Search Focus Group (JSFG) in Hyde Park, and has presented many programs on social media use in job search for the group’s general meetings and ½ Day Job Search Workshops as well as for Senior Capstone students at Northern Kentucky University.

Michelle has presented this Learning Lab Series for Women with great success.  Past participants have benefited from the small group setting; the comfortable atmosphere, the collaborative way of learning with other women and the incredible value. This course gives maximum value at half the price of other large (30+) group lab classes in town.

Check out what others have been saying about C3 Programs on my Michelle’s LinkedIn profile and/or contact us directly at info@creatingconnectionsconsulting.com or by calling  513-543-1935 with any questions.

Classes run for 2 hours and are under $50. Laptops available for use. March registration can be found here:  http://bit.ly/aCoeVo

Hope to see you in class!

LIFE ON THE GRID: PLAYING FOURSQUARE PRIVACY

Don’t Rob Me, I’m Just Checking In…….

March 14, 2010 · Leave a Comment · Edit This

Social Media Privacy Panel at NMC- Michelle Beckham, DG Hollums, Daniel Johnson, Jr. photo credit: Christiaan Todd Photography

Life on the Grid:

Discussions on Privacy all seem to be the rage right now. Thinking that this is due to the roll-out of Geo-location apps like Gowalla and Foursquare (1 yr old) and the introduction of geo-loca capabilities currently with Twitter and soon to be with Facebook next month. I sense that similar questions will arise from the unitiated as they did with Twitter.

“Why do I care what Adam had for lunch??”

will turn into,

“Why do I care where Adam went to lunch?!!”

Well from my perspective, there are a lot of great reasons to care. Using Foursquare as an example, I see the following benefits:

• Keeping tabs on where your friends are
• Knowing who the tech-savvy people are when you arrive at a venue (check in list will show this)
• The venue knowing that you are on-site or nearby and having the capability to offer you a discount
• The gaming aspect that strikes at the heart of all us competitive Type A personalities (unlock badges, awards, become Mayor, etc.)
• The stalker aspect- ability to glean info about friends that you might not have known (for example, who was out into the wee hours…)

I participated in a panel on Internet Privacy yesterday at the New Media Cincinnati 2nd Saturday Event and Foursquare was prominently discussed. Check out the Live Stream HERE. I personally had been holding off on all of the fun because I had concerns about privacy issues. After reading up on the applications and attending an American Marketing Association meeting in which Foursquare and Gowalla were featured, I came to realize that this cool tool offers a hot bed of marketing opportunities to the venues who jump on the bandwagon. By the way, Starbucks just announced that they are partnering with Foursquare which should help to nudge the rest of the retail world into joining the party.

I joined Foursquare about 24 hours ago and am really liking what I see. Will continue to update this blog with my experiences as I make my way through all of the settings and repercussions that ensue based on my choices. And for folks who know about the Please Rob Me. com site- I will NOT be checking in/out of my home.

For the record, I have an alarm system and a killer watch-dog, so keep on going when you hit my ‘hood……..

Copyright Michelle Beckham-Corbin 2010

Building Trust in a Virtual World

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Building Trust in a Virtual World

March 5, 2010 · 2 Comments

People live their lives today pressed between the flowing pages of Twitter and the back and forth banter of blogs. They connect with professionals via their profiles on LinkedIn and run them through Google search as a matter of routine background check. Presented with rich content, they sift through the information trying to determine the desired level of connection.

The tentacles of their personal brand are out there on the social media highway, reaching out and touching each person who zips by. These “brands” try hard to be engaging, hoping that the hook they thrust out is the one that will spear them in, bringing the friend/fan/follower front and center to the hub of their existence: the place where they make the sale.

This can’t happen without taking the conversation to a deeper place where they can become intimately connected to each other. How we get there is a matter of trust and is a crucial point in establishing lasting relationships. Those who have presented themselves in an authentic way on-line will appear seamlessly the same in person, while others who have experimented with on-line personas that don’t truly represent who they are will find continued relationships lacking as purchasers of the brand discover the existing holes.

Trust will always be an inherent part of taking the next step, but it is a developed risk needed to arrive at a deeper level of doing business. Today establishing a brand identity and a unique value proposition involves not only trust but truly being authentic in a very transparent way.

LIFE TURNS ON A DIME

Silently you entered the void
that had been slowly building for years
You stepped back in as if you had never left
The same, yet changed, as if life's limp hand
had painted an eternity of weariness on your brow

You slip in the fact that you are recently back in town
after a weekend with your folks
My eternal need to go beyond the basic "Hi, how are you?"
and ask pointed in-depth questions leads me to an answer
that makes my heart bleed for you

You tell me your visit was brutal
"Brutal" because your father is dying
Life-long smoking has led him to a dance with cancer
A Dance that is coming to an end
Already tiny silent cells have coursed outward and upward
and he is Stage 4 upon first diagnosis

"Damn, why didn't you tell me this before?!
A deep silence lays between us like a heavy woolen blanket
Slowly you begin to speak, your words falling like
bullet thuds into the packed earth:

"I spent the first night in the hospital with my father
He was in very bad pain: the kind of pain that makes a grown man
curl up into a ball screaming and crying like a newborn....
And when the pain wasn't wracking his body, he talked:

About how much he doesn't want to die
About how much he wants to get back to his work
About how much seeing me meant to him:

"Damn, I don't know what to say...."

"Yes, damn. Welcome to the last week of my life...."

****************************************************************


I know the history of pain between them- it cuts deep
like a knife, both literally and figuratively
Those cuts brought us close initially and these new wounds
are bringing us back together for the moment

I offer prayer, knowing that as an avowed atheist
he will shrug it off outwardly,
But because he knows my beliefs, will be inwardly thankful for
the positive energy

So sad to be brought back together under such circumstances
So glad that the connection is so tight, that he can reach out for
comfort, solace, help

Life turns on a dime......................











Copyright Michelle Beckham-Corbin 2010