Promoting Yourself

Inherent excellence is not always enough to fetch recognition. Potential sponsors need to know about your skills, competencies, accomplishments and experiences to be encouraged to make a positive difference to your career. Being memorable equals getting picked. Self-promotion is a delicate art because if you overdo it, you come across as a braggart, and if you underplay you don’t get the accolades. There should be a line between gaining a following and becoming sickeningly self-promotional. Here are few strategies to generate more visibility -

Prepare your story – Whenever you meet any potential sponsor, seize this opportunity to promote yourself by highlighting an accomplishment or two. The trick lies in being prepared with your story and arming yourself     with data points that you can reel off at the drop of a hat.

Redefine self-promotion – Just as the objective of marketing a product is to generate awareness about its key benefits to help customers make sound decisions, think of self-promotion as a responsible communication of your talents and accomplishment to those who can leverage and benefit from this information, thus making it a win-win proposition.

Clothe it in anecdotes – Share your success story in the form of a story. Share your strategy and challenges in cracking the deal, enabling your team to learn from your experience. Engage with humility, focus on facts and ensure that those stories are relevant.

Impactful Introduction – Make your introduction audience centric and impactful by incorporating elements that differentiate and lend a recall value. For instance, something like, “I am an avid trekker, I did the Everest base camp trek last year,” is likely to stick in the minds of the audience.

Engage beyond your core work – As the organization expands, it is not easy to get noticed outside your immediate circle. Participating in forums outside core work, like knowledge sharing forums, organizational committees, corporate social responsibility initiatives, diversity etc. will help in garner visibility and connect with people beyond operational network.

Communicate with your Manager – Tracking your accomplishments and feeding your manager with regular updates is mutually beneficial – it would not only help you promote yourself, but also offer your manager data points to identify areas where you could contribute.

Engage on Social Media – Start with posting an impactful profile, portraying your expertise by engaging in discussion forums, posting articles and commenting on posts, thus creating visibility by yourself.

Reverse Promotion – When you promote others, guided by the principle of reciprocity, they promote you in return. This reverse promotion, besides enhancing your visibility and highlighting your achievements, also helps you build relationships and earn goodwill. So, be open to connecting with people, learning about and promoting, their talents and achievements.