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| A tag dress at Artomatic. The sizes run from 4 to 14. I'm sure there is a story there, thankfully it's not mine. I've been within the same two sizes almost all my adult life. |
First off I need to tip my hat at Terri of RAGS Against the Machine for once again providing me with inspiration. The reference was to Rob Horning's The Accidental Bricoleurs. It added a new word to my vocabulary - bricoleur, which means handyman,tinker, someone who makes constructions for fun out of things lying around. It seems American to me, constructing ourselves as a patchwork of influences. Bricolage is the art of recombining different existing elements/styles into something new.
The article takes on fast-fashion explaining how retailers use feedback from outlets to tweak products which are produced in small batches and shipped continiously. Customer choices via purchases plus fashion fairy-dust drive the content of production.
The author seuges into social media on this same point of users providing the content. Personal branding occurs as individuals fashion their own images, which are composed of their mix of influences.
The authors speculate that vehicles like Facebook encourage us to patch together everything we do and see and that this potpourri of mostly images gives rise to new variations in tastes. As users of the media we are encourages to put forward our status, link, pin or tweet in what a virtual popularity contest. Like cliques in high school some posters are more popular and influential than others. We sell our mix of' recycled and created culture like goods in the social media marketplace.
Professional marketers looking to cash in on social media troll social media transaction files, most with billions of entries, looking to identify influencers. Some schemes make appeals to those identified as influencers, other merely tag them to attach ads to their postings and links, in hopes of gleaning their connections for sales.
To me, part of the entertainment of Facebook is the variety of posts and status that move post my news feed:
- The lefties are pummeling the right, the righties are pummeling the left;
- Everybody, even those who reject religion, seems to think they know what Jesus would do;
- The cancer survivors are lobbying, rejoicing or grieving;
- My young friends or relatives are having a party, traveling or otherwise reminding me of young things;
- My peers are attending graduations or wrestling with their Christmas tree lights;
- The Pastor(s) -somehow I seem to know a lot of Pastors- are offering thoughtful comments, links or remarking on their marathon training;
- Everybody it seems is stopping in at Target.
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Tag dress gals have slim waists.
This one seems to shop at Target all the time.
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I enjoy Facebook, but have no stake in whether I have 300 friends or 1,000. I prefer to know my friends personally but am happy to develop relationships with people who I only know online.
Cultivating a personal brand rose on my priority list last summer, when after many years of steady employment I lost my job. I was not prepared.
I had some advantages. I liked what I did and wanted to keep doing that, and it is a skilled profession. I'm a Systems Analyst. However, my marketing was woefully out of date.
I became aware of this during an interview with a manager who was about 35. I was ready to talk about my technical skills and the complex applications I was capable of developing, but was detailed his as to how long I had worked for my then-current employer. I will never forget the look on his face when I said the year - 1982. I didn't ask if he'd been born yet.I hadn't considered that I would need to explain why I'd worked someplace for so long. Suddenly my years weren't evidence that I'd was experienced and dedicated, they were proof that I was old, and implied that I'd been content to while away the years doing the same thing over and over. It was one of those moments that resulted in endless I should have saids afterward. That job didn't come through, I was sure it was my age, later on I found out they didn't hire anybody at all. A year later that whole group in the organization has fallen apart, it's just as well I didn't go there.
The concept of games your mother never taught you describes my upbringing to a tee. Bragging and tooting your own horn were not virtues in my conservative Midwestern household. Thrift, hard work, attention to detail, good manners, diligence, and reading three newspapers a day, not necessarily in that order, were the virtues of my upbringing. Most of these qualities and results of these activities were personified around our dinner table every night at 6 o'clock sharp right after the evening news - in stories. When the author of Brag! set me on a quest for my story I was in luck.
It didn't take me long to get my story straight and at the top of my talking list. I'd worked for my employer since 1982 because:
- They were a great employer and hadn't ever lost my job, a common reason for switching employers in the contracting world;
- I'd become a mother and needed to work less than full-time to care for my family, that's easier done with an existing employer;
- I found what I do, programming, to be challenging and fulfilling and working with energy data is something I enjoy.
With that spin on my story I could take a horror-filled look and expound on the many different places and technologies I'd worked in over those years, while on the payroll of that one employer.
At that point I still didn't have a "brand" but I did have a story. This is what I do..... For me, defining my story sharpened my story and my pitch. Equally important, it gave me confidence. As fate would have it I ended up back at my original job. I felt that it validated the story I'd developed - that it was a good job I enjoyed.
Almost a year later I find myself thinking about personal branding again. The world isn't a secure place and I have no way of knowing whether I'll be dusting off my resume again. If I learned anything from my experiences over the past year it should be that my resume shouldn't get dusty. A woman with grown children probably should have a new story, that one about working while my children were small seems a little tired.
How're you going to breath life into the second half of your life?
