Add ‘Award-Winning’ to Your Bio or LinkedIn

Have you ever wondered how so many people and companies seem to have ‘award-winning’ listed in their bio or description?

Did you ever scratch your head and ask yourself, ‘How did they win it?’

Well if our list of close to 8,000 awards programs  tells you anything, there’s an award out there somewhere for you to consider applying to right now.

For Organizations

If your company did something noteworthy, there’s most likely an award for it.

Here is where the brainstorming often happens in the marketing department. Noteworthy accomplishments are generally centered around a company’s products or services.

Ask yourself: did your company launch a new product? Or, did one of your products change the industry or end-user in some way?

A lot of marketing people decline from applying to awards programs because they feel that the company’s accomplishments weren’t strong or dramatic enough to merit an award. Nonsense. Just because the company didn’t have the largest market share or make the most in revenue, does not mean that the company cannot be considered for an award.

Even the tiniest distinctions or changes in product or service delivery can have an impact on the market. If a company’s offering has a feature that no competitor has, then that feature might be responsible for a unique result.

This requires some thinking, doesn’t it? Cleverness and creativity are needed here.

Marketing folks need to reach out to the business units and find these distinctions, along with any metrics to demonstrate leadership.

For Individuals

These are trickier to find.

Sure, programs like ’30 Under 30′ or ’40 Under 40′ encourage individual applications. However, when people proudly mention award-winning in their bio’s, they most likely won an award because they were part of a team that won the award.

Further, if there was an awards ceremony, that person and perhaps the whole team, was in attendance and accepted the award live in person. Perhaps photos or video was captured as well. 

Pics or it didn’t happen, as they say.

To garner an award so you, too, can add ‘award-winning’ to your bio, think about your team accomplishments and articulate them in a story. Add milestones and metrics to make the story richer and compelling.

Have this story ready to go when the marketing team is in the process of considering awards to which they will apply.

But wait: isn’t this a selfish way of thinking. Not at all. Your individual and team accomplishments will reflect well on the company as a whole.