LinkedIn and branding: brand yourself

As the world's largest professional network with more than 80 million members worldwide, LinkedIn can help you brand yourself. Our knowledge is goods now.  Companies, schools or other organizations who can give us jobs are our customers. As sellers, what can we do to enhance our products' value? LinkedIn provides a platform for both us and our customers. We may use the platform to display ourselves to others. In the following parts, I will discuss how to use PROFILE to brand yourself.
First of all is LinkedIn photo.  The photo may tell people about you. You are the brand. Opinions are formed in a nanosecond. And that means the photo at the top may be the most important part of your LinkedIn profile. So the photo should be natural. It is best taken recently. I can understand some people like to post their photo which was edited by Photoshop. But I don't think that it is suitable. LinkedIn is a profession platform. The hirers are looking for the people who can qualify their job and get along with colleagues instead of beautiful ones. Looking natural yet polished is far better. It is a headshot with nice shirt or blouse in a solid color.

Second is about SKILLS and EXPERIENCE. The hirers usually use keywords to search targets. Almost all the keywords are relative to skills and experience. So when you brand the two items, accurate keywords are necessary. To increase the interviews chance, you also need provide as many keywords as possible about your skills and experience. However, independent work experience should not be added. For example, if you want to find a software engineer position, the experience you worked as a waiter/waitress need not be put here.

Finally, your courses are also important. As new graduates, most people don't have work experience. In order to let the employers believe you are the person who they are looking for, you can show them what you learned.

In sum, branding yourself is the most important and difficult step before you go to job market. Besides the three sides above, we also have other things to do. Hopefully you can best use Linkedin to show you to hires.

QR codes: why you should use them

What are QR codes? Look at the funny-looking square picture on the left which is my blog's QR code. QR codes are more and more popular because of many reasons. In the following paragraphs, I will show you 3 reasons: easy to use, free, modern.

First, QR codes are easy to use. Nowadays,  more and more people are using smartphones.  It is said that today more than half Americans are smartphone users. Smartphones can be used as a QR-code scanner, displaying the code and converting it to some useful form such as a standard URL, thereby obviating the need for a user to type it manually into a web browser.

Second, QR codes are free. You can use some websites(such as goQR.me and the-qrcode-generator.com) to create your QR codes easily, and the activity is completely free.What you need do is just to go to the websites and input your information like Text, URLS, CALL ,etc. And then to download it. Now your QR codes are finished. 

Finally, QR codes make you modern. It is information society. Everyday, our life is filled with all kinds of information. If we could catch these information, we can talk them with our friends and use them to help our life easy and amazing. QR codes are one of them. You can scan other people's or companies' QR codes to get the information that you want and give your QR codes to them to let them know about you well. When the people around you are talking and using the QR codes, if you don't have one, you are backward.

In sum, QR codes don't spend your money and they make you walk along with modern world, the most an amazing aspect is that they are easy to use. So, to know about QR codes and use them as soon as possible.

Social network security or lack of when promoting your brand is an issue of utmost importance

Social network is gradually becoming absolutely necessary when companies promote their brands. In fact, it is a two-edge knife. On one hand, companies can use social media platforms to obtain immediate feedback from current/potential customers and communicate with their audience(http://sjsucs100wcs200w.blogspot.com/).  On the other hand,  many important information of companies can leak through social networks.  In the following paragraphs, I will show you that social networks' importance to promote the companies' brands and if the social network lacks the security, it will produce very bad influence to the development of businesses.


First, Social network has became the necessary way to promote the growth in the corporate sector of the economy. Companies can track information about them by some sites like www.google.com/alerts and www.hootsuite.com. Compare to traditional survey, social network has many obvious advantages. For example, it is easy and quick to get feedback. Using this feedback, companies can modify and make their blueprint of development.  Since more and more people like to use social network to transmit information, and commonly people even more like to buy the brands which their friends recommend, the brands can be known widely and quickly which effect is much better than they get from expensive ads.If things continue in this way, the company will gain huge development.

However, hackers  and rivals alike can take advantage of social media platform to get similar information . Hackers may use the information to attack the company. As rivals, they can make advantageous measures for themselves according to the information they gained about the company from social network which possibly is very bad to the development of the company.   In some cases, the leaders of one company can discuss their products with their loyal customers,these kind of conversation possibly influence this company's maker' decisions. Yet if the conversation is gotten and used by the rivals, it is possible that the future of the company will be very hard， even the life and death of the company can be affected.

In sum, social network can both promote the brand of one company also ruin the development of one company.  In order to better use it, one of the key works is to improve its' security. Many social network companies like Facebook and Google are working on it. The following video is talking about this issue.