LinkedIn and Branding: Create Online Brand for Yourself

As of June 2013, LinkedIn reports more than 225 million acquired users in more than 200 countries and territories. (Reference from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkedIn) More and more companies use LinkedIn to post their job openings. Also, human resource from many companies directly search people and connect with them through LinkedIn account. Therefore, having a LinkedIn account with your up-to-date education and working experience is very important for job hunting.

Once you finished your profile in LinkedIn, you can start your job searching. LinkedIn provide job listing and searching service, which is similar to the traditional job searching website such as Indeed, but with much more useful features. If you search a job in LinkedIn, you will find that at the bottom of each job list there is a sentence “1(or other number) person in your network” (as shown in the following picture). With this information, you have the chance to see whether there is somebody you know who can help you to get the interview opportunity of your favorite job. LinkedIn also provide another amazing service that you can check who has reviewed your profile and how many people reviewed your profile during some certain period. This kind of service breaks down information asymmetry between employee and employer for a long time.

LinkedIn is also a social networking website partly like Facebook, but for different purpose. LinkedIn is a social platform for professional connections. You can only find professional information of people in LinkedIn, while Facebook is the place to share your personal life with your friends. LinkedIn help people generate and organize their professional connections. After finishing your person profile, LinkedIn can automatically identify people who come from the same university or the same company as you. Then you can connect with them and receive all update of their professional information on LinkedIn. Furthermore, you can also review your friends’ connections, which will help you to get to know somebody who might give you opportunity for your next job. This is really a powerful way to largely expand your professional network, and you might be surprised to find that the distance between you and President Barack Obama is only three or four people.

QR code: new identity of brand

The QR code firstly impressed me about two years ago, while I saw a big QR code attached outside wall of a building. At that time, I can only guess that it is some kind of encrypted code, but do not know what QR code represent for and how to use it.

The process of creating my own QR code for my blog generates my strong interest in it because I find that it is very easy to generate and simple to use after I install a QR code scanner APP on my iPad. After doing research and study online, I want to share something about QR code with people who might also be curious about it.

First, let us talk about the word “QR Code” itself. What is “QR Code”? QR code is abbreviated from Quick Response Code, which also reveals the most essential feature of this code. How quickly respond could QR code? It takes me one second to scan the QR code of my blog, and then the front-page of blog website appears on my iPad screen. The second feature of QR code is that it can provide greater storage capacity than barcode. QR code is two-dimensional (2D) matrix code that can hold thousands of alphanumeric characters of information, whereas bar code is linear one-dimensional codes and can only hold up to 20 numerical digits.

Due to QR code’s fast readability, huge storage capacity and ease of use, it has already been applied in many fields. The most popular application is converting and storing the URL information into QR code just as the one we generated for our blogs. Scanning the QR code through smart mobile phone, we can immediately read our peer blog without typing their blog address into browser. This efficient way for transferring information via QR code attracts many companies to use QR code as their advertising method. We can easily find some big QR code presented on the outside wall of some buildings in commercial area as the following picture. QR code is becoming more and more familiar to people. Maybe QR code will pervade every aspect of our daily lives someday in the future.

Reference from http://www.thinkparallax.com/blog/2011/08/qr-codes/

Social Media, essential but not perfect

Social media has been undoubtedly reshaping the ways people live although social media security has become serious. In my view, we could enjoy surfing in social media as well as take any necessary actions to protect ourselves.

Social media is becoming one of the most powerful tools when promoting a brand because its unique feature – social media is a social platform for people and their social connections to interact with each other.  This feature makes people actively transform diverse images, videos and reviews about thing they pay attention to. The speed and power of information spreading among people in this way is incredible comparing with the traditional advertising media such as TV, even official websites of brands. For example, Facebook lunched “Facebook Offers” for businesses on May, 2012. Since then, each person can easily claim offers, just clicking “Get Offer”, as showed in the following picture of Macy’s offer in Facebook. Furthermore, each time people claim an offer, they could share the offer information with their friends. The benefit of Facebook Offers can be imagined from one fact that more than half of Facebook’s 845 Million active users have accessed this Macy’s offer at Facebook. (The data and following picture are cited from http://www.marismith.com/facebook-launches-facebook-offers-for-businesses/)

Macy's Offer at Facebook

At the same time, we cannot ignore the security problem of social network. From my point of view, there are two different security problems. One is that people know their private information is being used in some ways while they have little control on it. For example, people can see the advertisement closely related with their email content when they log into their Gmail account. This is because Google scanned our emails and analysis the content for its advertisement service. This kind of behavior causes debate. Some people believe it invades their privacy while other people think it should be allowed because it brings convenience to their lives. The second kind of security issue is caused by hacker. Many people might have met with such problems as their email accounts or chatting tool accounts are stolen by hacker, with some illegal technical methods. Once this happens, people will certainly lose control of their private information. What make things worse is that this electronically stored information will be very easy to copy and quickly spread through Internet, which will cause unpredictable bad affect. 

Although security issues look very serious, it should not prevent us enjoying the advantage that social media bring to us.  We should learn to protect ourselves by some ways. First, we should create and use our passwords securely. We should create long password with some kind of complexity just as urT@257_. (Reference from GuidetoFacebookSecurity.pdf) We should use different password for different account and timely change them. Second, we can install powerful Antivirus software which can distinguish unsafe websites and prevent hacker invading into your computer. Third, we should separate our professional and social email. We’d better use different email accounts for different purpose. There must be other better methods to improve network security. Any advice and discussion about how to protect ourselves are welcome.