LinkedIn and Branding : Making yourself stand out from the crowd.

LinkedIn recently hit 200 Million members! Hence when it comes to hiring, companies prefer to head over to LinkedIn for its tremendous reach and other benefits (Groups).

There is no substitution for a network of active professional and that is the truth.
Kevin Bacon’s Six degrees of separation, which draws from the theory of “Six degrees of separation”, states that any person can be connected to any other person through 6 or less than 6 connections.
That gives us the reach, but what needs to be understood that it is still a level playing field and each one has the same reach. Today’s world has cut throat competition. There are thousands like you who want to be in the same position you are or are aspiring to be in. Hence the recruiter has a lot of candidates to look at.

How do you stand out from the crowd?

How do you bring yourself to the notice of employers?

As Debra Caires says "You" are a business. You have invested years in sharpening and learning new skills. You are now your own business and your resume is your sales pitch.
And this sales pitch has about 1-2 minutes before it is relegated to the garbage bin. Due to this limited attention that it will be getting it is absolutely necessary to have a sales pitch (read Resume) which will leave an impression.

A sales pitch consists of among other things the hard cold fact of “What do you bring to the table? How will your skills help the other person / business achieve his own goals?”
What you can and cannot do needs to be put across to a potential employee

I believe that this can be done by following these simple tips –

1. Get a customized URL – This way whenever anyone decides to Google for your name it is ensured that your LinkedIn profile is the one which will show up in the results.

2. List out all your skills in the inverted pyramid fashion – Put the skills you are most familiar with first followed by the others. This is how the recruiters believe people list out their skills. Users however do not realize this.

3. Have a professional photo – Although it might not seem like a lot the profile picture is sort of a pre-first impression. As such it should be decent. Extravagant / Nonprofessional photos might scare potential employers away.

4. Add Multimedia to your LinkedIn profile – LinkedIn supports all types of Multimedia including but not limited to audio, video, presentation, documents. The only catch is that the documents need to be published on a third party preapproved provider.

5. Get recommendations from people you have worked with.

6. Put in snippets of testimonials (with permission)  into the LinkedIn profile.

7. Fine Tune your headline to reflect  what you currently do / aspire to do.

8. The summary of your LinkedIn profile should reflect your work and why you think you did a good job and back it up wherever possible with figures (percentages etc)

Sources :
http://socialmediatoday.com/node/1700131
http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/outside-voices-careers/2013/04/17/how-to-market-yourself-on-linkedin
Image Courtesy: http://www.someecards.com/usercards/viewcard/MjAxMi1mYzMwNmYxOWVkZTNlMTg3

QR Codes: Decoded.

What are QR codes?

Ever see those small white squares with weirdly arranged small black squares within them? Yep. Those are QR codes.  And those weirdly arranged squares?  Yes, they contain some information.

Come on, what are QR codes?

Well technically speaking QR codes contain information which has been structured into an array of black and white squares. This info can be very easily generated and as easily read with a camera enabled phone in conjunction with a QR decoding software.

What purpose do they serve?

In short they put the offline world in contact with the online world. QR codes can be used to embed links to the website of the brand being promoted. It can be used for a variety of purposes including leading the user who is scanning the QR code to a website which can give more information on a specific topic. They can be used as a hiring tool to direct potential employees to apply for a job.

An interesting use is that of QR codes being placed on tombstones and which when scanned will lead to a web page which can display the info related to the person in question.

Example : QR Code to this website.

Any shortcomings?

Perceived shortcomings are that not everyone has a camera enabled phone, If they do they need to buy third party software. Even if these conditions are fulfilled there still is the perceived issue of the site not being displayed properly on the mobile.

In today’s world almost all cell phones are enabled with a primitive camera and third party software is reliable. In addition companies have realized that a substantial chunk of traffic is from cellphone users and hence these companies are making / have already made their company websites cellphone friendly.

What’s the future for QR codes?

Although reports suggest that user do recognize QR codes and have scanned a QR code at least once what would really give a real sense of the usefulness and usage of QR codes would be how many times does a person see a code and actually pull his/her cell out to scan it. Example: Out of the 10 times that a person sees a QR code he ends up scanning the code 8 times. That would serve as a yardstick to the future of the QR code technology.

Sources - 
http://sjsucs100wcs200w.blogspot.com .

Seven Things you should know about QR Codes, Educause Learning Initiative.

Social Networking and security. . .or lack of when promoting your brand.

The internet has made the world a smaller and a very well connected world. 

There are currently about 2,405,518,376^[1]  people who are connected to the internet. Out of these Facebook alone accounts for 1.2 billion users^[2] . Adding users from other websites will probably sum up to a huge number. Hence when one thinks about the best way to promote his/ her brand, the most natural course of action is to recognize and use the potential of the already existing social networks. There are many other reasons like the low cost to reach a potential customer, to prefer promoting brands over Social Networks rather than through other channels.

While doing so it is necessary to understand that different platforms will have different audiences having different tastes. Promoting your brand on the right platforms is important and will have a direct bearing on the return on investment.

Case in point - "Pepsi was one of the first few brands to use social media to raise brand awareness. When the company decided to overhaul its entire brand, including the logo, PepsiCo adopted a slightly non-traditional approach. Instead of sending out a press release, PepsiCo opted in some 'select blogger' and delivered a bunch of cans showing the way its design had evolved since its launch. These influencers then blogged about the new design, increasing brand awareness in the process. The real time nature of the social media and the fact that these brand advocate in turn influence their followers to be more receptive to the change worked brilliantly for the beverage company"[3]

This demonstrates how the focus is shifting from the normal channels to social media /networks.

A coin will always have two sides  -

It takes months to gather a following (Facebook Groups) .However something as simple as a disgruntled customer posting on such public forums can tarnish the reputation of the company. It is not limited to disgruntled customers. Disgruntled employees / reckless comments / posts by employees can have a huge impact on the image of the company. Take the example of an employee who posted the following on the Social Network website named Twitter.

“I just posted a funny video of myself frying a rodent at the restaurant where I work.”  -Employee at  well-known, nationwide fried chicken company in 2008 [4]

This tweet whether true or false will definitely make customers hesitant before they decide to visit the place next time.

Additionally if the Social Network account of the person in charge of carrying out the brand promotion is hacked then all of the hard work that has been put in can be washed away within a day or two.The security aspects when using Social Networks that need to be understood and taken care are -

1. Hoax emails asking for some critical information.

2. Posting rogue URL's which will redirect to websites which can then grab information or install rogue software.

References / Source -

[1] - "Internet Usage Statistics,The Internet Big Picture,World Internet Users and Population Stats" ,Internet World Stats ,June 30 2012, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

[2] - "Social Networking Statistics", Browser Media and Socialnomics, 12th November 2012, http://www.statisticbrain.com/social-networking-statistics/

[3] -  "The Impact of Social Media Influencers on Brands", Syndicated Author, 23rd May 2013, http://www.ronsela.com/the-impact-of-social-media-influencers-on-brands/

[4] - "Social networking and security risks", Dinerman Paul  - http://www.gfi.com/whitepapers/Social_Networking_and_Security_Risks.pdf