LinkedIn and Branding: Brand Your Career

LinkedIn has redefined social networking by creating a business related networking site to map your professional life. With around 225 million user accounts LinkedIn connects you to a large professional network to boost your career. In this day and age paper resumes are becoming obsolete if not already as LinkedIn has replaced them with their electronic resumes. The entire site is your resume and because it is all online in an easily accessible format recruiters can find you with a click. This simplified interaction between the job seeker and the recruiter makes LinkedIn the future. Recruiters have all the tools they need on LinkedIn, they can easily search for the right candidates and get access to their resumes. They can search by profession, industry, and geography and used the associated graphs to pick out the candidates. No longer to businesses have to store peoples’ resumes and they are constantly updated.

           To attract connections and recruiters you need to keep your LinkedIn actively updated. First of all, you need to set up your profile with all the professional information. Add your picture, summary, experience, skills, education, and other information. Also edit your public profile link so that it easily remembered not a bunch on numbers (preferably your name or a permutation of your name). Another important way to keep your profile active is to follow companies and groups that you are interested in. This further helps you get connected with related professionals and improves your chances of getting recruited. Posting on these groups and related news topics is a good way to spread your name as well.

More info: http://imonlinkedinnowwhat.com/

QR Codes: A Wealth of Data on a Square

To be honest I never cared much for QR codes until today. I had seen them on many posters, websites, billboards, airports, shops, etc. but I thought of them as nothing more than a barcode that linked to business websites. I was terribly wrong. QR codes can be used is so many ways! Scanning a QR code can not only link to URLs, they can be used to send emails, initiate phone calls, connect to a Wi-Fi network, process orders, link to a calendar, and more. To make things even better, they are easy to create and easy to use. All you need is a QR code generating sites such as Unitag where you can easily create and design QR codes for your needs. To use QR codes is just as easy, all you need is a phone camera to scan the code. Unfortunately QR codes have security holes which you must look out for. QR codes can be tampered with so that they link you to a malicious site or even worse they can be used to get access to your sensitive data and steal your passwords or other identification information. Be careful when wanting to scan a QR code, watch out for any evidence of tampering and only scan from trusted sources.



What makes QR codes more fascinating is its algorithm. QR codes came about in 1994 in the automotive industry. Created by Denso Wave, they were made to replace barcodes that could hold little information due to being one-dimensional. As always, adding a dimension makes everything better. QR codes are two-dimensional since it can hold information horizontally and vertically. This allows QR codes to not only hold more information but also reduce the size of the printing space. Compared to a regular barcode, a QR code can hold up to a hundred times more data and take up one-tenth of the space. All of this leads to fast readability and high storage capacity which makes QR codes so powerful. The last powerful feature of the QR code is the error correction algorithm. Not only does this allow damaged QR codes to be read but this is what allows you to design the code the way you want it to look: logos, pictures, colors, patterns.

Securing You and Your Brand on Facebook

Social networking is huge right now and will only get bigger in the future. Websites such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, Vine, etc. have tens or hundreds of millions of users each, if not over a billion. The reason for so many users on social networking sites is information. People want information on all their friends and pages they follow and businesses want information on the people. Facebook has an enormous amount of information because of their billion users. What is all this information about? Each user on Facebook, whether a person or a business, is promoting their "brand" to the world. "Branding" is an important part of social networking for people and increasingly important for businesses. But nothing is worse than losing the "brand" one has built. Security is very important on social network sites because there is large amounts of information scammers and hackers want access to.

Businesses wanting to promote their brand have access to tools that gather information from Facebook that will improve their product. Tools are available (both paid and free) from Google, Hootsuite, UberVu, and SocialMention that can send alerts and create detailed graphs based on keywords to get information on the audience. It's even possible to set-up a Facebook page so that it targets a specific audience and a demographic area. This allows businesses to better relate and communicate with their consumers which in return will improve their brand. There is quite a bit of work required to manage their digital footprint though. Anything posted online will be viewed by many people so posts to be true statements. Writing the wrong post can harm the company brand.

A business will also have to take care of their Facebook page in terms of security. On the surface, Facebook is a social networking site but their main business comes as an information sharing site. Not only is Facebook making money by selling information about the users for ad revenue but also criminal organizations want access to this information by scamming or hacking users. It is safe to assume that data stored on the Facebook servers is safe from hackers because encryption software is hard to break unless there is a secret backdoor for the NSA. The way around encryption is by getting access of the user accounts in the first place which bypasses any need to break encryption. As this is much easier, scamming users of their accounts is the main method of attack. The main line of defense is using a strong password and signing out of Facebook once done. Scammers use links to fake sites that will trick users into entering their log in information. They can also install malware and scripts that will gather account information and use the account to scam other users. Specific information on securing your Facebook account can be found at this link.

List of important tips from the previous link:

• Change your password regularly.
• Make sure the URL is correct and don't log into Facebook more than once.
• Log out of Facebook if not using a personal computer.
• Keep your browser and anti-virus software up-to-date.
• Don't paste script code into the address bar.
• Don't click on weird links.
• Beware of links from friends.