LinkedIn and Branding: Setting Up Your Profile

"LinkedIn is the leading online professional directory of individuals and companies. LinkedIn (linkedin.com) has over 85 million members in more than 200 countries, including executives from every Fortune 500 company." (Source). And what this means is that many employers use to look for potential candidates for their hiring process.  So it is a very good idea to make a profile on LinkedIn to get yourself some exposure to companies that are looking for new employers. And it also good to have an account to build up your list of contacts which will strengthen your social network which you will find very helpful to have when you are looking for a job in the future.

    And one of the best ways to get yourself a better chance at being selected as a potential candidate for an employer is to update your profile's info. However, before I delve any deeper always be sure to remember the fact that you always need to check the date something was created before using it as a guide as things typically change with time as new design schemes are introduced. And you can currently get to this page using this link.

1. Navigate to the upper left hand corner to find the 'profile' tab
2. Hover over the 'profile' tag
3. Click on the 'edit profile' button

Then simply edit each item listed on the page to reflect the skills you have. And one very important thing to edit is your LinkedIn url as a custom one looks a lot nicer than one filled with random junk, which you can currently get to using this link.

1. Then navigate to the lower right hand corner to find 'Customize your public profile URL' link.
2. Click on it and edit your automatically generated one into a custom one like: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lastnamefirstname or http://www.linkedin.com/in/firstnamelastname

And that way people will not have to try to remember your long LinkedIn profile url to view your profile as they will only need to type http://www.linkedin.com/in/ plus whatever you used as your custom url to get to your LinkedIn profile. And this should make yourself more memorable as you took an extra step in customizing your LinkedIn profile to get in touch with potential employers.

QR codes: What's it for?

QR Code to quickly access my blog.

QR (Quick Response) Codes were invented in Japan in order to store more information than possible with a normal bar code in order to make people's work at cash registers simpler (see: http://www.qrcode.com/en/history/ for more information on the history of QR Codes). However, they have only become really popular in the past couple of years. This increase in usage is due to the fact that smartphones have become the most popular type of cell phone for users to purchase. And so armed with this advance gadget people are able to do things they would never have been able to do with their older non-smart cell phones by downloading apps to bring new features to their device. And one type of app that can be download is a QR Scanner that allows a person to scan in a QR Code using their smartphone's camera in order to quickly access material.

QR Code on the side of a building.

But that brings us to the question of what the person is scanning in, as QR Codes can basically be made to do anything. And so one simple addition that people should make to promote the usage of their QR Code is to include a short caption under their QR Code like I did for the first image on this post to let people know what it is for. Because as you can plainly see from the next image is that some people do not include any kind of caption or image customization to give the people who are looking at them any idea of what they are for. And this is extremely important to do when you have a whole bunch of QR Codes next to each other as they are impossible to decipher by look alone. And so the above QR Codes on the side of the building could be for any number of things ranging from directions to the nearest public parking lot to how much it costs to rent a room there. This leads to them not being used as nobody wants to waste their time trying out each one to see if any deals with what they are interested in gaining knowledge about. And thus the creation of your QR Codes was useless as nobody scanned any of them into their smartphone even though they might contain information that a ton of people would find very handy to have on hand.

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

In today's world of technological advancements it is extremely important to be able to directly communicate with your customers quickly and efficiently. This is because word of mouth is an especially important aspect in getting your brand's name out there. And one of the most important aspect of this is customer support, in which you can gain a lot of new customers by positively and quickly engaging with your customers when they experience a problem. And this will lead people to talk about how great your company is at responding to issues which will lead more people to use your company's services since your company's reputation for responding to customer's issue is very good.

On the other hand, if your company has a poor or slow support service, people will start to talk negatively about your company and consequential switch over to one of your competitors. However, there is no need to be alarmed if your company cannot afford to actively engage with your customers in a live chat of some sort to provide quick support. This is because services such as: Google Alerts exist to monitor people's searches about your company on the web. And so armed with this feature your company can see what people are looking up about your company. Then if people are saying negative things about the services your company provides, your company can respond by prioritizing the fixing of this issue to make your customer's pleased. And then your company's reputation will become better as people see that you really care about listening to what your customers have to say which will attract more customers into using your services.