LinkedIn is a great tool to advertise you

           

            LinkedIn is a social networking website for people in professional occupations. It is founded in December 2002 and launched on May 5, 2003. The main purpose of this website is to help people network professionally and stay updated. All the services on this website are free so it’s a great tool to use.

           LinkedIn can let you find other companies, business associates, clients, organizations and colleagues whom you already know. You can connect with these associates through this website and then they will become part of your network. Once you connected with these people, you later can get accesses to their list of connections which also give you an opportunity to connect other people.

           Also, Linked in provides other features such as setup, join in groups,  search for jobs available which other people advertise the open positions and you can apply for it right on their network. It’s also a great tool for job seeking.

           Moreover, LinkedIn can help you network with others and professional organization in your industry. This helps you stay updated with industry trends and you can share information with others who do things similar to you. Once you in a network, you can create or join a specific group to discuss about ideas and share industry or your products news. Therefore, this is a great tool to build and advertise your products in a professional way.

           I heard about LinkedIn from a friend of mine long time ago, but I haven’t gotten a chance to use it because all of my friends are using Facebook and I’m also a new to this industry world. Since the impressive introduction to LinkedIn from my professor in cs100w, I know that I have to have a LinkedIn account for my future careers.

QR codes, the most efficient way to talk about yourself

QR code (quick response code) was first designed for industrial uses in japan. It has become popular due to the fact that its fast readability and greater storage capacity compared to the standard UPC barcodes. Because of these facts, many applications such as product tracking, time tracking, item identification, website identification and more used the QR codes (Wikipedia). There are more reasons why QR codes have become so popular. QR codes nowadays in 2013 really easy to use and to generate. We can just use a smart phone with a scanner application and we can get the information behind the QR code. For example, we can go to a particular website just by doing a simple scan on that QR code and it will lead us to that website. We don’t have to type the entire website URL out. Moreover, we can also generate a QR code for the website we want by using some website which can generate the QE codes such as http://www.qrstuff.com/. It’s really easy to use and free. For example, the QR code above is my QR code for my blog. If I want to tell my friends about my blog, I don’t have to give them the entire URL but instead just give them this QR code and they can get to my blog easily. 

Two sides of Social Networking and Security or lack of when promote your brand

          Nowadays, social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus have been used widely all over the world. Every user can see others’ photos, status, relationship and updates easily just by one click. Because these social media websites are so popular, not only a regular person uses them but also a corporate, company and/or business. Especially, businesses like to get their products out to the world as quick and effective as possible. Social networking websites allow them to be able to reach out to their customers by not having to put into too much work. For example, if a certain grand-opening restaurant wants to advertise for its menu, then it would first need to have its own website. However, a website isn’t as effective as a fan page on Facebook. Most people will like to visit the restaurant’s fan page than its website.

           When a business has its own account on any social networking website, it can get people’s attention quickly through uploaded pictures and videos, status updates, and replies to comments. However, there is a bad side to this because the security on these websites aren’t as good as the one on their own website. Hackers may find a much more difficult time to hack a company or corporate’s own website than the fan page. Inconsiderate comments can be posted and seen by everybody on the Facebook’s fan page but not on the website. Overall, there are always two sides to social networking. Though it may bring you benefits in advertising and marketing, it can hurt you back by not having enough security.