Personal Branding

Companies use brands to market their products because good brands can make products look visible and memorable and stimulate consumptions. However, have you ever thought to be your own boss by   using brands to market yourself? Personal branding will give you a competitive advantage over the numerous masses that are looking for jobs.

A personal brand, in a nutshell, is the way you present yourself to the world. So the most vital step to successfully branding yourself is to establish a personal identity. Who are you? What do you do? What is your focus on your future career? Once it is defined, you can Control what others feel about you and who are the key audiences interacting with you. Then you should make full use of the media channel, like twitter or blogs to develop you reputation. Writing articles, sharing professional information and knowledge, or submitting comments on others’ social platforms in your field is effective. This lets targeted audiences see your name frequently and become aware of the benefit and knowledge that you offer. It will absolutely enhance your influence and popularity, making you a pro in your industry; an expert in your field. Using professional networks that built around one’s employment capabilities, like creating a LinkedIn profile, will also promote your opportunities to be known to the public.  

 As for me, I only use blogs on Google Plus to position myself as a social media enthusiast. I post new articles related to how social media technology evolves and how it affects our lives each week. Moreover, I never post words about my personal life because I want my personal brand to look more professional. It takes time to build personal branding as a social media practitioner, nonetheless.

The Photo Sharing Age

Flickr is a “free or pay” online platform to store and share digital photos. It has been generally believed to be a great example of the way of Web 2.0 application. Flickr was launched in February 2004 by Ludicorp，and Yahoo purchased Ludicorp and Flickr in March 2005.

The key feature makes Flickr outstanding is the presence of tags, which can be used for marking photos as favorites, group photo pools and interestingness, for which a patent is pending. The function of tagging enables users to find imagines related to the same topic or even the same place names, so that people can find out others sharing on the same subject. It is the first website to implement tag clouds,

Actually, the real value of Flickr should not only in photo sharing, but also to build the social network based on sharing photos. In the age which people do not know what is social network, Flickr already have created one. Groups are used as a way to communicate with fellow members of Flickr around common photography interests. By choosing to follow groups, recent uploads of the group will sometimes appear on a user's homepage when they log on. The relationship between users is not the traditional, for example, one can put the other person into “family” group without adding friends first. Such flexibility largely encourages sharing, giving comments and interaction between users, as well as improving the database.

Grasping better photography will sure to enhance the popularity of your photos shared on Flickr. Here are some tips:

It is hard to make perfect concentration on a photo, to move a little to the left or right, or zoom in or out just a little more. Using the zoom on your photos will not only change how close your subject appears but it will also change the depth of field. You can hold the camera horizontally or vertically to include the whole shot.           

When you take a photo of a friend, a pet, or an animal, do not let the surroundings to distract attention away from the subject. Standing further back and zoom in with your largest lens magnification. This will minimize the depth of field, which means only your subject should be in focus

Using a tripod will keep your camera steady which will make your photos clearer. For example, if you are using a 500 mm lens, the minimum shutter speed you would normally need to use without a tripod would be 1/500 second. When using a shutter speed slower than this simple rule of thumb suggests, a tripod is in order.

Some of people may ignore the function of mode setting, like ‘portrait’, ‘landscape’, ’sports’, and ‘night’ etc. This function can help to change the aperture, shutter speed, ISO, making the shot more life look.

Cosmopolitan Magazine on social platforms

The largest-selling young women's magazine in the world, Cosmopolitan is famous for its upbeat style, focus on the young career woman and candid discussion of contemporary male/female relationships. This magazine is active on the social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google blogger and Cosmo Radio on channel 109 on both Sirius and XM platforms. Cosmopolitan is the best-selling young women's magazine in the U.S, a bible for fun, fearless females that reaches more than 18 million readers a month. The magazine uses the listening strategy through the comments from fans who share what they like or dislike on the platform. Its fan page on Facebook has 1,857,510 likes and 20,912 people talking about this. One of the comments catching my attention is “I'm getting annoyed that a magazine that's suppose to help women become "confident and independent" has become more about pleasing a man than anything else.” But there is no public relation team helping to explain problems for readers on the Facebook.

It posts articles on relationships, sex, health, careers, self-improvement, celebrities, as well as fashion and beauty. Each month when the newly published is released in stores, it will update on Facebook and also offer download links for readers to get monthly issue of Cosmo on e-reader. You’ll be reading your favorite magazine in just minutes.          Cosmopolitan magazine has a subscription website called Cosmopolitan Magazine Customer Service, which can be used to order your magazines online.
      It also 387,142 followers on Twitter, and 12,967 tweets mainly offering tips for fashion and beauty, but few of them have rewets. It does not work as effectively as Facebook does.

Reflection on Social Network

The Internet is considered to the most useful invention, it has changed our way of study, life and even social work. But some may say it is just fictitious world, not the real one. Actually, most of all may feel that social network really is one part of the real world, and that is also the reason why Facebook can be so popular that become the social kingdom in a flash.

In the movie Social Network, like most genius, Zuckeberg is very shy and not good at social. He is really kind of pinchers, he will even change five topics in one minute in conversation, and his girlfriend cannot stand up, and broke up with him. It is the stimulation as well as the inspiration of the Facebook.

He invaded the school network database that night, and collected photos of all the beautiful girls, including his ex-girlfriend, and posted them on his website called Facemash, and students in Harvard even can give marks for the beautiful faces. Large number of clicks caused the collapse of the network, and Zuckeberg was punished by the school board. But he did not care about at all. He accepted the invitation from Winklevoss brothers to found the Harvard Network together, but after the success of Facebook, he was accused of plagiarism.But I think it still very difficult to put the definition of plagiarism, I think Zach really draws on the inspiration of the Harvard network, but he what made ​​the to the Facebook is far beyond the Winklevoss brothers imagination. Let alone Winklevoss brothers did not found any website successfully, even like the Facemash. It is impossible to produce good outcomes, if you do not have great skills, and creativity will remain in its prototype, just like the Winklevoss brothers.

Zuckeberg become the king of the social network, and he also is the youngest billionaire, but he has lost his friends and schoolmates who have helped with the foundation of Facebook. And he is also caught into self-blame for hurting his ex-girlfriend. The success or failure of his life, is really a dilemma.

Energizing your customers to be spokesmen

Are you still nervous about having no idea how to engage the relationships with your customers? Or you do not know how to increase your company’s branding popularity? Besides talking and listening to seek more customer insights in marketing, energizing is also a good approach.

Energizing customers means using the persuasive power of your enthusiastic customers for spreading brand benefits to other customers, whether potential or permanent ones. Energized customers are far more credible than any other media resources, like commercial broadcastings. Because most the commercial broadcastings use the exaggerate style to attract views’ attention, we will find the product are not as good as we expected, it is faked, so we do not want to believe in them. Conversely, if you hear the product from those who have used, it will be intriguing and more persuasive. And a research about “How much online North American consumers trust sources of information about products or services” show that 73% of the respondents get the recommendations from friends and family, 62% of them believe in consumer products and reviews.

One of the basic techniques given is energizing with ratings and reviews. The story how eBags turned Jim from a guy annoyed with his broken luggage into an eBag fan is just a good example Under most circumstances, if the product is broken, the companies will only replace a new one, but in this case, eBags even contact him and consult better suggestion for improving the design and quality. It will leave a professional brand image on customers. And the deeper the impression you leaves, the greater possibility your customers will write down their ratings and reviews, which in turn will be a great promoter for your products’ development.

Most of us may have the experience of shopping online. Numerous choices are there for you to choose from, and the price may vary greatly, but most of us will not choose the cheapest one or the most expensive one. We prefer to refer to their ratings and reviews, whether positive and negative, and choose the one with the best appraisal. Also, some shopping websites even have the function of array from the suppliers according to their satisfactory index. In such way, your customers have been energizied to be spokesmen.