What is personal branding?

Personal branding is very critical in today’s growing social market. You have to give yourself an image that can go on to represent you as a brand. If you do not already know, personal branding means the way others think of you. If you think of this in broader sense, you can think of it as marketing yourself like if you use QR Code marketing to lead people to your Social Media profile(s).

Many people think that personal branding is out of one’s own control and one should stop doing efforts to take control over it. However, with the presence of social media, it is not difficult to portray an image that you want or maybe, your business requires. You can easily control some of the factors that lead to personal branding. Controlling these factors means playing around with personal branding. If you do it right, you can achieve great things.

Remember, you cannot avoid personal branding in today’s social world. Even when you are blogging and updating your activities on social networks, you are branding yourself at the same time. Think of it in wider sense, think of yourself as a product and you will understand the concept of personal branding.

What you need to do is to understand the factors that lead to personal branding. These factors include all sorts of communication and interaction with others including email exchanges, social media updates, telephonic conversation, blogs and even everyday conversation with friends and family members. Think of it as the perception that people get when they interact or communicate with you or you communicate with them.

Personal branding can be categorized into internal brand and external brand. The external brand would be precisely what we have talked so far. Whereas, the internal brand is what you think about yourself. Generally, internal brand does not coincide perfectly with the external brand. This is normal and you should not worry about that.

How can QR Codes and Facebook be used as a personal branding tool?

If you are looking to promote your personal brand, then you do not need to worry about finding useful tools. There more tools than ever and you can use most of them without having to pay. However, in this cloud of tools, it becomes a little ambiguous which tools to use and which ones to avoid. Sometimes paying a small sum can really make the difference between free with no support v a few ££ for dedicated support.

When it comes to Facebook, one of the leading social networks of this decade, you do not need to think twice. If you want to read about effectiveness of Facebook as a marketing tool. Facebook can also be used as a personal branding tool. All you have to do is to see how the other executives are using it for personal branding. You can then pick the right strategies and can create one for your business. A quick way to really drive traffic and interested employers and prospect to your social media profile is to focus on how you can promote yourself using QR Code marketing as a combination with Social Media to boost your social presence.

The major reason to use Facebook as your personal branding tool is number of users that it has. Moreover, these users are not just kids anymore with 40% users above the age of 35. When you are using Facebook for personal branding, you have to make sure that you have developed a sound strategy. The problem with such a huge user base is that a single mistake can ruin all your efforts. Therefore, you have to be careful with your strategy and have double check and test it before implementing it.

QR Code marketing will help you gain a clearer idea how people interact with you as a brand as well. Use a decent QR Code management service so you can track and change the content people see when they scan. This control of the QR Code is essential so you can engage the person, employer or colleague by sharing different information at different times. Pointing them to your LinkedIn profile on Mondays and Facebook page on Fridays ensurs you are always in control of what they see and when. Facebook is great as long as you use it with the view to share it as a professional tool, not a social one.

You can use Facebook to promote relevant data, positive traits of your personality, opine on contemporary events and talk about latest happenings relevant to your business. However, you should not be revealing things that you would not reveal in a management meeting of your company. Similarly, you should not promote anything that can potentially go against the positive image of your company. Above all these, you have to care about the community and should contribute to it positively.

If you can follow these simple rules, you will find using QR Codes marketing with your social media profiles like Facebook, will help you in promoting yourself quickly, effectively and in a good light.

Internet is one commodity that has become essential for a lot of different reasons. Now your online presence is just as important as your resume or your QR Code business card. Today, with so many online tools available, there is a whole new race going on where just having an online presence on Twitter or Facebook just is not enough, particularly if you are looking for work. Do you really want your future employer to find you on FB or Twitter before that all important decision – getting an interview? That is where services like Flavors.me and About.me come in handy. They are both similar services for users to beautify and personalize their online content and information but what features do they offer? They have been around for awhile but still offer the non-technical user with a great tool and opportunity to build a content rich page which can be used to promote themselves. But, what makes them worth the trouble? And which one takes the lead? Let`s have a look at both of them.

Flavors.me launched in January of 2009 and  offers you an ideal platform for creating a personalized homepage for yourself. It is a simple and beautiful aggregator that helps you build your own personal space by extracting content from other web service like Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, Last.fm, Facebook, Goodreads, and Netflix etc. You can quickly create a beautiful life-stream in only a few minutes. Flavors.me gives you options to ork through like personal/biographical info, layout, put a picture for your background if you want, chose or make your own color palette, pick up a font of your choice, size it according to your personal taste and select the social networking sites that you wish to integrate with your Flavors.me. About.me is a similar service that was launched in the December of 2009. And only four days after its public launch AOL acquired its services – always handy for any start-up.  According to About.me sources, nearly 5000 users are joining them daily.

Services like Flavors.me and About.me are an excellent opportunity for individuals, companies and students to launch themselves on the web. Now you do not need to take the headache of making your own website and then creating all the content, instead hire the services of Flavors.me or About.me and they will do it for you. It is equally useful for individuals who wish to create celebrity fan pages, commercial promotion, and brand marketing etc for free or as little as $20 a year for additional options and features.

Now comes the ultimate question, which of the two services should you go for? Although the war of words that has been going on between the creators of both these websites have been making headline, but as both of these services do have their independent pros and cons, the choice in the end is yours. About.me is a free service compared to Flavors.me for which you have to pay for additional features. Also About.me is more about personal branding i.e. it is like building your own online business card. Once you set up an account with About.me, it helps you in keeping track of who visit your profile, where they come from and their behavior whilst perusing your profile page. Flavors.me offers premium features far superior to that About.me is offering at the moment. Users get a whole variety of layouts, fonts and integration with a lot more social websites than its competitor, where profile building features are far too basic in comparison. Flavors.me offers more benefits from SEO perspective as well i.e. it provides custom domain names and Custom Meta Data that About.me does not.

In the end, I guess it is just a matter of personal preference. You can set up an account with each of these services and decide for yourself which one fits you better. They are both pretty cool.

Here are other posts which can help to promote you further:

Dynamic QR Codes you control

Twitter Engagement

Quora is the new internet celebrity that people are all set to follow. It is the latest knowledge indexing platform for anyone who has a question to ask. With an impressive launch, Quora is all set to compete against other Q&A sites currently operating on the web. The idea of such a social networking site is not new, however the hint of innovation, the idea of using collaborative public effort as a knowledge tool and the initial popularity it has gained so far suggests Quora has the potential to set its mark.

Quora was built by two former Facebook employees and was publically launched in June 2010. The idea that led to the development of this latest social buzz was to create a platform where questions can be asked, answered, edited and organized by its very members i.e. you. Quora is aimed at becoming an online database where anything anyone wants to know can be found, although the credibility of such information, which is open to absolutely anyone, is debatable. Information on such a site can be rendered “negotiable” if it comes from a common user and “knowledgeable” if expressed by an expert on the matter. But nevertheless, Quora does promote the collaborative aspect of knowledge-sharing, where people come together to solve queries and learn more about stuff which otherwise cannot be found on the internet. Information shared on Quora is also rated by its users, indicating its usefulness, which eventually bring useful posts to the top of the page which helps in improving the quality of the information shared. Also at Quora, connecting with other people is just as easy as on any other social website.

Examples of How Individuals and Companies are Using QUORA

Quora can be quite useful for companies and individuals who wish to reach out to people, share their opinion or help create awareness. For example, someone posted the question:

Are QR codes here to stay or just an unsuccessful gimmick?

As a QR Code enthusiast (!) I posted my response about using Dynamic QR Codes to engage people in your message/product/service and so on. Social networking sites like Quora where people from all backgrounds have a say, can prove its productivity in the most unique ways. Whether it is individuals raising their voice for a cause or sharing their expert advice on matters regarding their professional fields; it bores out results.

A recent article in Federal Computer Week explained how Eric Cantor, a staff member for GOP House Majority Leader, made use of Quora to get public feedback on the idea of using social platforms for legislation. It is one smart way to see how general public thinks. Similarly companies such as O2 can also make use of such social websites to achieve their marketing objectives and publicity goals. Online presence is essential for a company to reach out to target audience. Customers on the other hand also have many queries regarding products. Social platforms like Quora can help such companies give positive response to questions posed about their products and help promote their products or services in a better ways; SimpleBank for example is using Quora to find out what people have to say about the current banking system in US and how it can be made better; or discover more about a particular technology, for example Dynamic QR Codes, before investing.

Measure of Impact

Quora has captured an audience and it has made a nice start. People are likely to interact on such platform because this way they get to express their opinion. And for the time being companies and individuals who wish to make it big on the internet will find Quora very charming for the purpose. However it is too early to say anything about Quora, time will tell if this latest social website will make it big itself or not. At this moment Quora is expanding rapidly and is one of the most talked about social platforms. Some hail the idea on which Quora works where as others have raised concerns and argued about the authenticity of information being shared on it. More and more users on the website mean more information sharing, while at the same time relying on users to provide all the answers can be a recipe for disaster. Quora has the potential to impact government market place, online businesses and individuals, but the magnitude of this impact is yet to be determined. So stay tuned!

QR Codes are all the rage now particularly as more than 50% of UK adults own a smart phone and 65% of people have seen QR Codes . There is a crucial difference in the types of Codes that are available and those being used by the private as well as the public sector. The vast majority of both mentioned sectors currently use static QR Codes, these are those you can create by yourself using freely available QR Code generators. These static Codes will only display one website or one message on the users’ mobile phone. By contrast, Dynamic QR Codes give the business or professional the possibility of controlling the information broadcasted via the Code by updating it using an online service. This means that the consumer, reader, student or whoever scans the image can receive new content such as video clips, MP3 files, text messages and links to specific websites each time they scan the SAME QR Code. Dynamic QR Codes are therefore much more versatile and powerful for business and public sector than the static equivalent. Using this innovative technology will really give the public sector the possibility of sharing digital information via the traditional printed media. This post will showcase one service that provides the possibility of controlling QR Codes, namely SQUARE:CODE.

How does SQUARE:CODE Work?

Schedule, Control and Monitor Your Dynamic QR Codes

SQUARE:CODE offers an online service that enhances the Customer’s experience of products and printed literature with targeted, up-to-date, dynamic and engaging content. The Business broadcasts information such as web links and messages to the Customer via SQUARE:CODES which they scan with their mobile phones. The Business controls exactly what readers see and when they see it via their online dashboard, The SQUARE:CODE Exchange.

Features include:

• quickly compare return on investment for different products/campaigns with advanced analytics e.g. chart showing scans for all ¼ page ads, colour, daily newspapers.
• schedule updates in advance, so your customers get the right information at the right time. New information each time the consumer scans the SQUARE:CODE.
• sophisticated tagging system to organise SQUARE:CODEs with products and services.
• ability to adapt campaigns/articles after they have been has been distributed and published.
• respond interactively to customers’ interests as campaigns or products develop, by monitoring how many people have scanned each code.

SQUARE:CODE’s Facebook page is currently offering promotional discounts and trial accounts to their Dynamic QR Code service. Truly an exciting service, well I should say that as I helped create SQUARE:CODE : ) . It’s not often I post blatant plugs but I did today… Please forgive me….

Has your inbox got you locked up?

With the onslaught of new and emerging social networking tools such as Google+, we now we have bigger social circles and more friends, connections, followers and so on. This means we are communicating with newer tools other than email. Our  frustration with email has therefore increased significantly. When was the last time you checked your inbox, 1 minute ago? Luckily there are tools available that may help to ease the time you spend on your messages, or at least alert people about your current message “load”. Cue: Courteous.ly.

What is COURTEOUS.LY?

Courteous.ly is a new idea in the pipeline to help users share information about their email load. It is an academic research project conducted at the University of Georgia. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of sharing information regarding email load and to see how users respond under such circumstances. The hypothesis is that people once exposed to your message (over)load will better understand and therefore delay either sending their message or expect a delayed response from you.

How Does it Work?

Courteous.ly provides you with a personal link which you can add to your email signature. Once clicked it informs contacts about your current message load by grading it as either “Light”, “Normal” or “High”, so they can better understand the delay in your response. You can sign up at Courteous.ly using your Gmail account and as soon as you get your link, you’re good to go. You can also show contacts how they can reach you faster by adding a personalised message in your settings. Also, by using simple tags for example [whenever] in the subject line of their email will ensure that the message only reaches you when your email load has dropped back to normal. Courteous.ly currently only works with your Google account, including Google Apps. Although it is a research project your personal information is kept private.

Benefits to Working Professionals and Business

Being a working professional, one has to deal with loads of e-mails on daily basis. Whether it be important business appointments, meeting schedules, client feedbacks, information sharing; today all happens electronically. E-mail is your personal postman and it is all up to your email account to keep you posted. It has provided us with a simpler and more effective ways of contacting people, however sometimes a mesage stampede may work counter clockwise. Every morning there will be junk mails, regular mails and important mails in your account and you have to deal with all of them in some fashion. People do not know what is keeping you from replying but Courteous.ly does exactly that for you. Letting people know about your email loads can help reduce your frustration as well as theirs.

When was the last time you stayed on top of your inbox? Did you go offline, or perhaps you have decided not to check your emails first thing in the morning and instead focus on becoming more productive in the way you use email? Whatever system or techniques you make use of, Courteous.ly could become one of them.