LinkedIn and Branding: What I had been Missing

My experiences with LinkedIn are few.  For starters, I knew nothing about LinkedIn until one of my instructors introduced me to the site during a summer university programme this year.  Just recently, I had found out that LinkedIn was launched all the way back in 2003.  I was surprised to not have learnt about this website until 10 years after its establishment.  Perhaps it is a sign that I am still very much new to the job market.

For me, LinkedIn may be the start of something new.  Before I was introduced to LinkedIn this summer, my plan for my adult life was less certain; I knew that I wanted to go to graduate school to get some solid research experience before scouting out for a job in the private sector that could complement my interests, but I was not quite sure how I would go about finding a lucrative job.  In addition, I would have had to be even more careful about choosing a job than my peers, since studying full-time at a university for an advanced degree would give me even fewer years to get job experience, and I did not want to squander my future education.

Most importantly, however, I knew that I could not keep my hand held by my parents as an adult, and that I needed a way to find employment on my own.  All around me at my university, I see ambitious young men and women talking about how they already have internships or are almost ready to start their own company.  While I have my own aspirations, I am still not completely sure how to fulfil them, and it is that difference which makes me feel intimidated.

This is where LinkedIn can help me.  As a website, LinkedIn feels familiar to computer geeks like me, and by following various companies, I can keep track of what they post.  By reading these companies’ posts, I can get a better idea of their work principles and know what to expect if I pursue employment there.  If a company is active on LinkedIn and posts on the website regularly, then I feel more comfortable and open to the company.  Posting on LinkedIn may seem minor compared to the other responsibilities that the company has, but if my experience is anything to go by, doing so can increase the desirability to prospective employees.

QR Codes: Often a Gimmick in Advertisements

Shortly after my parents and I moved to the suburbs in the East San Francisco Bay Area in 1997, the popularity of the World Wide Web was picking up speed.  It was not long before my father signed up for the Internet service provider America Online.  My father and I were intrigued with the amount of information that we could conveniently access.  Neither of us cared that AOL used the telephone lines, blocking us from sending or receiving phone calls; the amount of new things that we could do made it worthwhile.  (Even though my mother, who did not use the computer at all, let alone the Web, felt that the blocking of phone calls was troublesome.)

Followed was the popularity of the term “.com” in advertisements.  In 1997, having a ”.com” seemed like a big deal, as websites with their own domain names were associated almost exclusively with major businesses who had the resources and the infrastructure to risk building on to a new and rapidly-growing, but uncertain, platform. 

Now in 2013, just about anything can have a domain name, from upcoming films which are soon to be forgotten, to small family businesses.  This brings us to QR codes—they are functionally similar to URLs or Web addresses, but take less room on, for example, a poster.  In a sense, QR codes combine the compactness and machine readability of UPCs (bar codes) and the flexibility of URLs.

The advantage of machine readability is particularly important, since it leads to my overall opinion of QR codes.  QR codes that are meant to be scanned on humans are often a gimmick; the people who can scan these QR codes are people with smartphones, who are also people who can simply type a URL and go to the relevant website directly (although longer URLs can justifiably be replaced with a QR code).  QR codes can be overused to a fault [1] [2].  As I said before, QR codes in advertisements and magazines are gimmicky and could easily be replaced with URLs, and as a person who is mindful of where to go online, I often do not want to blindly go to a webpage or have my phone do anything that I would not expect it to do, so I have no interest in scanning them.  Since advertisements have been advertising their Web content long before QR codes even entered popular use, QR codes may quickly lose their novelty, as they do not offer nearly as much as domain names did in 1997.

Most productive uses of QR codes are instead in East Asia, where QR codes are being used for transit tickets, identification documents, and visas [3].  If the western world does not adopt the practical uses of QR codes that East Asia has, then it may only be a matter of time before the general public writes QR codes off as a fad.

Social Networking Security or Lack of When Promoting Your Brand

Branding is an important part in business.  In short, it maintains a company’s reputation.  Many of us who regularly eat fast food will drink Coca-Cola, for example, because since its introduction in 1886, it has been a consistently good, well-known, and refreshing source of beverage to this day, 1985’s New Coke notwithstanding.  “Coke” itself has become a genericized trademark.

Online social media platforms, including but not limited to Facebook, are the newest, the most transparent, and perhaps the most convenient way of discussing a company or its brand.  While products such as Coca-Cola are marketed towards a general consumer base, the most scrutiny from the online social network community may instead be on hobbies that computer geeks and other Internet dwellers like the most—video games.

When discontent, the video gaming community has been one of the most vocal critics of just about anything.  One controversy in the past few months was the introduction of the Xbox One, a video game system serving as the successor to the Xbox 360.  The Xbox One was to include restrictive features not present in the Xbox 360, such as needing to connect to the Internet every 24 hours via the Xbox One for verification and blocking pre-owned games without paying an additional fee.  A great amount of backlash from the community ensued [1], pressuring Microsoft, the developer of the Xbox One, to remove the Xbox One’s restrictive policies before the console was even released [2].

Another point of controversy was for a video game itself.  Mass Effect 3 is a science fiction action video game developed by Bioware and released March 2012.  The subject of the controversy itself was trivial; the ending of Mass Effect 3 was thought to be poorly written.  Despite the fact that anticlimactic endings are common in some works of fiction, the controversy was once again widespread in the community [3], with a Facebook page even dedicated to petitioning for a new ending to the game [4].  The response eventually pressured Bioware to release a recut ending for free the following summer, a rare occurrence for video games [5].

This vocality, however, may very well be a blessing in disguise.  If Microsoft had not, for instance, rescinded its restrictions on the Xbox One, then many people who would have bought the Xbox One when it would come out would have been surprised by the Xbox One’s user unfriendliness and complained after it would have been too late for Microsoft to change the Xbox One at all.  Furthermore, the same community that criticizes its industry can also come to its defence.  News reports can at times be inaccurate, with those on video games being no exception.  Preceding Mass Effect 3, the original Mass Effect was criticized by feminist author Cooper Lawrence on Fox News for its sexual content, exaggerating the actual amount of explicitness in Mass Effect.  In response, a large amount of negative reviews flooded the Amazon page for Lawrence’s then-latest book, The Cult of Perfection [6].

While the general audience for various products is not quite as fanatical as video game audiences, the lesson from these incidents is still relevant to other companies who open up themselves on the social network.