Coca Cola is Using London Olympics 2012 for Promoting its Brand

Coca Cola is one of the key sponsors of London Olympics 2012. Tough for Pepsi, they will gain massive mileage during the 17 days event. As a branding strategy, Coke has always associated its brand with the feeling of togetherness and joy. How could they let go this opportunity that comes after five years! After all Olympics is one of the biggest sports events in the world.

Coca Cola as its branding strategy for London Olympics 2012 have created a commercial “Move to the Beat”. This commercial was unveiled by on 15 February 2012 (check the video at the bottom of this post). Some of you may remember that in 2010 FIFA World CUP, Coke produced a new version of a Somali- Canadian K’Nana’s Waving Flag Song. Its association with an event that was watched by scores of people, the song became extremely viral on social media networks, giving massive brand equity to the company.

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McDonald’s Branding Strategy at Olympics 2012

As one of the chief official sponsors of London 2012 Olympics, McDonald’s restaurant is using its marketing and innovation strategy to attract large numbers at the world’s biggest McDonald’s with seating capacity for 1500 people. This restaurant is being built specially to serve large crowd at the games.

It is estimated that over 3 million customers will walk into this gigantic facility which will be operated by over 2000 staff and is equipped to serve over 50,000 Big Macs during the games. This unique facility is build using recyclable materials and is spread over 9,000 square feet.

McDonald’s has been sponsoring Olympic games since 1976 and fully understands the opportunity for creating more loyal customers during Olympics. The London Olympics 2012 will be the 9^th games for McDonald’s to act as the event’s official restaurant and the only branded food retailer burgers and French fries to feed hungry customers.

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Twitter Followers Will Enjoy Olympics in a Unique Way

London Olympics will be tweeted massively. This is the first event of this magnitude for Twitter and users all over the world will follow and engage with tweets about sports they love. To faclitate social media users, in London, a hudge Wi-Fi network has been created which will be 100% free!

British Telecom operator O2 is providing this excellent facility to ensure that millions of visitors that come to the City have the best experience possible and share their experiences on social media networks.

I a press release, Derek McManus, Chief Operating Officer for O2 said, “This groundbreaking deal – the first of its kind in the UK – will see us deliver high quality connectivity across London in time for London 2012. Our longer-term aim is to expand our footprint of O2 Wifi, which is open to everyone, and also intelligently enhance our services at street level, where people need the network the most.
“Our £500m annual network investment program is focused on integrating new layers of technology into the existing network to enable a seamless and sustained customer experience. We are driven entirely by our customers’ needs and believe that services should be delivered in the best possible way, across multiple networks and supported by different technologies.”

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Olympics 2012 - An Opportunity for Global Brands

This year’s largest sports extravaganza will be London Olympics 2012, the best opportunity for brands to increase their brand equity and to win hearts of their customers. London Olympics are starting from 27 July and will finish on 12^th August.

According to Daily Telegraph, BBC Television is gearing up to broadcast London Olympics to about 42,000,000 people. There will be 24 BBC internet channels providing HD streaming throughout the games. 20,000 media centers will work around the clock to host a similar number of journalists. There will be 1,233 cameras to do coverage of the event. And this is just one channel with many others in the que!

One of the biggest gainer from Olympics 2012 will be the hotel and travel industry in and around London. They are expected to accommodate close to a million visitors during the 17 days of games. Londoners will experience traffic chaos, chocked restaurants and pubs, markets will overflow. But all that is great for the official sponsors!

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Knowledge Workforce & Web 2.0

Digital era is the era of knowledge workforce. This means that in addition to specializations, the workforce at all levels require multiple skills in social sciences and technology. Accept it or not, technology has been integrated into our daily routine that has altered our DNAs. Smartphones, Blackberries, iPads and Tabs have given us the opportunity to learn faster and engage community around us effectively.

In early 1990, I started my job as a Trade Promotion Assistant at the British Consulate in Karachi. Coming from a commercial organization, I was shocked to learn that the office did not have a fax machine! Couple of months after my joining, as part of process improvement exercise, staff was asked to submit suggestions. Guess what, I recommended a fax machine.
Whereas Management Officer considered that as the best recommendation and allocated a budget for purchase of a fax machine of my choice, my head of department was unsure why we need this equipment.

After two decades, I now understand that perhaps until 90’s, technology penetration in the corporate world was slow, hence the acceptability of new technology. Situation is now different and corporate leaders who fail to adapt new technologies are fast pushing their companies into Coma!
I found an interesting video by Andrew McAfee of the MIT Center for Digital Business in which he explained how Web Enterprise 2.0 and other new collaborative tools let everyone create and organize information.
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An Excellent Story of Entrepreneurial Success

Social Media networking sites such as Facebook, Orket, Twitter, Linkedin and many more are building communities and helping people to exchange knowledge and information. These social media networks are also helping in promotion of brands, marketing, fund raising and conducting surveys.

I recently met team of Pakistani social media network “Pring”and inspired by their creativity and decided to publish the following interview I had with the creator of Pring Muhammad Nasarullah.

“We make Pakistan’s largest social network called Pring. We’re connecting Pakistanis on any handset with information and people they care about.”

An excellent story of entrepreneurial success! Click here to read

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Key Tools for Success

Last week a young man how follows me on twitter sent me a request for meeting. I invited him over for a glass of Lassi. His name is Muhammad Saad Khan. He has an interesting twitter profile that says “Writer, Social Media & Search Engine Marketing Philanthropist & Thought Leader, Public speaker/Social Activist to Fight Human Trafficking”.

I found our conversation highly inspiring with lots of excellent learning tips. Sharing with my readers a brief synopsis of what we discussed.

Build your vocabulary of Positive words: I 100% agree with this. Humans are attuned to remember negative happenings around them. You will not find anyone who had never experienced good things in his life. But in most cases, if you ask people to write their negative and positive vocabulary, they will write several negative words and only few positive words. We are attuned to negativity and the only way to undo this is by improving our vocabulary of positive words.

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How to become Indispensable

Are you a Linchpin?

A person who is as indispensable as a linchpin in a hand grenade – He is missed if he is gone!
This terminology is invented by Seth Godin, an author with 13 bestselling books on his credit, an entrepreneur who has created successful businesses, a speaker who motivates audience with his mesmerizing style and examples, a visionary marketer. Seth is called “America’s Greatest Marketer”. He writes a blog which is ranked by Technorati as the #1 blog in the world written by a single individual.

Seth Godin’s focus is on the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, how to deal with the changing dynamics of this ever changing world.
I was recently reading a blog 5 Ways to Become Indispensable at Work and this post is a comparison of two distinct views on “How to become indispensable”.

You can become indispensable - Click here to read how

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12 Leadership Lessons by Steve Jobs

What were the 12 Visionary Leadership Lesson Guy Kawasaki learnt from Steve Jobs?
Do you know who Guy Kawasaki is? He worked for Apple as software evangelist and later on as Chief software evangelist. His job was to convince people to write software for Apple.

He worked for Steve Jobs twice, only few are on this league! Guy is highly inspired by Steve Jobs’s vision and leadership qualities. He described the following key lessons that inspired his life:

1. Experts are clueless: Youngsters have temptations to default to older people but innovation is usually done by younger generation. Experts are generally stuck in older thinking pattern.
2. Customers can not tell you what they need: They can define things that are within their vocabulary. If you want to win the world, ignore your customers. Use your own vision to create stuff that creates markets never before.

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Changing Trend in Marketing with Social Media

A report published at Bloomberg suggests that; “Market for social media management tools grow over 100% to $970 million in 2016, from $389 million this year.”

The trend for marketing is changing through the globe. There are studies that show that fewer people are reading newspaper ads or billboards. According to Mashable “more people get their news from the Internet than from newspapers — and more ad dollars went to online outlets than to newspapers, too.”

This is supported by a surveys conducted by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism that says, “34% of respondents said they read news online within the past 24 hours (as opposed to 31% who favored newspapers); and a full 41% said they get most of their news online, 10% more than those who said they got most of their news from a newspaper.”

Most voters in this survey were from age group 18-to-29, and that is the market today and in the future!

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Emotions | Power to Succcess

My last blog on this subject titled “What is Success? Concept Re-defined!” talked about how people perceive success.

I continued reading stuff on this topic and found that Anthony Robbins in his book “Awaken the Giant
Within” provided an excellent set of 10 Emotions that could lead to a successful life.

These Emotions are:

Love and Warmth
In my opinion only dead are unable to express love and warmth. There is only one way to prove that you are alive and still have soul in your body – love and warmth. Anthony writes that “love can melt almost any negative emotions, hence generate warmth”.

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Deliver Effective Presentations

Giving an effective presentation is fun and enriches a sense of personal power; a quality presentation can help you win contacts, contracts and fortune! This is one of the key ingredients that will take your business to the next level.

I generally advise presenters to consider the 5P rule. This rule is explained in the last line of this post.
Presenters are generally required to learn to stand or move with a firm posture and speak with a natural accent. Understanding their audience and the environment is also advisable. Presenters who fail to exert a lot of energy and passion are unable to motivate their audience. It is also essential to learn the art of engaging your participants and stimulating the thought process for effective feedback and learning.

I have compiled a list of dos for those willing to learn the art of effective presentations!
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Techniques to Fight Depression?

One of the biggest causes of failure in achieving high growth in your career is “depression”. This blog post is written for depressed people and there are many. Some will accept it, some will not.

Let’s do a bit of self diagnostic of environment in which we wake-up every morning, drag ourselves until the day is over and ask just one question, how do I classify depression?

• A state when I feel no energy
• When I can only think of bad things
• Do not see light at the end of tunnel
• Fail to focus on issues (lack of concentration)
• Unhappy feeling
• Sleeplessness, fear and craving for food
• Unwell feeling on getting out of the bed in the morning

If you face any of the above in 24 hours, you might be experiencing depression, and it makes you powerless!
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Why Use Direct Mail as a promotional tool?

Remember those days when we used to wait for postman to deliver our mail? Things have changed; we now receive most of our bills, invoices and notices via email. Marketing and promotional material that used to flood our post box, now being sent to us in our spam box!

I recently conducted a random survey asking people about their preferences on receiving promotional material. Whereas most respondents expressed their preference to receive promotions via email, there was an alarming commonality, “It was easier to delete the email”.

Obviously when marketing and promotion is one of the major costs in any business, such a finding is scary. A major challenge for email marketing companies is to increase the “Open Rate”. There are various estimates and researches. But most experts agree that a 10-15% open rate is good. More important stuff is the action that the reader takes after reading the email. Logically speaking, a reader could delete, forward, respond or take no action.

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I was reading a report done by Constant Contact (one of the top email marketing companies in the US) based on a survey done in Fall 2011 that shows that 81% small business prefer face-to-face contact with the potential customers. Hence the importance of human contact is undeniable, particularly in case of small businesses.

Laughter Therapy Can Change Your Mental and Emotional State

We all are stuck in the whirlpool of happenings around us. Most of us remain in the “struggle mode” throughout our life! Fame, fortune, and family – we all need these three things and these either link us to happiness or depression.

Looking around, we now see people walking like emotionless zombies. Worried and depressed! People have generally stopped laughing. Unhappiness surrounds us on a daily basis. Our physiologies have now attuned to like depression. We like to listen to worrisome news. Discussions with friends and family are often circle around bad news!

Socialization is now done virtually. No more regular meetings with people you know, but interactions with people you are friends with on social media such as Facebook or Twitter. Sleepless nights texting or chatting, does that help in keeping us fresh and healthy?

No need to remember seven digit land-line phone numbers anymore. Historically, our minds were intelligent enough to remember telephone numbers such as home, office, in-laws and couple of friends. Not anymore though! I remember telephone companies replacing old printed directories every year. I am sure most of younger generation does not know what a telephone director looked like!

Grow with Assertive Behavior

A lot of people mix-up the meanings of being assertive and being aggressive. These are two distinctive behaviors. In simple words, assertiveness is related to open dialogue, exchange of views and situational analysis to come-up with a win-win conclusion, a truly positive action. Whereas being aggressive is a negative behavior.

Observe communication style of the most successful people around you and make a note of their assertiveness. In most cases you will see that assertive people do not try to impose their thoughts, but are tactfully able to make the other party agree upon certain things.

In today’s highly competitive business and work environment, if you are not assertive enough, you will not grow! Let’s analyze how assertive you are by answering the following questions on a scale of 1-10 (1 being the least times, and 10 being the most times):

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Spying Your Business Competitors

Spying on competitors can help businesses align marketing and pricing strategy.
While identifying competition, it is necessary not to keep your vision too narrow. A wider angle and more thorough approach will bring more competitors on your radar. Companies that fail to adapt this wider approach and identify their competitors narrowly are endangered by smooth operators who can easily become strong competitive threats.

This fast paced business environment requires quick and comprehensive information on competitor’s activity and the next potential move or product launch or even sponsorship to an event. In simple words, a successful business always stays at least one step ahead of its competitors.

While identifying competition, one of the key mistakes is to look only for your competitor’s positive points that might pull your customers. Not many businesses consider importance of negative aspects of your competitor’s business model – think about it, if you exactly know the negative elements of your competitor’s branding, marketing or pricing strategy, you can use this as an advantage to your company.

I read an excellent piece by David Aaker who is the vice chairman of Prophet and the author of Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant. He writes the davidaaker.com blog on branding. David suggests;
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Mistakes to Avoid in 2012

Today is the first of January 2012, a new year has begun. It will bring joy and happiness for many, some will suffer and some will struggle. That is the reality of life.

2012 will be a challenging year for small businesses across the globe. With deepening economic crisis in Europe, threat of Euro zone and Euro, possibility of Greece and Italy defaulting and push to convince Germany to take the hit by paying for financially strangled nations in Europe, things are not promising!

The US Economy continued in depression since 2007. Although, US economists and the media, including New York Times. Los-Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Herald Tribune have acknowledged US economic growth in 2011, the consumer market still looks dull!

Middle East remained a turbulent region during 2011; it is highly unlikely for this region to perform well in the New Year.

According to Moody’s, Asia Pacific economies are going to see some slowdown mainly reflecting upon the economic crisis in Europe. There are chances of recovery in the second half of 2012, but a lot depends on how well the US and European economies perform!

The situation is alarming and a number of businesses particularly domestic businesses in smaller economies will be required to play safe. To be able to survive, small businesses must focus avoiding four major mistakes during 2012:

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Brand Building with a Perfect Logo

Let me start this post by asking a simple question:

What is the first thing an entrepreneur creates before starting a business?

Answer: A business logo.

The reason is simple. Logo is created to build brand identity and it is also a visual representation of your business that helps in building brand equity and ensuring customer loyalty. Therefore it is essential to consider spending time and energy in creating a perfect logo.
Some people rightly argue that logo is not a brand, according to Dan Pallotta who is an expert in nonprofit sector innovation and a pioneering social entrepreneur;

“A brand is much more than a name or a logo. Brand is everything, and everything is brand”
This means that everything that goes around creating brand value and brand recognition is important, and my view is that an attractive logo plays a vital role in doing so.
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Micro Management Failures!

The term Micro Management means keeping close control on happenings within an organization. The term has a negative connotation and rightly so. Manager’s role is to facilitate, but a micro manager generally creates roadblocks for other coworkers.

Small business owners tend to micromanage, but once the business grows, the scope of an owner manager’s responsibilities change. It however becomes challenging for him to realize the situation, which ultimately makes life difficult for him and his coworkers. In this post, I would like to focus on why people micromanage and what can be done to improve situation in an organization.

Psychologically, we all are micromanagers; some will consider this a radical statement. But the fact of the matter is that human generally think that “they are correct and others are goofs”. Those who say that they are working for micro managers, most of the time do not realize that they micromanage too
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The Age of Social Media

My recent posts focused on business opportunities available through social media. There is no doubt that social media is an extension of online businesses, but the same also provides business promotion opportunities for non-online business too. This post is about some examples of how businesses in Pakistan are using social media to increase outreach and building brand value.

In the modern age of social media, physical presence of a business is becoming irrelevant. For example a pizza oven at home can be turned into a potential business. I have taken this example from 14^th Street Pizza, based in Karachi. Based on a simple business model, marketing is done only via Facebook. They have an active Facebook page with over 130,000 fans. This marketing tool brings them massive sales every day.

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Growing Opportunites for Making Money Online

Power of web 2.0 is still unfolding. Businesses small or large, corporations, political parties, think tanks etc are fast becoming aware of the fact “There is no escape from the might of internet!” Looking back in the history, CEO of CNET Halsey Minor was amongst the first corporate leaders who accepted the power of internet. Started as a cable TV in 1992, CNET soon started beaming via the web.

Amazon has been recognized the first comprehensive ecommerce enabled marketing platform. The growth has been phenomenal for this company, in 1999, Amazon touched the annual revenue US$1.5 billion. In the quarter ending June 2011, the revenue stood at US$ 9.91 billion.

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Can Facebook Help in Generating Business Leads

Facebook with its massive outreach to over 800 million active users globally has become an ultimate promotional tool for businesses and simply cannot be ignored.

Those who label it as timewaster would be astonished by taking a quick browse on reasons for considering Facebook as a promotional tool for any business:

It is the single platform that connects its users speaking 70 languages. According to Facebook stats, over 400 million users visit their newsfeed at least once every day; this connects (on an average) them to eighty community pages, Facebook groups or events posted by their contacts. Users consider this platform as a good tool to upload photos. It has become so popular that on an average over 250 million photos are being uploaded every day!

With an increasing use through mobile devices, this application is now accessed by more than 350 million users via their cell phones or Smartphones. This gives Facebook an extra ordinary outreach to people on the go.
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12 Tips for New Bloggers

I encourage people to write and the best way to publish their writing is through blogs. Usually, people interested in blogging, ask me “how to start putting thoughts together?” A valid question! Like any other learnable things, writing skills can also be learnt gradually.

I was told a long time ago that to be able to write well, one must read a lot. My first suggestion to aspiring bloggers is to make a list of topics that interest them. This could be sports they follow, music, fashion, politics, humor etc. This reading will trigger a flow of thoughts and that is the beginning of the process!

The trend is that the user generated content is read more as compared to news! According to estimates, only in the US, User generated content consumer will touch 130 million in 2012. Lets become part of this massive stream!
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6 Tips for Time Management

A conversation this morning with a 23 year old young lad inspired me to write this post. The conversation was on “Time Management”. Like many others, this youngster was also finding it tough to accomplish various tasks in a given day. His average sleep time has reduced drastically with about 3-4 hours a day! To be very honest, he was struggling with his daily routine.

I googled three combinations for time management and following is the result:

Pages available on “Time Management” are 219,000,000
Pages available on “Time Management Tips” 41,600,000
Pages available on “Time Management Skills” are 56,800,000

One thing in common, none of these can help you increase even a single minute of a 24 hours cycle! Isn’t that astonishing?
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Blog Awards Vote for My Blog in Business Blog Category

Please vote for my blog in the Blog Awards Competition. It is placed under Business Blog's Category

Click http://pakistanblogawards.com/2011/11/14/best-business-blog-hammad-siddiqui/

Scroll down a bit and hit STARS for vote.

Thanks a million

5 Things to Consider For Total Quality Management Processes

Is there any doubt in the fact that only those organizations grow fast that remain in the continuous improvement mode? Companies spend millions of dollars in research and development and learning from every stakeholder including staff, customers and competitors.

Buzz of “TQM” or “Total Quality Management” is heard in the management discussions. TQM allows organizations to learn from current practices and improve upon the quality of their of service,
product or procedure. It is rightly considered as an essential element of best management practices.

Size and depth of process improvement programs may vary from company to company, depending on the complexities, nature of business and age of the company. In addition to TQM, these programs may include Business Reengineering, Lean, and Six Sigma.

Startup businesses – Entrepreneur must at Key Factors

Start-up companies face many challenges from cash flow to inventory management, from marketing to retaining quality human resource, from keeping the overheads under control to dealing with legal matters.

Globally, a large number of startups do not succeed because the lack of business acumen and skill set required pushing business from one stage to the next. Entrepreneurs become passionate about their idea to an extent where they ignore the complications in implementing the idea.

Laura Parkin, chief executive of the Bangalore-based National Entrepreneurship Network says that;
“in some cases, what we’re seeing is the lack of ability to innovate besides cutting prices and a get-rich-quick mentality.”

There is no doubt that one of the key success factor for small business is “keeping lean”, however a million dollar question is “for how long this business should remain lean”?
Jared Chung – Founder, Starfish says,

“Lean Startup requires that you confront all of the most uncertain parts of your business model up-front, based on the realization that uncertainty is the greatest foe of a startup.”

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How did Coke created a Top Brand?

Who can deny the fact that Coca Cola has created a brand that is well known and respected around the globe? Recent report on Best Global Brand by Interbrand has put Coca Cola at the top of the list. Commonly known as Coke, has left all other competitors wondering about the unique branding and marketing strategies created and implemented by the company.

Started in 1866, continuous improvement in the packaging and brand positioning resulted in the success of this company. Since its inception the company is closely aligning the product with the dynamics of consumer sophistication and acceptability of innovation.

The company does not miss any opportunity to associate its brand with mega global celebrations and events. For example in 2010, at FIFA World Cup, Coke launched a new version of Somali-Canadian K’Naan’s Waving Flag song. An event which was according to FIFA, the International Association of Football Association, cumulatively watched by 26 billion people (64 matches). That was the largest activation in Coke’s history. The song went viral through social media, TV commercials and was linked by the common thread of celebration.

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Creativity and Innovation – Massive Challenges for Corporates and Entrepreneurs

I am sure my readers will agree that most corporate, particularly multinational companies try to implement ideas that worked in one culture or environment. I sometime wonder how these corporate can encourage their executives to act creatively in their respective societies and work environment.
Creativity is not a new topic. It has been discussed widely in all major business journals. Researchers have written heaps of stuff on creativity.

Having spoken to several senior executives, I have come to a conclusion that creativity in the developing and under developed countries is less challenging as compared to developed countries. Reason is simple, due to lack to technological advancement, there are more opportunities in the developing or under developed countries for experimenting with creative ideas whereas creative ideas in the developed world face fierce competition!

Following is a statement by Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, is the author of Serious Play and the forthcoming Getting Beyond Ideas. Scharge says:

“This point is vital: genuine creativity isn’t about ideas. It’s about translating ideas into ingenious products, services and solutions. Ideas are the seeds, not the substance, of creativity. Getting them to take root is easier than it’s ever been.”

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How can Social Media be used as a Tool for Job Search

If you have been employed and doing well in your career, you might not need career advice!

But most people need to grow faster and progress quickly. I am one of them and I want others to grow fast too! In my opinion, in most cases, growth is due to high level contacts and networking.

For over last three years, I have been monitoring social media trends, believe it or not, more and more jobs are now available on social media. Avoiding social media or using it only for chatting to friending is perhaps something that will push you behind the scene. No one can deny the fact that face-to-face networking is crucial, but ignoring the importance of active social media presence is crime, bluntly speaking, those who are not following the norms, are making a serious mistake!

I am a great fan of social media networking and strongly belief that no other medium can provide the extreme exposure one can get using social media tools. Ali Chambers, vice president at Boston-based executive coaching and outplacement supports my views and said;

“People who have neglected to create and update a social media presence, particularly on LinkedIn, could miss out on being considered for positions.”

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