Week #9- What Color is Your Parachute- Ch. 7

This week in What Color is Your Parachute, it was about self-inventories. These are super important for a job hunt because you learn more about yourself and what good qualities you would bring to a job. Then, in turn, will help you find a better job that would better suite you. By doing a self-inventory you really get to see what kind of job would best fit you, and that will definitely help in your future job search. It will make you more eager to find something you are looking for. Also by doing this self-inventory, it gives you unique ways to describe yourself to potential employers. Also, having done this, if you're up against so many other people for this job, you can tell the employer your unique qualities that will make you stand out above the crowd. If you ever wanted to change your career, after doing the inventory, it would really help you to decide what career path would be good for you to go into.

There are a number of steps that go into actually doing the self-inventory. They are:
1. Mental Preparation
2. One Sheet of Paper (Digital or Physical)
3. A Number of Worksheets
4. Some Kind of Graphic or Picture
5. A prioritizing Instrument or Grid
6. Conclusion: Prioritizing the Petals

I encourage you, if you want to know more about a self inventory and what exactly each of these steps are, to go and read this book, because it's really amazing and gives a lot of other helpful tips and tricks that will really help out in the real world when looking for jobs. 

Week #9- Hootsuite Demo

Today in class we learned more about how to use Hootsuite and honestly, it's pretty cool. It's a really neat way to manage all your social media profiles. So today we learned how to add our accounts to the page.

In this screenshot it shows all the profiles I have added to Hootsuite. My Digital Marketing page, Twitter page, and LinkeIn page are all added to Hootsuite, so I can post to them simultaneously. You can add more and different profiles. I could've added my personal Facebook page, but I just decided to do my Digital Marketing Page. 

In this screenshot, it shows how to post. In the left hand side of the page, it shows the three accounts that I have linked. And just by tapping on them you can either add them or delete them to where you want to post. Next to it, in the big white box, you write what you want to post. 

In this picture you can see that my post has worked! Wahoo!

The post got sent to LinkedIn

And finally, it got posted to my Twitter! All at the same time, which is super cool!

All of this stuff is super cool and I'm super excited to continue to learn more about Hootsuite. 

Week #8- Hootsuite- Ch. 7

This week I read a chapter of Introduction to Social Media Marketing and it was about Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a took to help you manage your all your social media accounts in one central location. You can post to multiple accounts by just having this one thing. This is very helpful because once I write a blog, I have to go to each one of my different social media accounts, including: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, so I can share my blog. Then I always forget if I already posted it on my social media or not. So this would be really helpful for me, who is forgetful sometimes. 

In class on Tuesday we made our own Hootsuite accounts and now we are going through a course to teach us how to use it. Hootsuite makes a lot of YouTube videos to help everyone learn how to use it. They are very user friendly. In the book he takes you step by step on how to use Hootsuite and especially on how to get started. The nice part about Hootsuite is that you can schedule when to post things for you. So in my case this is very helpful because like I previously said, I forget to post to some places and I don't always post a link to my blog every time I write one. So this way I can schedule when I want to have something posted and then it does it for you. How convenient! Hootsuite really helps with people who manage many different profiles. The author of the book, my professor, manages so many different pages on Facebook, so this took, I'm sure, is very helpful for him!

This is a snapshot of someone else's Hootsuite account, just so you can get a glimpse of what it looks like. We haven't gotten that far in our Hootsuite experience, but when we do, I'm sure I will have more to blog about!

 

Week #8- What Color is Your Parachute- Ch. 6

This week I read another fantastic chapter of What Color is Your Parachute, and this week it was about what to do when your job-hunt isn't working anymore. He talks about something called the "Traditional Approach". This is how we have always been looking for jobs, this is how everyone tells us to look for jobs. The first 5 chapters of this book were about the Traditional Approach. This approach doesn't demand too much out of us and we can easily learn how to do it. The other way we can look at our job-hunt is through the "Parachute Approach". This is where you start with yourself and not the job market. You look at yourself and you figure out which of your strengths would best fit what employer. You shouldn't wait until they have an opening, you go to the employer that you want to work for and approach them through a "bridge-person. It's someone who knows you and someone who knows them. LinkedIn is a good way to find this "bridge-person".

Then he gives 11 best and worst approaches to job-hunting. Things that you and I might think are good ways to find jobs are actually not good ways. The first is job-hunting on the internet. "This method apparently works on average 4% of the time". That's ridiculous considering I just found my last job on the internet! LOL! One of the better ways to job-hunt is to go knocking on the door of any employer, this method works 47% of the time. It works the best with small employers. The best way to job-hunt is using the Yellow Pages. This works 65% of the time. But it does take a lot of time to go through them. Either way you try to job-hunt, it is usually a lot of work.

Week #7- Social Analytics

This week in class we learned about Social Analytics, its learning how to analyze things, such as our Facebook pages we created. We got to learn how to see how many people have "liked" our page and how many people look at our posts. Where the people come from that like our page. It was actually super cool to be able to see all that.

Seeing certain things like this are super helpful to people who are really trying to market things and advertise different products, for me, I'm not too concerned about if a ton of people are liking my page or not. I'm not really trying to sell anything.

In this screenshot of my page, it shows the post that I have made to my page. Then it shows in the orange how many people I have reached. In the light blue it says how many people have clicked on my page and then in the red it shows how many reactions, comments and shares I've gotten. As you can see I'm not doing too hot. But that's okay because my grade doesn't depend on it.

Week #7- What Color is Your Parachute- Ch. 5

This week I read Chapter 5 of What Color is Your Parachute, and it was awesome. This chapter was about salary negotiation, what no one wants to talk about, or what really everyone wants to talk about but everyone is afraid to do it. He gives 6 secrets to salary negotiation. The first one is "Never Discuss Salary Until the End of the Whole Interviewing Process at That Organization, When (and If) They Have Definitely Said They Want You".  He also gives three responses for when employers ask about how much you would like to get paid. These responses are super helpful because I always think, "I have no idea how to respond to that".

The second secret he gives is "The Purpose of Salary Negotiation Is to Uncover the Most That an Employer Is Willing to Pay to Get You". I think this is super hard to realize because I think its hard to realize what an employer can afford to pay.

The third secret is "During Salary Discussion, Never Be the First One to Mention a Salary Figure". This one could be easy for me because in interviews I am always nervous about discussing pay with them. He does give tips on how to respond to when employers ask "What kind of salary are you looking for?"

The fourth secret is "Before You Go to the Interview, Do Some Careful Research on Typical Salaries for Your Field and in That Organization". He goes on to discuss that 2-3 days of research can get you an extra $15,000 a year sometimes. It's not always going to happen, but he has seen it before.

The fifth secret is "Research the Range That the Employer Likely Has in Mind, and Then Define an Interrelated Range for Yourself, Relative to the Employer's Range". Again he says that this is going to take some extra time and work on your part, but it could definitely be worth it in the end.

The sixth and final secret is "Know How to Bring the Salary Negotiation to a Close; Don't Leave It 'Just Hanging'". This is a super important secret because if you don't have it down in writing and signed than the employer will "forget" what they told you.

All these tips are super important for job hunting and super helpful because no one likes to talk about salary when they are going on an interview.

Week #6- What Color is your Parachute- Ch. 4.

This week I read, yet again, What Color is Your Parachute chapter 4. This chapter was probably the best one that I have read yet. This one is very useful for not just students, but everyone. I believe everyone should have to read this chapter to graduate college. It was all about interviews, one of the most scary things a person has to do in life. Interviews are scary and they can be very intense, but they can really make you "make your mark" on an employer. Interviews aren't always just for jobs either, college students get interviewed a lot for graduate programs that they want to get into. So many of us either have gone through an interview process before, or are going to go through one at least once in our lives, so this chapter is great for you. I have gone through a handful of interviews myself for part time jobs. They have been somewhat stressful and I wish I could have read through all of his tips before I went on my interviews. He gives us 16 tips on how to have a successful interview and each one of them has really stood out to me and really helped to open my eyes about what people are looking for in them.

I am very glad to have been given the opportunity to read a book like this in class. It is so helpful for the real world, and I could use all the help I can get. I will be entering the "real world" only in about 7 months, so I really am going to use all the tips and tricks that Bolles provides throughout this book.

Week #6- Twitter- Ch. 5

This week I read Introduction to Social Media Marketing chapter 5, and this chapter was about Twitter. I absolutely love Twitter. I think its a great way to get things out to people and to market yourself and others. There is a feature on Twitter that lets you take a post that you see and you can "retweet" it, which means it's almost like you're sharing the post again, so everyone you follow can see it once you retweet it. You can also just "like" something. When someone you follow likes something, it might pop up on your timeline because you usually like the same things.

There are certain times when people just post something funny to their Twitter and just by a couple of people looking at it at retweeting it, these people can reach hundreds of thousands of people with their one tweet that they just thought was funny. I've seen so many people who are just like you and me, get thousands of retweets on Twitter. Anything that is going on in the world will be on Twitter within a few minutes of it happening and everyone will see what is going on. I have found out about so many events that have happened in the world through Twitter. They also have a tab called "Trends for You", and this is basically like "what is everyone tweeting about right now". It shows you news, it shows you the latest celebrity gossip, it is very very useful if you want to stay up to date.

You can see in this photo is my Twitter account. Already you can see on the left hand side of the page is my Trends for you column, and then in the middle is what people are tweeting and retweeting. The first tweet that pops up is about President Trump. Everything he says usually ends up on Twitter, not to mention the fact that he already tweets a lot of what he wants to say, but anyways, news outlets will tweet clips of his press conferences and other things that are going on it the world. So if you want to promote a business or get people to start talking about a certain product, Twitter is the way to go because you can reach so many people in such a fast amount of time.