Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts

Monday, March 26, 2012

6 Job Searching Tips Most People Skip



After making the decision to look for a new job, most job seekers put together a resumé and then start networking and marketing themselves to potential employers. Naturally, you hope to attract interest and win a job offer as soon as possible.
Fueled with the desire to take positive action quickly, however, you may skip important aspects of your job search. Even if unhurried, you may not realize that figuring out what you want in a job and an employer helps you increases your chances of getting hired.
Here are crucial steps that people often miss when conducting a job search. (See also:10 Outdated Job Search Techniques to Avoid )

1. Defining Your Ideal Job

You may jump into a search without considering what's best for you because you do not want to limit job possibilities. But even when unemployment stats are high, defining your ideal situation helps to focus your job search. 
Specific areas to consider include:
  • Work content and day-to-day responsibilities
  • Expertise you hope to contribute
  • Duties you'd like to avoid
  • Organization size, structure, and style
Using this information, communicate career goals to your network as well as human resources managers and hiring managers.

2. Updating Your LinkedIn Profile

Many job seekers focus on polishing their resumés and cleaning up their Facebook walls, but neglect their LinkedIn profiles. Remember to do the following:
  • Upload a recent, professional image of yourself
  • Freshen your experience to include projects and accountabilities relevant to your job search
  • Build and expand your network 
  • Request and offer recommendations 
  • List stand-out stuff about yourself to infuse your personality and drive for excellence into your professional online presence
Your LinkedIn listing validates your professional experiences through connections with and recommendations from your bosses, colleagues, customers, vendors, and other relationships.

3. Researching Workplace Culture

Job seekers often fail to investigate the workplace style of potential employers. But having the right cultural fit is a key factor in your appeal as a job candidate.
Research organizational practices and ways of thinking in these and other areas:
  • Encouragement of innovation and risk taking
  • Expectations for workloads and extended workdays
  • Commitment to employee development in terms of training, assignments, and promotions
  • Decision-making styles, from empowering independent action to requiring multiple layers of approvals
Talk with friends and acquaintances about their experiences with the company. Read news accounts. Look at job descriptions on your connections' LinkedIn profiles. Check out employee reviews at career sites such as Glassdoor . 
Determine if a potential employer is a good match with your professional values and approach to getting things done. Then, use this information to articulate why you are a great candidate for the company during interviews with human resources staff, hiring managers, and potential colleagues.

4. Learning About Interviewers

In the excitement of winning an interview, job seekers often forget to gather pertinent information about those who are interviewing them. You may be reluctant, but asking questions often places you in a positive light with hiring decision-makers. Plus, you gather valuable information for interviews and follow-up activities.
Find out these tidbits about your interviewers:
  • Names and titles
  • Contact information, including email and mailing addresses
  • Positions (if not clear by title), such as who represents human resources, who is the department head, and who are potential colleagues
Learn about each interviewer's background by looking at her bio on the company's website or reviewing her LinkedIn profile, noting career progression and special interests. This information can help you understand how to frame your responses, shape questions, and manage the flow of conversation during the interview. Plus, you'll have the details you need to send a thank-you note.

5. Uncovering the Difference Between Official and Working Job Titles

Many job seekers do not take the time to truly understand all the terms that companies use to describe openings within their organizations. Even the most discerning person may draw incorrect or incomplete conclusions about a position based on its title and job description. What's crucial is grasping that there is often a gap between your understanding as a job seeker and the intent of the employer, which may have an unusual organizational structure or quirky corporate lingo.
So don't rely on job titles to identify positions for which you are qualified and don't assume that you are ill-suited for a job based solely on the written description. Do your best to vet opportunities by researching a company, its culture, and its representatives with whom you are interviewing. When you meet with hiring decision-makers, ask clarifying questions about work content so that you can be sure you understand the requirements. Then, use this knowledge to reference professional experiences, skills, and accomplishments most relevant to the job opening.

6. Sending Thank-You Notes

Many job seekers forgo sending thank-you notes because they think that this step will not play a significant role in the hiring decision. While it's true that many companies call back candidates before a message can be composed and delivered, proper follow up contributes to success in a job search.
Differentiate yourself from other candidates by thanking your interviewers. Craft a thank-you note that conveys your appreciation and solidifies your position as a strong candidate. In your written communications, reinforce the value of your capabilities and let the hiring manager know that you are truly interested in the opportunity. These messages increase the likelihood that you will receive an offer.
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Thursday, February 23, 2012

Educate Yourself: Daily Brainwashing Techniques



While it's pretty unlikely that you're a target of deliberate brainwashing, it is likely that you're subject to some of the common techniques associated with the less-than-ethical practice. Here are a few common methods you encounter on a regular basis and what you can do to avoid them.
First things first, what is brainwashing exactly? Wikipedia offers a concise definition:
Mind control (also known as brainwashing , coercive persuasion, mind abuse, thought control, or thought reform) refers to a process in which a group or individual "systematically uses unethically manipulative methods to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the manipulator(s), often to the detriment of the person being manipulated".
Basically, it's a form of extreme manipulation. We often associate the practice with cults and don't consider its presence in everyday life, yet the techniques used in brainwashing are frequently leveraged by advertisers, news networks, politicians, and others. Alex Long, writing for hacking blog Null Byte, provides an outline of some of the most common brainwashing techniques . Here are the most notable:
  • The manipulator offers you a number of choices, but the choices all lead to the same conclusion.
  • The same idea or phrase is frequently repeated to make sure it sticks in your brain.
  • Intense intelligence-dampening is performed by providing you with constant short snippets of information on various subjects. This trains you to have a short memory, makes the amount of information feel overwhelming, and the answers provided by the manipulator to be highly desired due to how overwhelmed you feel.
  • Emotional manipulation is used to put you in a heightened state, as this makes it harder for you to employ logic. Inducing fear and anger are among the most popular manipulated emotions.
When reading this list, you're likely able to think of a few examples of these techniques. News channels and political parties often repeat a consistent message when they want to get their point across. Short snippets of information is also a common tactic on news networks. Advertisers love to offer choices that all lead to their product, and emotional manipulation is common in people you'll encounter as well as in most forms of media—even seemingly (and sometimes actually) harmless mediums like film. These techniques are everywhere. They aren't turning you into a zombie, but they are informing many of your choices. The good news is that you can avoid them if you're proactive.

How to Avoid Brainwashing Techniques

Avoiding brainwashing techniques often involves avoiding the brainwashers themselves, but this is next to impossible. Taking advertising as an example, you can't avoid them all and attempting to do so can be rather expensive if you still want to watch television and movies. Your best bet is to cut out what you can and, when you can't, seek balance. Finding balance is often easiest by simply providing yourself with the information you need. All you need to do is the following:
  1. Identify the manipulative message you've received.
  2. Find an opposing message, whether it's manipulative or not. Also attempt to find the most neutral and unbiased account of that same message.
  3. Compare your different sources and decide how you feel.
Brainwashing, whether mild or extreme, is possible in a large part due to isolation. If you only hear the brainwashed message on a regular basis, and rarely (or never) expose yourself to alternatives, you're going to be far more likely to accept what you hear without thinking. If you want to avoid the brainwashing techniques discussed in this post, your best bet is to surround yourself with a spectrum of information rather than simply settling for the message that makes you feel comfortable. After all, that's often what the message is aiming to do.
For more on manipulation, check out our posts on manipulation in advertising ,emotional manipulation , and planting ideas in someone's mind .
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Thursday, February 16, 2012

Cydia Apps Leak Less Private Data than iTunes Apps




A screenshot of the ContactPrivacy feature in the unofficial Cydia iOS app platform.
Users have learned over the last few years that Apple's "walled garden" approach to third party apps isn't quite as protective of their sensitive data as it might sound. More surprising, perhaps, is another revelation: that the popular unauthorized apps outside those walls tend to respect privacy better than the approved ones inside.
After building a tool called PiOS that analyzes private data leaks from iOS apps, the researchers ran their analysis on 1,407 free apps–825 downloaded from Apple's App Store using the website App Tracker, and 526 accessible through BigBoss, the largest repository of unauthorized apps available to users through the Cydia app market for jailbroken iPhones and iPads.
A table from the UCSB study showing how frequently authorized App Store and unauthorized Cydia iOS apps leak private information.
Of those tested apps, 21 percent of official App Store apps uploaded the user's Unique Device Identifier, (UDID) a series of user-specific digits that can be tracked between apps to assemble a profile of a specific person's behavior. Four percent uploaded the device's location, and half a percent uploaded the user's contact list. When the researchers analyzed the unauthorized Cydia apps, on the other hand, only four percent leaked the user's UDID, and only one app out of the 500 tested–a program specifically designed for espionage called MobileSpy–leaked location or contact data.
But why would Cydia's unauthorized apps actually leak private data less often than those that Apple approves? Egele points to Cydia's culture of privacy among administrators and users. "The people who run Cydia seem very conscious of what information is available and can be accessed," says Egele. "The applications you get from Cydia are geared toward more privacy-aware people."
I've contacted Apple for comment and will update this post if I hear back from the company.
"If you care about this kind of thing, you should jailbreak your phone," says Freeman. "Instead of Apple making decisions about what's good and bad, you decide. People think jailbreaking is about deciding that things Apple doesn't like are good. But it  also allows you to decide that things Apple likes are bad. We provide you the tools to block the functionality you don't believe apps should have on your phone."

References

  1. ^ news that the iPhone app Path uploads users' entire contact lists(thenextweb.com) ( http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/02/07/path-2-uploads-your-address-book-but-says-that-its-for-friend-matching-and-will-be-opt-in-soon/ )
  2. ^ here (seclab.cs.ucsb.edu) ( http://seclab.cs.ucsb.edu/media/uploads/papers/egele-ndss11.pdf )
  3. ^ discovery by a Singaporean researcher that the social networking app Path uploads users' contact list (mclov.in) ( http://mclov.in/2012/02/08/path-uploads-your-entire-address-book-to-their-servers.html )
  4. ^ using security flaws hackers find in iOS's code (www.forbes.com) ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/08/01/meet-comex-the-iphone-uber-hacker-who-keeps-outsmarting-apple/ )
  5. ^ ContactPrivacy (www.cultofmac.com) ( http://www.cultofmac.com/145112/how-to-keep-apps-like-path-from-accessing-your-contacts-data-jailbreak/ )
  6. ^ PrivaCy (cydia.saurik.com) ( http://cydia.saurik.com/package/com.saurik.privacy )
  7. ^ here (seclab.cs.ucsb.edu) ( http://seclab.cs.ucsb.edu/media/uploads/papers/egele-ndss11.pdf )
  8. As the scandal swirled this past week over news that the iPhone app Path uploads users' entire contact lists 1 without permission, I came upon a study (PDF here 2 ) released last year by a group of researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the International Security Systems Lab that aimed to analyze how and where iPhone apps transmit users' private data. Not only did the researchers find that one in five of the free apps in Apple's app store upload private data back to the apps' creators that could potentially identify users and allow profiles to be built of their activities. They also discovered that programs in Cydia, the most popular platform for unauthorized apps that run only on "jailbroken" iPhones, tend to leak private data far less frequently than Apple's approved apps.
  9. For Manuel Egele, a post-doctoral researcher at UCSB, the discovery by a Singaporean researcher that the social networking app Path uploads users' contact list 3 only confirms a pattern he and his co-authors have long seen. Four of the Apple-approved apps he tested last year were found to similarly upload contacts, including one from the location-based social network Gowalla.  "Clearly this behavior hasn't changed over the last year. I'm not sure whether there's been any improvement from Apple's side," Egele says. "For easily accessible data, app store apps are much more frequently accessing and leaking that data. The app store is supposed to be a walled garden. Unless Apple gives approval, you can't put things there. But whatever job the company is doing isn't good enough."
  10. With somewhere between 10 million and 15 million users, Cydia's app platform has become the default unofficial app store of users who jailbreak their iPhones and iPads, hacking them to install applications and operating system tweaks that Apple restrictions are designed to block. That kind of device hacking, using security flaws hackers find in iOS's code 4 to unlock its restrictions against running unapproved code, also introduces new security and privacy risks for users by stripping away the phone or tablet's security features and leaving the device open to malware.
  11. But Jay Freeman, Cydia's creator, points to numerous applications available via Cydia that actually give users privacy and security features they wouldn't otherwise have. Immediately after the Path scandal broke, for instance, a developer named Ryan Petrich created a tweak for Cydia called ContactPrivacy 5that warns the user whenever an application wants to upload his or her contact information, (shown above) rather than simply allowing the data to be transmitted by default. Another app that Freeman wrote himself, called PrivaCy 6 , gives the users a toggle switch that allows them to control whether any particular app can upload usage statistics to a remote server.
  12. Read the study from the International Security Systems Lab and the University of California at Santa Barbara here 7 .

Original URL:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/02/14/unauthorized-iphone-and-ipad-apps-leak-private-data-less-often-than-approved-ones/
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Proposed Law will Force Advertisers to Add a Disclaimer on the Ad



by Alia Beard Rau - Feb. 14, 2012 10:57 PM
The Republic | azcentral.com

Women have wrinkles, pores and curves. And there's a movement across the world to make sure advertisers can no longer pretend otherwise.
Now, that movement has come to Arizona.
House Bill 2793, proposed by Rep. Katie Hobbs, D-Phoenix, would require advertisers who alter or enhance a photo to put a disclaimer on that ad alerting customers that "Postproduction techniques were made to alter the appearance in this advertisement. When using this product, similar results may not be achieved."
The bill has little to no chance of success. But Hobbs said that's OK.
"We just wanted to bring it to the table and start a discussion," she said. "We need to bring attention to these body-image issues, especially with young girls. Girls need to know that they don't have to look perfect."
Arizona appears to be the first state in the nation to consider such a bill. There are ongoing efforts to get Congress to take up the matter. Several other countries also regulate or are considering regulating such advertising.


Hobbs said YWCA Maricopa County brought the idea to her.
Sam Richard, who serves on the YWCA Maricopa County board of directors, said the bill is modeled after laws in the United Kingdom.
"As an organization, we are all about empowering women and eliminating discrimination," Richard said. "We want to make sure that young women get a better start and better self-image."
He said girls need to understand that these photos aren't all real. Someone has airbrushed out the model's wrinkles and pores, or put a woman's head on top of a computer-generated perfect body.
"You need to disclose that so our young women don't grow up thinking a poreless face is possible," he said. "That's not the way that I think anyone wants to raise their daughters."
But Louie Moses, creative director of the Phoenix-based Moses Anshell advertising agency, said the advertising industry should be allowed to police itself.
"I don't like legislation that tells us what to do and what not to do in marketing," Moses said. "I know what's right."
He agreed that the evolution of photo-manipulation programs has made it nearly impossible for an average consumer to tell if a photo is real or fake. But he said legitimate advertising companies don't abuse that.
"It's one thing to make the sky bluer. It's another thing to make my body look perfect," he said. "And with the companies we represent, we see an advantage to choosing to tell the truth."
Moses also said people often blame advertising agencies for too many of the evils of society.
"People are always screaming about the images out there, but I think they are overlooking the easiest way to dispel those things," he said, suggesting parents strive to be their children's role models. "We don't want our media raising our kids."
The House Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on the bill this morning, but may not actually vote on it. The bill has to have a vote to move forward.
Seth Matlins, co-founder of Los Angeles-based online women's magazine Off Our Chests, supports Hobbs' effort, calling it "extraordinary."
Off Our Chests is behind the push for similar federal legislation it calls the Media and Public Health Act. The National Eating Disorders Association and other groups have joined the push for a federal law, but no member of Congress has yet agreed to carry it.
"I'm thrilled (Hobbs) is doing this. I haven't heard of any other states trying it," Matlins said.
He said manipulated photo ads create unobtainable beauty ideals.
"People are left feeling worse about themselves because they don't look like something that actually nobody looks like," he said. "We're trying to help the makers of culture understand the relationship between what they do and how people feel."


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