LinkedIn: A Professional Outlook

LinkedIn: A Professional Outlook

In my opinion, LinkedIn is very professional networking site and a place for people to build their careers. Through LinkedIn you are allowed to create a professional profile and basically summarize all of your qualifying skills for businesses, employers, and companies to see worldwide. I really admire LinkedIn social media platform because it a way to market and take full advantage of the many sections that will full define your professional skill for future career opportunities.

While creating a LinkedIn profile users are allowed to take full advantage of various sections that include:

•        Personal Picture
•     Work Experience (Past/Present)
•       Skills & Expertise
•       Volunteer Services and Supportive Causes
•       Projects
•     Personal Summaries
•      Recommendations

Being able to add/fill out these sections on your page make me think about filling out job applications and having a job interview conducted. The great thing about your skills being added to the page, people are now able to endorse you and share your LinkedIn profile with others. Personally, creating my LinkedIn page for employers and users to visit saves me a lot of time on sending companies paper copies of my resume because they can refer to my professional page immediately.

According to The 2013 LinkedIn Marketing Guide, it discusses how LinkedIn is a great network for businesses to increase traffic and leads into their companies. One key component for businesses having successful LinkedIn’s is the ability to create a group that targets customers and users interest. This also allows groups to make announcements of special events, seminars  and etc. through email regularly just like having an actual mailing list.

I see how LinkedIn allows for great connections to be made between companies and people. These connections call ultimately lead to much greater opportunities for users as wells as companies. Even a nonprofit organization can join LinkedIn and utilize the many different sections to find volunteers and even a faster hiring process.

Suburban Health Organization has a great overview on the company description. It includes their mission statement, goals, specialties, and even there primary industry. All of these are very important to health organization and LinkedIn allows the company to be truthful about them.This organization is composed of central Indiana hospitals that work together to promote quality, efficiency and patient access in the many communities they serve. This medium has a strong connection between Indiana people and surrounding hospitals owners such as:

•      Hancock Regional Hospital
•     Hendricks Regional Health
•     Henry County Hospital
•     Johnson Memorial Hospital
•     Major Hospital
•     Riverview Hospital
•      Rush Memorial Hospital
•      St. Vincent Health Inc.,
•      Community Westview Hospital
•      Witham Health Services

Through LinkedIn this health organization was able to create physician recruitment, management of care contracts, captive insurance companies, strength and a diversity of services that will help make their hospitals and physicians one of the leading provider networks in central Indiana for users to learn more about. Although this company is a private industry it includes 11-50 employees to provide adequate services to others and continues to grow daily in their professional existence

I believe LinkedIn is an abundant opportunity for all organizations to be successful and create connections to people all across the world that will help build their companies. This professional site is a great marketing tool or companies to get the word out about the organization itself and a way to get the best employees available by continuing to use LinkedIn for their companies’ success. I enjoyed exploring the LinkedIn social media platform and creating my professional profile for future employers to see.

Exploring Facebook: Likes or No Likes

In my opinion, facebook is one of the most relaxed social media platforms for me to use. I am the most familiar with facebook than any other social media site because I personally use it on a daily basis. Facebook is always updating their new technology and applications that they want their users to use daily. Now today, facebook has over 800 million users who use their social media platform throughout every minute of the day all across the world.

According to the health care strategies article, it states that a business can benefit from facebook because it extends their reputation and expands their branding message. http://www.healthcaresuccess.com/articles/facebook-fundamentals.html This is very beneficial for companies because it facebook becomes another official face for networking and advertising for the business to bring more traffic to their page. It is almost like by organizations utilizing facebook as a resource it creates a very strong link for users and businesses to connect better on a one on one level. 

Facebook even has a technical support system available to help organizations with any concerns or questions they may have about setting up their pages. I think it’s a great idea for employees and employers to find users that are interested in their company and those that they are also interested in for their company.

Health organizations also benefit from creating a  facebook page because users are able to like their page and constantly receive updated posts from the organizations on their timelines. Once an organization has created a facebook page for users to like, they are allowed to:

•  learn about the different upcoming events 
• ways they can help contribute to bettering the organization cause
• receive constant tips on healthy living

These organizations give health information related to their causes and create an atmosphere that makes others feel right at home. The more users like and follow their pages the more traffic they will receive on their timelines and people who are talking about the organizations.

Organizations create posts for people to comment and give feedback on the topics they have created. There are also opportunities for people to create videos, post pictures, like status, and design creative post that are  shared on the organization home page. You can also add music and a variety of symbols to make your page more attractive to others. This allows organizations and users to be more visual with their words and posts through statuses that keep the attention of all users.

While being on facebook I decided to research the American Heart Association. This organization has over 13,000 likes and several of people talking about their organization. The is all sorts of information and links shared about walk tributes, walking plans, fundraising options, and ways users can join in together to find a cure for this disease. I think it is very interesting that organizations make very positive posts and so many followers comment back and forth on the posts.

 However, their posts have not been updated since June 2011 and that hinders the health organization from growing because their interaction with users was lacking very bad. In my opinion, for this organization to attract more traffic and bring more awareness they are going to have to:

•  change their strategy
• set solid goals to achieve
• be consistent in connecting with their users on a regular basis

Overall I like the concept that facebook has and it is a great opportunity for businesses, organizations, and people from everywhere to interact and communicate with each other on a regularly. Especially for health organizations because it’s a free resource and a creative way that they can reach people on different level through social media since most users are using facebook than any other site. What other way to brand and market your organization, if not through the most popular social media platform because it is very beneficial.

Understanding the Fundamentals of Wikis

The Wiki Styles of Creation

When I first began using the Wiki page I was very confused and nervous about what exactly I was supposed to do for this blogging assignment even though I used to have a page similar to this before. After creating my user name and mini profile I was doing my best to navigate through the tools that were listed such as:

• searching information
• editing your profile
• changing font size
• being able to post information under my page

Using Wikis really made me think about Wikipedia because it seems almost just alike with the editing and changing of information only it’s a more condensed and a personalized version.

Dr. Flynn created an initial page and gave us directions to follow for creating the wiki pages successful. I noticed that you could go onto any of your classmates’ pages and edit or give suggestions on their pages for things you thought were creative. Although I had some trouble searching topics of interest to me, I found it using this site was very time consuming and filled with features that I never imagined before.

According to the WikiProject Medicine article, it stated that it was a place for editors to improve their medical and health content on Wikipedia so that they are able to collaborate and discuss things.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine Everyone is welcome to join in regardless of your qualifications. In my opinion that seemed very unusual to me because this particular articles involves discussing medical and health information that are key components in people everyday lives. 

A user being able to check out the organization goals is pretty reasonable, but the fact that anyone can edit or change information that is already posted is not safe. I do not think this is a good resource to receive health information like this from an organization.

When organizations create pages through Wiki they are basically allowing everybody to post and change any type of information that they would like on their pages. This is a easy way for discussions to get started and ideas to be exchanged through the pages. All of the ideas from people are updated on the same page, so individuals are aware of everything this is going on in the Wiki World. I know for me Wiki became very overwhelming because you were allowed to personalize everything that you want and the many features listed such as discussions, creating content, sharing files and editing documents was a lot for me.

Health organizations can benefit from the Wiki social media platform to a certain degree because all the information that is being released by their organizations reaches millions of users.They are able to post

• organization events
• short term and long term goals
• rewards
• feedback for ways to help build their brand
• and promotion of ideas to help their organization grow

Although, wiki is not a creditable source for seeking health information it is good for allowing users to communicate as a whole. When you want to make a change to a wiki page it is able to be done quickly, fast and in a hurry which benefits health organizations if they are trying to update and promote upcoming health events. This wiki tool can be very productive in some ways to users and companies.

One health organization that I discovered on Wiki was Relay for Life of Second Chance. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Relay_For_Life_of_Second_Life . This wiki site is the signature fundraising activity for Relay for Life for the American Cancer Society that is an overnight event for people of all ages to participate in. This annual activity takes places the second life in July of each year and volunteers join teams to have fun while they are also fundraising and raising awareness for the cures of cancer. This activity page has several years of history listed of the Second Chance events donations and the different type of participation from individuals such as:

• walking laps
• being avatars 
• or running laps

 I thought it was a very good idea that this page gave a very detailed overview of what this event represent and provided a most frequently asked question section for users that had concerns. The last time this page was updated was January 2012 almost one and half year ago from today. This site has a very clear layout and a lot of the information is bullet pointed for users to easily follow the information they have listed. There are also several videos and pictures posted for people to see what this event truly entitles with raising true awareness and money for curing cancer.

Overall, I think Wiki is a very creative method to get information out to people especially when you are trying to introduce a topic of your interest and want others input on that topic. This feature allows you to be very interactive with other users and edit any information that you would like. However, I would not choose this social media platform for health information because it is just not trustworthy enough for me. 

If an organization has the time to create a wiki page for advertisement or promotion of events then I think it is a terrific idea to use but, providing health facts is not very beneficial. In my opinion, Wiki does have a pretty unique feature of providing and being able to update any type of information that you would like.