10 Tips To Keep in Mind When Applying for Jobs

 Crown Advertising and Marketing 
245 Newtown Road, Suite 103, Plainview, NY 11803
516-470-2700 www.crownad.com

 

With the job market being so competitive, applicants should keep in mind a few helpful hints when applying for jobs. These tips will answer the frequently asked question: “Why is it that some people get hired and some don’t?” 

Here are 10 tips provided by the New York Times. 

1. Review the resume. Review it again. Have a grown up review it. Nearly 1/3 of resumes submitted have careless mistakes including misspellings, grammatical errors and format mishaps. Have at least 2 other people review your resume before you submit it to anyone! Careless mistakes show that you don’t pay attention to details and are careless. 
2. Show up on time for the interview. That means plan on getting there early. Look around. Be friendly.
3. Dress appropriately for the interview. Don’t wear jeans or look like you are on the way to the beach. Dress professionally, neat and conservative. First impressions are everything!  
4. Know something about the company. With the advent of the Internet and Web, many companies expect you to be familiar with what it is they do. They also expect that you will speak convincingly about why you would love to work at their company. Do your research! 
5. Take internships seriously. It isn’t easy to find an internship. Many companies use them to develop a pool for prospective employees.
6. Don’t just look for job postings. Target companies that you would like to work for and send them a résumé. Follow up. Send one to the H.R. person, the manager, the president. Include a beautifully written cover letter. Follow up. If you do this enough, you will find someone who just happens to be thinking about placing a job ad, and calling you may make this person’s life a little easier. Timing is everything, although persistence is important, too. Talk to friends and relatives about companies they know. 
7. Think about things you have done in school, in a previous job, in a volunteer position that speak to your commitment, your ability to solve problems, your ability to deal with difficult customer situations, your ability to get a job done. Work it into your résumé and your interview responses. 
8. Ask questions, especially when interviewers ask if you have any questions. If you don’t, you look unengaged, afraid or uninterested. And make them good questions about what you’ll be doing on the job. Don’t ask how much vacation time you get. The primary goal of the questions you ask is to get the job, not to decide if you want the job. Think before you speak. This is a skill that most of us could improve. 
9. Stay in touch. If you get to be a finalist for a position but don’t get it, suck it up. Don’t take it personally. The company clearly liked you, but you were edged out. It is not easy to pick between finalists, and many times it is very close. Ask if you can stay in touch. If you get an enthusiastic yes, be sure to do so. There is a good chance that the new hire won’t work out or that another position will open up. You are close! 
10. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen people burn bridges for no reason. That doesn’t necessarily mean telling off your boss on the way out. It is usually more subtle, like not giving notice, making disparaging remarks about the company to co-workers (who can’t wait to tell the boss) or exhibiting an I-don’t-care-anymore attitude. Be smart: if you give notice and the company chooses to keep you around, stay on your best behavior. Say good-bye to everyone. It will speak well of you, and it will be remembered. It can be the difference between getting a lukewarm reference or an enthusiastic one. That could easily make the difference in getting your next job.

Tips for Optimizing Your Mobile Website

 Crown Advertising and Marketing 
245 Newtown Road, Suite 103, Plainview, NY 11803
516-470-2700 www.crownad.com

Having a desktop website and a mobile website are two completely different things! On the mobile web, utility triumphs style – opposite desktop sites. 

“Fancy visuals and a great motif may look terrific on your desktop, but on mobile, all they’re likely to do is slow things down,” (mashable.com). 

 

Creating a mobile website is essential in this technological age. Doing so requires a different frame of mind. Here are 6 simple tips to optimize your mobile website provided by Mashable.com.

• Keep it simple: most users aren’t visiting your mobile site for the aesthetic experience. Instead, they’re trying to get something quickly, whether it’s information or a pizza. A good place to start is to ask yourself, “What are most customers going to visit our site for?” If it’s to reach a live person, then make the phone number prominent (and use Click-to-Call.) If it’s to find your address, put that up high as well. Put two or three of the most important things in one place. “Keep navigation to a minimum while delivering the maximum amount of engaging content within a smaller screen that you get on a laptop or desktop,” says Craig Besnoy, U.S. managing director for NetBiscuits, another mobile web consultant. “In addition, a properly designed mobile site keep as much of the call to action above the mobile fold, while keeping text input to a minimum.”

• Don’t use a lot of images: Nothing slows a page down like a few large images. Mink recommends getting rid of most the images on your homepage except for ones that are considered essential and even then, you should use smaller versions. Anything else is self-sabotage since a slow user experience leads to a high bounce rate.

• Design it for multiple handsets: A mobile site that’s designed for an iPhone won’t look good on a Nokia phone and might not even show up at all. That’s a mistake, says Rekha Baliga, director of customer engineering at mobile web consultant Atmio, since a big chunk of the world’s users are on a Nokia phone. Atmio keeps a database of more than 500 mobile phones and ensures that any site it creates will look good on any of them. “Never design a site for a specific device,” says Besnoy. “Despite popular belief, everyone does not use an iPhone or Android, nor is their device running the latest version of the operating system.”

• Learn from other great mobile sites: Most companies and brands haven’t set up a mobile site yet, but a good number have. That’s good news for you, since you can learn from the best ones (and the worst). Below are two sites that Besnoy recommends. Both use NetBiscuits’s platform, but beyond that, each — eBay’s and CBS’s — offer simple navigation, large type and few images.

• Use an “M-Dot” URL: People Google you on their mobile phones just like they Google you on a desktop, so you should create a site that’s optimized for SEO. One important consideration is an “m-dot” URl (ex: m.abc.com.), which will help Google recognize and index your mobile site separately from your standard one.

• Test and listen to feedback: Some mobile web consultants, like Atmio, offer A/B testing for mobile sites to let you compare how different designs perform. Another option is Google’s GoMo site, which lets you plug in your URL to see how it looks on a mobile phone. Ultimately, though, your customers will provide the most valuable feedback since they are your target audience. So listen to any complaints or compliments that come your way. What you’re looking to hear is that the site worked quickly and as it should, not that it looked pretty. As Mink says: “There’s not much mystery to it. At this stage, it’s as simple as it looks. Zero in on that primary action you want [customers] to take and make that your primary focus.”

5 Apple Products to Look for in 2012

 Crown Advertising and Marketing 
245 Newtown Road, Suite 103, Plainview, NY 11803
516-470-2700 www.crownad.com

Every year, Apple “wow’s” it’s customers and the world of technology with its’ new products. Here are the five predictions for Apple in 2012, provided by cnet.com. 

1. No TV set, yet: The rumored product that's spent most of 2011 as an abstraction of data points is almost certainly on its way to being a real thing, but likely won't be seen next year. Steve Jobs told Walter Isaacson, author of the Steve Jobs biography, "I'd like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use… It would be seamlessly synched with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.” How far along Apple really was on that project remains a significant question.
2. Siri opened up to developers: The sassy voice assistant has been a breakout hit for Apple since its introduction with the iPhone 4S in October, but it's missing something big. Apple's current implementation is limited to Web queries from partners like Wolfram Alpha and Yelp, along with Apple's own apps. What's missing is a way to hook it into the half a million or so apps that are on the App Store. Much as those very same apps helped expand what one could do with the iPhone itself, creating voice plug-ins for apps could very well be the next step in making Siri a more useful service. 
3. The end of Mac Pro: Desktop sales just weren't what they used to be compared to when Apple introduced the original design of the Mac Pro (then the Power Mac G5) in mid-2003. While Mac hardware sales have grown considerably since then, notebooks have been the belle of the ball since they surpassed the company's sales of desktop computers in 2004. Those same notebook units now face cannibalization from Apple's iPad, which itself blew past Mac sales last year. An anonymously sourced report from AppleInsider in October suggested that Apple's seen a sharp decline in sales of the workstations, which begin at $2,499 in the U.S., and that the drop has led executives to reconsider whether it's worth continuing to invest in the product. Lending further credence to that idea is the fact that Apple hasn't given the line a proper overhaul since before it made the move to Intel processors, instead putting its focus on updates to its Mac Mini, iMac and MacBook portable lines. Will Apple announce its demise of the Mac Pro, or simply replace that spot in its product line with something else?
4. Apple ditches Google for Maps: Google's been closely tied to Apple's iOS since the first iPhone was unveiled, but that could change next year if the company ends up introducing its own mapping service. Why would Apple do that? Tensions between the Apple and Google have increased in recent years with the rise of Android, Google's mobile operating system. 
5. A truly new iPhone: Apple's released a new iPhone every year since its introduction, making this one a bit of a no-brainer. So far that cycle's consisted of a steady stream of internal tweaks, with every other year including a full-scale overhaul. The iPhone 4 was the last such big change to Apple's iPhone design formula, with the 4S getting speedier guts. So what features will the new one have? The big thing to expect is a larger screen. The traditional 3.5-inch displays have served Apple well, but other manufacturers have bumped up to the 4-inch range, with some going bigger. Other things to put on that list include a jump to 4G networking, near-field communications (NFC) for transferring information between devices, and of course the usual tweaks to the camera and processor.

Check Out the Top 10 Social Media Disasters of 2011!

 Crown Advertising and Marketing 
245 Newtown Road, Suite 103, Plainview, NY 11803
516-470-2700 www.crownad.com

Check out the TOP 10 SOCIAL MEDIA DISASTERS OF 2011.

Considering 2011 is being viewed as the year of social media disasters, it was just a matter of time before someone put together a montage video of the top 10 disasters. 

Over the course of 2011, companies, brands and individuals lined up to take the fall, making critical mistakes at crucial moments and showing an incredible lack of common sense on social media outlets. 

David Amerland put together this list after sifting through dozens of case studies and scores of files looking for the ones which stood out for what they can teach us about social media and marketing. 

 Let us know what you think of these social media disasters on our Facebook Wall linked HERE. Enjoy the video! Thanks, David! 

Survey Says: Email Marketing & Social Media are Top Areas of Investment for Businesses in 2012

  Crown Advertising and Marketing 
245 Newtown Road, Suite 103, Plainview, NY 11803
516-470-2700 www.crownad.com

A recent article published by BullDogReporter.com announces email marketing and social media are top areas of investment in 2012, according to a new StrongMail survey. 92% of businesses plan to increase or maintain marketing budgets in 2012. 

According to the survey, “51% of businesses plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2012, and another 41% plan to maintain current levels,” (BullDogReporter.com). Only 8% of respondents plan to decrease marketing budgets, which is a slight increase over the 7% reported in last year's survey. Other areas of increased spend included mobile and search, which are tied at 37%. 

Direct mail (28%) and tradeshows (23%) are top targets for decreased spending in the upcoming new year. 

More than two-thirds of businesses plan to integrate social media and email in 2012, versus 44% integrating mobile and email. “The strong ties between email marketing and social media are also emphasized by the 47% of businesses that plan to increase investment in using email to drive growth in their social media channels, such as corporate Facebook and Twitter pages,” (BullDogReporter.com).

Other survey highlights worth noting:

• 92% plan to increase or maintain marketing spend in 2012

• 60% plan to increase email marketing budget; 55% social media; 37% mobile/search (tied)

• 45% cite data integration as primary email marketing challenge in 2012; 43% lack of resources/staff; 40% content management

• 48% cite increasing subscriber engagement as top 2012 email marketing initiative; 44% improving segmentation/targeting; 32% growing opt-in email list

• 68% plan to integrate email marketing with social media; 44% with mobile; 17% with search

Where is your business planning on spending their marketing budget? If you are looking to take your marketing campaign to the next level, or looking for a marketing and advertising to work with, contact Crown Advertising. Contact information can be found here: CrownAd.com.