What's in a picture

Once again, I want to focus on the importance of having a picture for your profile, this time for your presence on the professional social networking sites. 

As I needed to work intensively for expanding my network lately, I spent a lot of time on Xing - Germany's favorite network - and LinkedIn. I neglected a lot those two professional places so I wanted to get in touch with some of the members of my networks, events and potential new clients. One of my main problem was to recognize some of the people of my networks that did not have any picture.

Even though when you are looking to hire or network, you are interested in the level of professional achievement and the immediate experience, but you may also need to have an eye contact. Not necessarily a bad looking person has less chances to get a new job or a new project, but it is equally important to know how the person looks like as a proof of her/his authenticity. I need to know which is the person with such and such experience as maybe I can meet him/her on one of the conferences we are supposed to participate together. 

Thus, you have a picture, you have credibility and wish my contacts without picture read this post and will help me to network better with them. 

What your picture says about you

If you are an intensive user of the freelance networks - as I am - you will easily notice a lot of choices regarding the profile pictures. Some will prefer to hide their identity and post a picture with an avatar, somehow related to their work recommendations. The most used are a computer for the IT specialists and a pen for a freelance writer. 

There are also some that did not make a difference between their hobbies and their tailored profiles and thus they selected as professional recommendations images with favorite pets and various spots visited during their vacations. If the last choice could be a decent option after all, in the case of the pets pictures, I will think more than twice before hiring someone that considered that his representative picture should be a cat or a monkey. 

Last but not least, some decided to upload pictures with their children - could impress the audience when you realize that you will help the person to feed his/her family, but probably it doesn't work for all - or with their lovely spouses. Not few of them are fake and use other people's pictures randomly stolen from the social media networks or from Google. 

What I honestly prefer is a decent picture, when you can say something about yourself, with a professional look that will inspire the potential employer to work with you and not with anyone else. 

Wordpress and pictures

I am not such a big fan of Wordpress, but I take any opportunity to learn something new about it. My big problem is that sometimes it might take a lot of time to upload your post, because you need to consider various technicalities that blogspot, for instance, does not have. Very often, due to my hectic work, I need a simple application allowing me to write my posts wherever I am and eventually attach some pics.

While editing some blog posts in Wordpress, I needed to ad some pictures too and I was impressed by the options. First, the picture can be inserted in a very elegant way, with a nice format and a quality space dedicated to the caption. Another great possibility is the creation of galleries of photos. Especially for blogs dedicated to travel, this is a great option. You can follow the slides of pictures at a very good quality. You can insert the picture relatively easily, with many options of the location and the dimensions. The result, is impressive and if not too lazy and with a lot of work to do, I wish I have more than one blog on Wordpress.

The new Foursquare

is more social and more visually oriented - by allowing users to post pictures on the spot.

Another sign that little by little we are all becoming a kind of journalists or, at least, news providers.

Where's your pic?

When I am looking to the overall aspect of my blog, I might say that from the design point of view, I don't like always what I see. Too grey, nothing to catch your view except some articles and links. I guarantee everything - or almost everything - is extremely interesting and brain rewarding. But, on the other side, something is missing. And, how it is happening - hope not only to me, very often, I co-partenered with the idea for hundreds of days but I was unable to apply it accordingly. And the idea is: I need a more visual presentation of my blog(s). I can trust my words and like them. But, without an image, my writing might be a simple narcissist exercise. Do something to catch somehow your audience! Blogs and, in general, social media, is for busy people, or for people in a big big hurry. Use as many cards as possible to bring them in, and offer them a promise of something different. Starting with the design of your blog, or Twitter page or the feed of your Facebook page.

Here was my starter-of-the day conclusion! Have a good one and lots of readers and comments.