James Cochran’s Blog

For many of us going through school now and soon to be embarking on our search for a career we’ve heard a lot about personal branding. Think about how Trump puts his name on everything. In essence that’s a personal brand. As it would apply to people like you and me it’s what we put out there on the internet. Our blog, our Facebook profile, and our twitter stream. This is our personal brand. This is what a potential employer would find out about us when doing a search to find out more about us.

So what is a Knog? It’s shorthand for Knowledge Blog. The idea being that you should create your own blog and talk about the stuff you know. If you’re good at fixing radiators on ’86 Chevy Cavaliers then talk about that. If you know how to install FreeNAS in a virtual machine using Virtual Box then you should talk about that. Anything in regards to what you are knowledgeable about should go in it. Anything you are learning you should document.

The point of this is not only will you be able to go back and review what you know and what you’ve learned, but you can also show it off to potential employers. The same ones that will be googling your name when you apply for that job you’re hoping to get will run across your knog and will not only get a sense of what you know but also your personality.

You don’t have to spend any money to get it going either. Just head over to WordPress.com and create a new blog. Try to use your name in your web address or at least make sure you brand your blog with your name so you show up in Google. That’s the easy part. The real work starts when you go to write your posts. Just keep at it and before you know it you’ll have more content then you could have ever imagined and you’ll be searching the internet trying to find out how to move your blog to your new domain “YourName.com”, which you can do fairly easily.  So quit wasting time and go to wordpress.com and get started on your own knog!

I’ve had many friends ask me what a Retweet is and we’ll get to that but first… what is Twitter?

Twitter is a social website that I’ve been using for a few years and it’s a place where you can tell the entire world (wide web) what you are doing, as long as it’s 140 characters or less.  To the left there you’ll see my twitter updates.  Examples of things you might post here is “Working on my website”, “Cooking dinner”, or “Cashing my tax refund and heading to Frys”

That’s about as basic of an explanation as you can get.  People use it for all sorts of other things like promoting their blog or putting out some great information.  Sometimes when another user finds some information they think would be great to share they aren’t sure the best way to do so.  That’s where Retweeting comes in.  It’s not polite to just steal someones tweet and post it as your own so instead you should prefix the tweet and give props back to the original poster.  Here’s what you do:

Copy the tweet you want to retweet.  Start a new tweet and type RT @jamescochran and then paste the original tweet.  Of course replace my user name with the name of the original twitterer.

You may ask why you should go through all the trouble? It’s because you have your list of friends but all your friends may not be following the same people you are or have the same followers.  As a matter of fact the chances are very good you don’t.  Essentially this allows you to share information from one network with your network.  And then someone from your network my share that information with all the people on their network.

It’s all about word of mouth.  I, for one, always pay more attention to tweets that have been Retweeted because I know it’s information that at least two people thought was important or worth reading.  So if you found this link on Twitter make sure you go back and Retweet this!