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It’s Not You. It’s Me. June 22, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
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10 comments

Most everyone starts using Twitter in the same way. Trying to gain some traction, we connect to lots of people for varying reasons: friends, coworkers, business partners, church members, etc.  Those connections lead to others and our little Twitter world grows.  Over time, we develop a fairly heterogeneous group of followers.

For some (perhaps most) of us, that group winds up with some fairly disjoint communities.  As a result, you begin to realize that some things you tweet are meaningless to large numbers of your followers.  Instead of bringing value to your followers, you are distracting them.  It may get to the point that you stop tweeting things for fear that they won’t readily appeal to a large percentage of your followers.  When you reach that point, the whole concept of Twitter begins to unravel.

Some would say that this is no big deal, that part of the appeal of Twitter is to bring these divergent worlds together and allow this cross-pollination to occur.  I can understand that approach from a theoretical perspective, but the reality is that there are certain tweets intended for one audience, and other tweets that should only be delivered to another.  In my case, most of my friends couldn’t care less about the finer points of IT leadership, while my business connections see little value in the arcane details of my chaperoning the 8th grade class trip.

Other social tools, like Plaxo and Facebook, understand that there are layers of access to our lives.  Plaxo, for example, allows you to divide your world into family, friends, and business contacts.  You control what each of those groups can see, allowing you to reveal more of yourself to those you are closer to.  Facebook has even more fine-grained access control, giving you the ability to selectively expose different items to groups or even individuals.

Twitter has a much simpler access control model: all or nothing. You can lock your account on Twitter, which forces people to request approval before they can see your tweets.  This is generally considered to be anti-social behavior on Twitter, where most people tend to keep their streams open.  Once approved, people have access to your tweets.  Oddly enough, people can see who you follow (and who follows you) even if your account is locked.

Within my circle, I am hearing more and more concern about this lack of access control in Twitter.  Real people in the real world have real concerns about what they share and with whom they share it.  Our tools should reflect our needs, not vice versa.  Twitter has tremendous value, but it falls short in supporting a more traditional model of progressive disclosure in our social interactions.

What to do?  I don’t want to abandon Twitter.  Instead, I set out to divide my Twitter world, creating a professional stream and a private stream.  Along the way, I knew I would have to drop some followers and hope that others would play along. I’d also have to figure out how to help people understand how my multiple Twitter personalities connected.

How did I do it?  How did it work out? We’re out of space in this post, so you’ll have to come back next time to find out.  In the meantime, share your thoughts: do you see a need for better access control in Twitter?  Would you split your account?  Does this even matter?

The Original Social Media Guru June 8, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Book Reviews, Networking.
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7 comments

If you spend any time doing anything on the internet, you will soon stumble across a special kind of expert who is just dying to help you improve your virtual social life.  These self-professed Social Media Gurus promise to reveal deep secrets about Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, all designed to garner you more followers, more attention, and more interest on the internet.

Let’s face it: the vast, vast majority of Social Media Gurus know just a teeny bit more than you do about all this stuff.  If you really wanted to learn their secrets, ten minutes with Google (or Bing, which is growing on me) will make you a Social Media Guru, too.  And if you really want 100,000 followers, or friends, or connections, one mortifying YouTube video should do the trick.

All these social networking tools are just communication tools: conduits for information. You can learn the mechanics of any of them in a day, and absorb most of the culture in a week.  But that doesn’t make you any more social, although you may have made a good start at a network.

What matters is what you send over those conduits.  The information you share and how you respond to others is what’s important. It’s the content that counts, not the mechanics of the tool.

Most modern Social Media Gurus want to teach you the mechanics.  This is not social networking, just like understanding the mechanics of a piano is not going to make you a piano player.  Very few Social Media Gurus can teach you what to send using these systems, once you have mastered the mechanics.

Sadly, the very best Social Media Guru died in 1955, before any of these things were invented. Fortunately for us, he wrote down all his secrets well before he passed away.  That Guru was Dale Carnegie, and his secrets are revealed in his book, How To Win Friends & Influence People.

If you have never read this book, do yourself a great favor and pick up a copy.  For Amazon’s bargain price of $8.70 ($0.96 on your Kindle) you can learn the secrets of the greatest Social Media Guru in history.  Carnegie’s book is easy to read, with each concept presented in a short chapter with supporting anecdotes.  If even that’s too much for you, he summarizes each chapter with a one-line moral at the end.  The anecdotes are delightful, recalling social situations from the 1920′s and 1930′s that are still relevant today.

If you have read this book before, read it again.  You will have the same revelations all over again, and be even more committed to changing the way you communicate with people. Carnegie was among the first, and is still the best, Social Media Guru.

I won’t even try to summarize Carnegie’s advice here.  Click the link above, buy the book, and start your summer reading with the one book that could truly improve every relationship you have.

Focus! June 5, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking, Technology.
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3 comments

In my previous post, I complained about the effort needed to join a new social networking service.  It seems that every service wants to create an extensive profile and friend network to provide a foundation for their core feature.  The simple act of joining becomes an overwhelming exercise in typing.

The problem is that every social site wants to be all things to all people.  As a result, they wind up doing most of those things poorly.

Consider LinkedIn.  The grand-daddy of professional networking sites, LinkedIn is the gold standard for capturing your professional resume.  I have yet to find any site that does a better job of collecting, categorizing, and managing my career history.  If you aren’t on LinkedIn, you don’t exist in most professional circles.

You’d think that LinkedIn would be happy to be the very best in managing my professional profile.  Instead, LinkedIn has spent a lot of time to create second-rate messaging, status, collaboration, and search capabilities.  Why? Does anyone really prefer to manage their email in LinkedIn, as opposed to their primary email platform?  Why does LinkedIn send me an email to tell me I have a message in LinkedIn, instead of just delivering the message?  LinkedIn does one thing well; please stick to it!

Plaxo is the best site I’ve found for managing my contact list.  It seamlessly backs up my contacts, syncs them to various other systems, and manages role-based security among more than a thousand people in my address book.  Why, then, does it offer second-rate blogging and status updates?  Why does it try to stream content from other services into its Pulse service?  Plaxo does one thing extremely well; please stick to it!

I could go on and on.  Brightkite is the best site around for managing real-time location information, yet insists that you build a completely different set of friends within their service.  TripIt does a great job managing travel itineraries but also wants its own set of friends and contacts.  Facebook is the standard for context-rich real-time personal status, but also has goofy internal email and second-rate contact lists.  Flickr is one of the best places to manage your photos, but has yet another collection of friends and favorites to manage.

Twitter, to its credit, sticks to its core function of low-bandwidth real-time information; I hope they won’t be distracted by the need to add some second-rate services to “more fully engage their customers.”  We don’t want engagement, we want effective simplicity.

What service do you provide?  Is it your primary focus?  Are you distracted by trying to expand into areas that others already handle more effectively?  It is easy to fall into this trap as we work to serve our customers as best we can.  There is nothing wrong with trying to provide more service, but it can be a waste of resources to build things which distract us, annoy our customers, and ultimately reduce what we’re really trying to accomplish.

Focus on your core business. Consider additional services carefully before expanding. Sometimes, you deliver the best service by providing just one service, better than anyone else in the world.

Comfort Zones May 22, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Networking.
Tags: , , , , ,
2 comments

Last summer, I had the opportunity to watch a group of Boy Scouts go through a high-ropes team building exercise.  Beyond the fun of watching boys climb 50 feet in the air with nothing more than a safety rope hooked to their waist, I learned a clever trick about comfort zones.

High-ropes courses are all about getting out of your comfort zone.  I am very comfortable on the ground, enjoying the combination of gravity and my feet firmly planted on the earth.  Climbing a 40-foot ladder comprised solely of five planks at eight-foot intervals took me way out of my zone, to the point of near-frozen, knee-shaking fear at the top.  But I did it, and I’m better for it, if only to avoid embarrassment in front of 13-year-olds who scrambled to the top like monkeys.

There was a more subtle comfort zone that was shattered five minutes into the day.  When we arrived, the instructors asked the boys to pair up.  As you would expect, they found their best friends and quickly formed twosomes.  She then asked them to each assume a character, either SpongeBob or Patrick (remember the audience here).  They did so.  She then gathered all the SpongeBobs into one group, and all the Patricks into another.  One group headed to the ropes course, and the other to another exercise.

In one deft motion she separated every boy from his best friend! For the rest of the day, the boys worked without the comfort of their buddy, opening them to social opportunities they would never have had.  They still had fun, accomplished things, and grew a bit.  But they did it with a little more risk and became more open to partnering with others throughout the day.

I was so impressed by this trick that I asked the leader about it.  She shared that they had choices for any number of groups.  Need groups of three? Team them in trios and then ask them to become one of the Three Stooges.  Foursomes? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And so forth.  They had learned that boys know how to game the “count off” trick, positioning their best friends “n” people away to make sure they stayed together.  The character game took them by surprise, before they could figure out how to thwart the leader’s intent.

As adults, we probably won’t be asked to become a cartoon character (I’d pick SpongeBob, FYI). But, boy, do we need to be broken up and moved out of our social comfort zones!  How many times do you arrive at a networking event and look for the familiar faces?  I’m guilty of this, and I really enjoy working a room and getting to meet new people.  For the less gregarious among us, breaking out to meet strangers is a difficult exercise.

How many opportunities do we miss for fear of breaking away from our comfortable friends?  There is such value in meeting new people, expanding our horizons, and finding ways to help others.  Our reluctance to engage a stranger costs us so much.  As adults, we are supposed to know better and not require outside intervention to make us do the right thing.  Yet we still revert to old behaviors, rooted deep in our psyches.

We all own this problem.  At your next event, acknowledge the familiar faces and turn away to meet the strangers.  If your friends chase you down, gently aim them at others as well.  You may have to write “SpongeBob” on your name tag to make your point, but it will be worth the effort.

What Are You Putting In? March 27, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
Tags: , ,
8 comments

In my ongoing effort to convert the entire world to using Twitter, I often get this response:

I tried it for a while, but I didn’t get anything out of it.

Really?  I’m so sorry.  Tell me, what did you put into it?

Why do so many people come to Twitter with the expectation of getting a huge immediate reward?  Do they really expect to create an account and immerse themselves in a flood of useful, pertinent information? Do they really think it could be that easy?

Here’s a novel thought: you get out of Twitter what you put into Twitter.  Twitter is about collaborating and sharing, 140 characters at a time.  When you come to Twitter, come prepared to share something.  It doesn’t have to be earth-shattering information.  Just something, anything, that someone, somewhere, might want to see.

Did you just finish a project at work?  Tweet it.  Find a useful resource on the web?  Tweet it.  Do something nice for your spouse?  Tweet it. See a great movie or listen to a great song?  Twee—well, you get the idea.

Then, stick with it.  It took me months to find and follow a set of people that I found interesting.  All the while, I kept tweeting.   Twitter is a living, networked version of the Golden Rule: tweet unto others as you would have them tweet unto you.

Here’s a novel approach to getting started with Twitter: expect nothing in return.  Engage Twitter with the single goal of providing value and helping every person you can, as best you can, with no expectation of reciprocation.  Stick with that approach for a long time. You might be surprised at the results.

If that proves to be a successful approach with Twitter, don’t stop there.  You may find that this is a successful approach to your entire life.  But don’t take my word for it.  Try it for yourself.

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