Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.
Tags: Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Media, Twitter
I’ve written at length on the usefulness of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, and various other social tools. Each serves a unique role in creating a complete online social presence. Professional network? LinkedIn. Personal network? Facebook. Address book? Plaxo. Real-time status? Twitter. This is not hard to understand for the millions of users of these systems. We all seem happy to use each tool as it fits our world, some more, some less.
Except for Twitter, the purveyors of these tools are not happy with our usage model. They seem to think that we are not using them enough, and they keep making changes to draw us closer to their platform. So far, this has not worked, and the tools are getting worse instead of better.
Most recently, LinkedIn announced that they had integrated Twitter capabilities into their interface. Really? I find it hard to believe that this was the most requested LinkedIn feature. Was LinkedIn barraged on a daily basis with demands that people’s Twitter streams suddenly appear in their LinkedIn profile?
I doubt it. LinkedIn has no ability to present a status stream like Twitter. The idea is completely out of touch with the LinkedIn model. The real-time, transient nature of tweets clashes with the professional, managed appearance of LinkedIn’s profile. It’s like showing up to a job interview in your pajamas.
Instead, I sense a panicked decision among a management team whose product is losing relevance to a more dominant technology. If you can’t beat ‘em, integrate them poorly, I guess.
What does LinkedIn offer? They list your Twitter account in your profile and allow you to stream some or all of your tweets into your LinkedIn status. To selectively send tweets to your profile status, you must include the hashtag #in in the tweet. This serves two purposes: it lets LinkedIn grab and post the tweet, and it lets everyone on Twitter know that you don’t know the difference between Twitter and LinkedIn. LinkedIn might as well grab and post #fail tweets to complete your social portrait.
Facebook is suffering from a similar case of Twitter-envy, but is doing a better job of hiding it. You can connect your Twitter and Facebook statuses so that all your tweets show up as Facebook status updates. I do this, more as a time saver than anything else, although I occasionally update Facebook independently from Twitter.
Given the similar functionality between Facebook status updates and Twitter tweets, that integration is easy. Unfortunately, Facebook also envies Twitter’s real-time nature and has developed multiple conflicting ways to look at status updates. Within Facebook, I can look at status updates. I can also look at my news feed and it’s close sibling, the live news feed. As best I can tell, the live news feed provides a more intimate view of the activity on Farmville and Mafia Wars but little else.
When I do check Facebook, I tend to check all of these things, plus my wall and my inbox, just in case. No wonder Facebook claims to present one-fourth of all pageviews on the internet: it takes that many just to make sure you haven’t missed anything.
There’s a lesson here: stick to what you know. LinkedIn’s Twitter integration is just embarrassing for all concerned. Facebook’s Twitter envy is damaging a once-clean user interface. If these platforms would be happy with what they do best, we’d all be better off. And if we all applied that rule to everything we do, imagine how much good we’d accomplish.
http://effectivecio.com/2009/06/05/focus/
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
Tags: Facebook, Plaxo, Social Media, Twitter
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?
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Book Reviews, Networking.
Tags: Best Of 2009, Book Reviews, Books, Communication, Customer Service, Facebook, LinkedIn, Networking, Relationships, Twitter
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.
Tags: Facebook, Interfaces, LinkedIn, Social Media, Software, Twitter, Users
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.
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