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 Random Musings.
Tags: Communication, LinkedIn, Relationships, Social Media
I like LinkedIn. I’ve used it for many years, well before the term “social media” came into vogue, and value what it does well: keeping me abreast of the career changes within my professional network. Although the powers-that-be at LinkedIn have added other features over the years, the core value of network awareness hasn’t changed. Many of those new features provide little value, at least to me. And there is one feature that needs to go immediately: recommendations.
In theory, recommendations seem to make a lot of sense. If you feel strongly about a person to whom you are connected, you can write a recommendation of that person. The recommendation, once approved by the recipient, is placed on their profile for all the world to see. LinkedIn thinks this is such a good feature that your profile is not considered complete until you have accumulated three recommendations.
In reality, the LinkedIn recommendation system is useless. Here’s why:
- Recommendations are universally positive. No one in their right mind would permit a negative recommendation to appear on their profile. Self-selected recommendations tell me nothing about you, except that you can apparently convince others to laud you in public. I suspect this is a quid pro quo practice anyway, so even that skill is suspect.
- Recommendations are usually solicited. Who hasn’t gotten a request for a recommendation? How many of us have written one, if only to avoid an awkward refusal? Not to upset anyone, but if I really thought highly of you, I’d write a recommendation without prompting.
- Honest recommendations are tainted. Surrounded by so many fake recommendations, the occasional sincere unsolicited recommendation is lost in the noise. Their value is diminished to the point that they are useless.
- Real recommendations occur without the knowledge of the subject. Real recommendations (which LinkedIn was trying to emulate) occur between people privately. When someone calls and asks my opinion of another person, they’ll get a real recommendation. It will have for more value to the requester than any generic recommendation on LinkedIn.
To eliminate all these problems, I think LinkedIn should just drop the entire system. No more recommendations cluttering up profiles, no more requests filling up my LinkedIn mailbox, no more “happy talk” about people you’d otherwise not write about.
Instead, when you want to find out about someone, find a mutual connection on LinkedIn and contact them. Use LinkedIn for what it was intended: connecting with your professional network to learn things and do a better job. You’ll get a better, honest answer that benefits everyone concerned.
And please, if you like this idea, recommend it to someone else.
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.
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Technology.
Tags: Best Of 2009, Communication, Leadership, LinkedIn, Management Skills, Social Media, Twitter
With the intrusion of social media into every aspect of our lives, it should come as no surprise that much energy is being spent to develop social networks for executives. On the surface, this makes sense: executive leaders have much to share, but few immediate peers to share it with. Corner offices can be lonely places; while a developer can easily find peers on the same hallway or building, executives must look in nearby companies to find someone who shares the same problems and concerns as they do.
Social media seems to solve this problem perfectly: bridging time and space, social tools would allow executives to share and commiserate freely. When a CFO needs to bounce a problem off another CFO, they would just be a tweet or post away. If a bunch of CIOs want to dish about the best VoIP telephony investment, a shared chat room would neatly fill the bill.
Unfortunately, it isn’t taking off as hoped. I find this very disappointing; I am a huge believer in executive networking and constantly encourage my peers to explore these new technologies. I participate in pilot programs and join fledgling groups. Many of them start with great promise but none have really taken off. For example, there are dozens of CIO groups on LinkedIn; none have achieved any sort of regular, useful interaction.
There are three big reasons why these groups fail to catch on:
Time Members of a social group must dedicate time to make the group succeed. This means checking in, reading things, contributing, commenting, and participating. Sadly, time is the most precious resource any executive possesses. Pulled in a dozen directions, bouncing between meetings while answering email on the fly, providing direction and decisions on the spur of the moment, few executives have the luxury of dedicating a block of time to their social network on a regular basis. For many leaders, just taking the time to maintain their LinkedIn profile is a major effort. Forget about writing a blog or maintaining a presence on Twitter.
Culture The majority of current executives cut their technology teeth when email became popular and PCs proliferated in the workplace. Although comfortable with email, they see technology as a speed improvement for traditional one-on-one communication. They have not seen the benefit of technology-driven many-to-many exchanges. They are completely comfortable with in-person group interaction: breakfast and lunch meetings, conferences, and peer discussions are popular and usually well attended. Translating that interaction to electronic media feels unnatural. Just as important, it takes time to learn these tools, let alone use them, and as we already know, time is in short supply. Many executives have every intention to learn these new things but simply never find the time.
Liability What executives say matters. With leadership comes responsibility, and with responsibility comes a reluctance to speak without due consideration. In some cases, inappropriate comments by an executive can carry legal liability. In this environment, the idea of openly contributing to a public forum is simply unthinkable. Even when private invite-only environments are created expressly for this purpose, it is hard to get people to drop their defenses and start talking.
I don’t have solutions to these problems. Time management is a personal affair; an individual must make the commitment to embrace social media and stick with it to extract the value. Culture can change over time, but it happens slowly, much more slowly than the rate at which new social tools are introduced. Liability is the most stifling; inappropriate comments in a public forum can be deleterious to your career, to say the least.
I am nonetheless optimistic that we will overcome these issues and begin to see regular, solid interaction within executive social networks. As leaders, we must embrace and explore new ideas, technical or otherwise, to ensure that we drive our organizations towards those with the most value. By opting out of this swelling wave of technology, many leaders will find themselves, literally and figuratively, out of touch in just a few years. Where will you be?
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