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TMI! February 20, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.
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Social media started with Who.  Through sites like Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn, and Plaxo, we all jumped online and answered that question.  Who are you?  What do you like, and not like?  What do you do, and who do you know?

Initially it seemed a little odd to share so much with so many strangers.  Under the illusion that once we shared, we were no longer strangers, the social media construct expanded to include What and When.  What are you doing?  When did you do it?  Who did you do it with?  Do you have any pictures of what you did?  Some sites integrated What and When on top of Who, like Facebook, and others focused solely on What and When with very little Who added (Twitter).  Other sites have struggled to add even a little What to their Who (LinkedIn and Plaxo) and haven’t even touched When. 

(It’s an interesting exercise to characterize all the social media sites in terms of their support for Who, What, and When.  I suspect you could cross that metric against their typical user profile and draw some interesting conclusions.  At the very least, there has to be a few master’s theses in there, for the enterprising graduate student.)

Recently, social media took the next step and started integrating Where into the mix.  Sites like Brightkite and TripIthave been gathering location data for a while now, although the data is explicitly shared and offered in discrete chunks.  Trumping them both, Google has taken it to a whole new level with their new Latitude service.

Latitude uses your mobile phone to track your location in real-time, plotting your location atop Google Maps.  By creating a social network with Latitude, you can share your location with others.  Unlike other services, Latitude can be set to broadcast continuously, allowing others to see your movements and track you in real time.

Although some will find this a great way to find friends, I find it all a little… creepy.  I don’t think I want to broadcast my position to everyone, all the time.  Although Latitude claims to restrict your broadcasts to your network, Google knows (and keeps) all that data.  For years, we feared that the government would drag us all into a dystopic Orwellian world where our every activity is tracked and analyzed.  It turns out, we’re doing it to ourselves without any government intervention at all.

One big impediment to adoption for these services is ensuring safety.  Not of ourselves, but of our families.  As a husband and father, I do not want the world to know when I am away from home, especially for extended periods of time.  I had one person decline to join my network on TripIt for exactly that reason, since his spouse was really uncomfortable with “strangers” knowing when she was home alone.  I can sympathize, and I am thinking hard about how I participate in these services.

Nonetheless, I suspect that we will become comfortable with adding Where to our Who, What, and When.  What’s left?  At some point, we may want to reconsider Why?

Scheduled Network Maintenance January 5, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
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Start your new year off right: take a moment to get your network in tip-top working order!

No, not the physical network attached to your computer. (Although I hope someone is doing that on a regular basis!)  I mean your social network, the foundation of your personal and professional world.

For many people, social networking tools became an important part of their world in 2008.  For others that have been using these tools for years, social technology took on added importance in the past year.  No matter how you got to this point, your networks need maintenance and care to stay vibrant and useful.

With that in mind, it’s time for a little dusting and polishing.  Here are some places to start:

  • Out With The Old
    Like weeds in a garden, old entries in your network can obscure the real value of your important connections.  Take a moment to review each member of your social communities.  Why are they there?  Do you even remember who these people are?  Have you taken time to keep the connection alive and fresh?

    What to do with old connections?  Two schools of thought prevail: purge or archive.  In the purge model, you ruthlessly delete outdated connections.  Archiving is a bit more merciful; older connections are moved to a separate archive area where they are available but not directly visible.

    Depending on the community, purge may be your only choice.  Outlook, however, makes archiving easy.  I maintain two extra contact folders named “Older” and “Ancient.” Over time, I migrate waning contacts from my primary contact list to Older and then Ancient.  That way, if I renew a connection, I can recall the previous history of that person.  Only my current contacts sync into my phone, making quick handheld searches faster.

  • In With The New
    Have you made contact with someone but not added them to your social communities?  I find this happens a lot: I add someone to my address book, but fail to find and connect to them in LinkedIn, Plaxo, and other communities.  Each of these tools have ways to find connections by searching your address book.  Take a moment to upload your contacts and work through the resulting list of potential new connections.
  • Seek Consistency
    As you add those new contacts into all your social worlds, make sure you have consistent connections among your worlds.  Are your LinkedIn connections mirrored in Plaxo?  Do you follow your Plaxo connections in Twitter? Is there alignment between Facebook friends and business connections?

    Unfortunately, figuring all this out is extraordinarily tedious.  While all of these systems can add address book entries to their own world, few of them have any ability to compare themselves to other social services.  This is a huge hole in the social fabric and a fundamental failure of the “walled garden” model of social services.  Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to have equivalence between all these services so that you are taking maximum advantage of all they have to offer for all your contacts.

  • Strike A Balance
    Twitter has a uniquely asymmetric connection model.  You can follow someone even if they don’t follow you, and vice versa.  If you both follow each other, certain features (like direct messaging) are unlocked for both of you.  Endless debates surround the value of following all your followers, but it makes sense to follow all the important ones.  I generally follow all new followers to check them out; if they become annoying, I stop following.  Take a moment to compare your followers with whom you are following and make appropriate corrections.

    There are handy tools that make this easy to do.  Twitter Karma will show you disparities in your Twitter world, with fixes just a few clicks away.  You might be surprised to see who is ignoring your fervent tweeting!

  • Freshen Your Appearance
    Welcome the new year with a new photo!  Upload a new profile picture to all your social sites.  We’re all a year older, so it’s time to let the world see what we look like now, not a year (or more) ago.  What?  You don’t have a picture in your profiles?  Arrggghhh!  This is one of my pet peeves, which I’ve previously addressed.  I forgive you for not paying attention back then, but now you have no excuse.  Post your picture right now!

    Done?  Ok, now go collect pictures of everyone in your contact list and add them to your address book. I cannot overstate the value of having headshots in my phone as I try to identify people in a crowd.  I have a terrible memory for names and faces and am mortified when I call someone by the wrong name.  Having those photos is a huge help.

    You can find photos everywhere: LinkedIn, Twitter, Plaxo, Facebook, and every other social site prompts people for their mugshot.  When all else fails, a Google image search for people with less-common names can help, too.  Play web detective for a few hours and collect some pictures.

  • Maintain Privacy
    Finally, review the privacy and disclosure settings for each of your social tools.  Are you sharing what you want to share? Hiding private stuff?  Although some sites have limited choices, others (like Plaxo and Facebook) offer more fine-grained privacy management settings.  Take a moment to make sure that all the buttons and dials are set to the right values so that you maintain appropriate relationships across your various social circles.

Whew!  That’s a bit of work, but worth every moment invested. With this housekeeping out of the way, you are ready to begin the new year!  Who knows where these tools will take you in 2009?

How Big Is Too Big? December 15, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
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I’ve been using LinkedIn for a long time, at least six or seven years.  In that time, I’ve accumulated 270 links in my network.  In all but a few cases, I know each person, why I linked to them, and what relationship I currently have with them.  Certainly, some links are stronger and more robust than others, but they all were created from an initial meeting of some sort that justified the connection.

Some people are compelled to collect links and compete to see who has the most.  Some of these people even include their link counts in their LinkedIn account names, as a sort of badge of honor.  I’ll confess: I do not understand this behavior, beyond some natural desire to compete and win at something.  Certainly, the network that results from this kind of link-hunting is effectively useless.

Network connections have value because you leverage the trust relationship for a mutual benefit.  That might be some advice, or a job reference, or a quick answer to a question.  You know to whom to turn in your network because you actually know these people and know what they can offer.  My recent post on “knowing who knows” expands on this.

When requests are sent to me through my network, I know that I can trust them and deal with them with some level of confidence.  The original goal of LinkedIn was to replicate the traditional face-to-face business network with its semi-formal model of introductions and references.  That whole practice only works when knowledge and trust is part of the network.  If you don’t know the person at the other end of the connection, the interaction is worthless.

I routinely ignore requests to connect with people I don’t know.  No offense intended, but my network is valuable to me.  That value is diluted when anonymous connections begin to accumulate.  Honestly, my rejection improves the quality of the requestor’s network for the same reason: if they don’t know me, why would they want to trust me?

I feel sorry for those link hunters that you see on LinkedIn.  Their network is worthless, and everyone else (except for the other link hunters) knows it.

There is far more value in a small, carefully maintained network than in a large, unkempt one.  Guard your network closely and grow it carefully.  You’ll reap the benefits for years to come, and its value will grow immensely over time.

Public And Private Lives October 24, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
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Last month I talked about maintaining privacy in an open world.  Since then, I’ve got a lot of good feedback from people, all of whom share my concern.

As tools like Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, and LinkedIn become more pervasive and status updates begin to filter between sites, lines are blurring between public, private, business, and personal posts.  Blogs that were once targeted at friends and family are being picked up by business associates.  Tweets intended for friends and classmates find their way to parents and teachers.  Many folks are rethinking what they post on blogs as they consider all the different groups that may read a post.  Even for those who have been long-time proponents of these new open social tools, it is becoming clear that some sort of layering is needed.

A friend of mine recently reported that his boss “de-friended” all of his reports in Facebook.  I can understand this.  Maintaining a professional distance is important, both physically and virtually.  Tweeting that you are calling in sick to take the day off is not a good idea when your boss (or HR) can easily pick up your Twitter feed.

I think there is tremendous value in these tools and am glad that they are increasing in popularity.  Unfortunately, most people are inherently private and will err on the side of communicating less when inappropriate exposure is possible.  It is a shame that, just as broad adoption takes hold, people will stop using the tools for fear of embarrassing themselves.

I don’t have an answer to this.  We’re seeing the first vestige of layered exposure in Plaxo, but Plaxo’s social sharing features are horribly immature.  The best sharing tools, like Twitter and Facebook, don’t provide enough layers to control content distribution.  Something needs to change, and quickly.  As I noted earlier, figure that out, and you’ll be the next social networking billionaire.

Show Your Face! October 10, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
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This week, LinkedIn took a huge step forward when they finally started including profile photos in the popups that appear when you hover over a person’s name. Previously, the popup displayed a textual summary of a person’s profile data. The addition of the photo makes the popup profile much more useful.

I am a big fan of including pictures in your online profiles for these kinds of sites. The primary reason is selfish: it makes it easier for me to remember names and faces when I can see a person’s picture. I make it a practice to copy these photos into my Outlook address book; they’ll appear in the header of emails when possible and get synced to my phone as well. On more than one occasion I have been at some sort of gathering and used the pictures in my phone to confirm someone’s identity before walking up to say hello. They also show up in the caller ID display when I receive calls.

Photos are a huge part of social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, but are notably missing in most professional sites like Plaxo and LinkedIn. Why? I suspect that most people are too self-conscious to include a photo with their professional profile, or only have casual photos that don’t convey an appropriate professional demeanor.

Too self-conscious? Get over it. The value of your photo in cementing connections with people far exceeds your concern over having a “good” picture of yourself online. Moreover, most people are far too picky in choosing a picture of themselves. People who know you accepted what you look like long ago. Few of us are supermodels; the rest are just average-looking people.

Inappropriate photo? Not a problem. For online photos to be effective, you must crop them tightly, showing only your face. The latest fad is to crop even tighter, clipping off the edges of your face. Either way, those embarrassing background details won’t show up. Just find any photo that shows your face clearly, crop out everything else, and get it posted online.

So get going! Find a photo, crop it, and post it. Your profile will be much improved as a result, and I’ll certainly be happier, along with everyone else in your online network.

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