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One Hand Clapping December 11, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.
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5 comments

A few weeks ago, I fretted about the need for business cards amidst all these new-fangled connectivity tools.  Although we have all sorts of ways to sustain a connection once it’s made, it still takes a little card to get most connections started.

Until now, that is.  I recently learned about a clever new device called a Poken.  The size of a USB drive, a Poken contains a unique serial number and an RFID tag reader.  When you acquire a Poken, you register it on the Poken web site.  On that site, you associate your contact information with your unique serial number. You can even create multiple contact cards, with separate business and personal information.

When you encounter another Poken user, you simply touch your Poken to theirs.  The devices sense each other, exchange serial numbers, and glow green to indicate a successful exchange.  Later, when you plug your Poken into your computer, you are shown the contact information for the person that you just met.  You can download that data into Outlook, another mail client, or just keep it on the Poken web site.

Essentially, a Poken is a digital business card, without all the bother of carrying paper cards.  Even better, you can’t run out of cards with a Poken, and you never lose a card you’ve acquired.  Best of all, the data is already entered for you on the Poken site, so you’ll never transcribe another business card.

It’s easy to imagine folks exchanging contact information at a conference or social event.  I could also see vendors with Poken readers at their booths, eliminating the need to “swipe your badge” to gather customer data.  There are all sorts of imaginative ways to use a Poken.

Poken also has a clever privacy feature.  You may encounter someone with whom you do not wish to exchange information.  Instead of awkwardly avoiding them, you discreetly tap a button on the Poken twice, just before touching it to their Poken.  You get their serial number, but they get a “ghost card” from you.  When they later synchronize their Poken, they see an empty business card (and have a private awkward moment).  If you later decide to reveal yourself to them, you can do so on the Poken site and your card will be revealed.

With all this going for it, what’s not to like about the Poken? It’s small, easy to use, well-designed, geeky-cool, and a conversation starter. What more could you want?

Well, I’d like to find someone else who owns one.  Honestly, I don’t even know if mine works, although I have high hopes.  Owning the only Poken in a crowd is much like the sound of one hand clapping.  For this great idea to take off, a lot of people need to acquire Pokens.  And soon.

So, I implore all of you to get a Poken.  While most Pokens target a younger demographic, the Poken Pulse sports a more executive style and offers 2 gigs of USB storage to boot.  With Christmas approaching, I think a Poken makes the perfect gift for everyone on your shopping list.  You’ll find dozens of Pokens (including the Pulse) at findapoken.com.  Do yourself (and me) a favor: hasten the end of paper business cards and get a Poken today.

Social Spackle December 9, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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It’s been a social media week for some reason, with many opportunities to discuss the benefits and pitfalls of all this new stuff with lots of folks.  Despite the attention that social media gets, and the adoption of the tools by some demographic groups, there is still a long way to go for some people to start using this stuff.

There’s a common refrain that permeates a lot of these discussions: “It might be useful for others, but I just don’t think it’s for me. Who cares what I’m doing or thinking?” I have a simple answer for that: “I do.”  And lots of other people as well.

The concept of social media is not new.  Years and years ago, social media went by different names.  We used to call it “talking,” or “writing a letter,” or “making a social call.” As technology advanced, it became “sending a telegram” and “making a phone call.” Now we call it “updating my status” or “sending a tweet.” Technology changes, but the goal remains the same.

The point is to keep in touch with people you care about, and for them to keep in touch with you.  These simple interactions with others build a rich fabric that connects you and keeps you close. While some people belittle the trivial information that often gets shared, it is that information, in fact, that makes the whole exercise worthwhile.

In today’s world, we rarely cross paths with people and engage them in person.  When we do, we often spend time catching up: “Where have you been? What have you been doing?” We do it because we care, and the more we know about a person, the more we can connect and share.

Social media lets you share those little bits about yourself all the time.  Interested people can absorb them and keep up with you.  I call this information “social spackle.”  It is the stuff that fills in the cracks in our relationships and keep them strong. When you do finally meet someone, you are already up to speed on their life; you can have a richer and more valuable moment together.

Consider a simple example: an acquaintance tweets as he goes on a trip to visit his daughter and see his grandchildren.  Trivial data, he thinks; who would care about that?  But those who know him are glad to know it, and file it all away.  When we next meet, we have excited questions: How was your trip?  How are those grandkids? That little bit of social spackle strengthened our bond and made for a nicer moment.

Reluctant to try social media?  Don’t do it for you.  Do it for those who care about you.  Find ways to spread some social spackle and see what happens.  You will be surprised at the change in the richness and quality of your relationships, both with people you’ve known and the people you will meet.  What do you have to lose?

When Tools Collide November 20, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.
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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/

Got A Card? November 6, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking, Technology.
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At any industry event, the impact of social media is evident.  People are tweeting as the event transpires. Bloggers c0ver keynote addresses live.  Vendors stream video from their booths, letting you watch presentations as you browse the show floor.

It is now common to see people run into folks they know but have never actually met.  Relationships built on Twitter or Facebook come alive when people actually meet face to face.  Closing the loop with a physical connection is now the last component of a rich relationship; it used to be the first.

In spite of all this connectedness and mobile technology, one thing has remained absolutely unchanged throughout the lifetime of the internet: the business card.  How can it be, with all this technology at our disposal, that the single most important way to gather important data about a person is a little card? Even people who have built a strong relationship electronically will still exchange cards when they meet for the first time.

Why?  What is missing from the new media that this old solution provides?

The problem has two sources.  First, people still need to exchange some basic data to complete a connection: name, phone number, email address.  Physical address is becoming much less important; other items (like your Twitter or Facebook name) are becoming more prominent.  Even so, the basic way to reach most people is by phone or email.

Secondly, there is no simple way to exchange this information.  I have used many electronic devices over the years, from a Casio Zoomer to various Palm devices to all sorts of phones.  Each of this gadgets has had some way to create a business card and send it to someone else, either by infrared or Bluetooth.  It was always very cool, seemed to work like magic, and never got used more than once or twice.  After you had shown off your geek skills to admiring neighbors, you then exchanged business cards and went on your way.

I don’t know that this will ever change.  There is no cross-platform standard for exchanging virtual business cards that actually works.  I know all about Bluetooth Object Exchange, but it’s just too hard to set up and actually use in real life.

Even if you could establish such a standard, it would take years for everyone to acquire a device that used it.  In the meantime, you’d still be handing out business cards.  And you’d still need cards for people without a device, not to mention needing cards to throw into drawings and such at industry events.

It’s actually kind of quaint that such an old practice simply will not succumb to modern technology.  Even as more and more people  tweet and blog and post and stream, you still cannot avoid asking that age-old question: “May I have your card?”

Why Blog? October 26, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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6 comments

In a recent article, Andrew Keen opined that CIOs have no business blogging.  His intentionally provocative piece was in response to an opposing view by John Suffolk, who is both a blogger and the UK government CIO.  I’ll presume that Mr. Keen was doing a bit of trolling and forgive him his somewhat grating approach, but he has touched on a question I get asked fairly frequently: “Why do you blog?”

The glib response, of course, is “why not?”  But now that this blog is approaching it’s second birthday, it’s worth a moment of reflection to understand why there might be value in executive (and not just CIO) blogging.

I started blogging as an attempt to informally share my thoughts on IT leadership.  I believe that teaching is an important aspect of leadership.  Rather than subject my team to periodic lectures on effective IT strategy and management, I began capturing my thoughts as blog entries.  Those on my team that were interested could read them; those who were not could ignore them.  While I do get occasional feedback from coworkers, I have no idea as to who reads this blog, or how often. That’s OK with me; if even one person finds value, then the exercise is worth it.

I also thought it was important to experience the technology first-hand.  Since I believe that CIOs should test and evaluate things, I wanted to see what it would be like to produce a blog on a regular basis.  Given the constant discussions of the value (or lack thereof) of social media technology in a corporate environment, having direct exposure makes me a more informed participant in the conversation.

In the course of writing, however, I discovered that there are many other side benefits to blogging:

  • You meet all sorts of interesting people. This is a huge, unexpected, pleasant occurrence. Many people have taken the time to either comment or email me about something I wrote and always teach me something new.
  • It can be clarifying. It really helps to write things down.  Many of my blog postings have allowed me to explore things in unexpected ways and given me insight into issues that I am dealing with.  I’ve found that writing enhances thinking; the opposite is not always the case.
  • It makes you a better writer. Writing is like public speaking: the more you do it, the easier it gets.  You also become very appreciative of those who write well.  Dashing off 500 words is not easy.  Dashing them off on a regular basis can be daunting, but the discipline required to do it builds character.

In the end, perhaps the best reason for blogging is that I enjoy doing it.  I’ve always enjoyed writing and I certainly love my job.  Combining the two seems like a natural fit.  It isn’t for everyone, of course; there seem to be fewer than two dozen blogging CIOs in the world.  That said, if you are at all inclined to write, I suggest you give blogging a try, regardless of your position in the world.  Mr. Keen’s opinions aside, anyone who has something to share should share it.