The right to anonimity

Europe is approaching a new round of elections and a lot of candidates are mulling, about many other things, the issue of Internet regulation.

I may get involved again professionally in one side’s campaign, so before that happens, I would like to offer to all politicians (who obviously read this blog BEFORE the Huffington Post or the Financial Times) some interesting advice on what the Internet wants.

Click on screen shot to go to live page

Capeesh?

(For the technically inclined, here is a nice infographic describing how it works)

Contacts madness (2 – resolution)

A couple of weeks ago I voiced my frustration at not being able to achieve a stable sync of my various address books. Unable to stand the uncertainty in now knowing if a password or a user ID is correct (also helped by the recent loss of almost every identity-related item), I decided to takle the issue and get to a resolution.

I mentioned I use a Pro account of what I believe is the best cross-platform for contacts syncing out there, Soocial, and with the help of their support (thanks Bart !) I did the following to achieve contact Nirvana: first, removed all the sources except the Mac, then added them back one at the time until I found that the offending connection was the Android one, which essentially duplicates (and conflicts with) the sync that happens between my Google account and the Android phone. It should NOT, but it does.

To avoid this problem, this is the full procedure:

1. add all the sources – EXCEPT the Android phone
2. stop sync on Soocial from the Preferences screen
3. reset Sync Services  on Mac (http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1627)
4. reset Soocial for the Mac:
   • Go to the Soocial client Preferences screen
   • Make sure the client is OFF, but logged in
   • Hit the “Reset” button.
   • Turn client ON
5. enable Google Sync on phone (settings – accounts – Google – make sure “contacts” are checked)
6. clean up the set manually – easiest on the Mac Address Book
7. wait for changes to propagate

You may have to do some minor cleaning on Android as deletions do not propagate as seamlessly. Did I mention already how pissed I am at this obvious lack of control of my Digital Self?

Perhaps yes.

Yanked!

Today I discovered that, despite user’ reluctance, Picasa Web Albums essentially does not exist anymore: you can still browse your pictures, but not much else – all the editing and organizing functionality has been transferred over to G+ Pics, another effort by Google to twist our arms into using the largest Ghost Town social network on the planet, and yet another sign of how little we control our Digital Self.

I cannot really say I mourn Picasa which was never much in terms of user interface and navigation, but I had srt of grown accustomed to it. More than anything I will miss the absence of the continuous “Share with your friends” pressure that’s so characteristic of G+, as Google is bending over backwards to demonstrate how active are its G+ users.

These devious sharing buttons are everywhere and are always the default choice – you must look hard for a “Cancel” button, with the result many users will think “Cancel” applies to whatever it is they were trying to do and not to the obnoxious hypersharing mode.

Having said that, hypersharing would be annoying if somebody WAS actually looking at his stream. Since not many people are, the problem is more a principle one than a real one.

LinkedIn endorsements: why I don’t think they are going away

Yesterday on my flight back from Dusseldorf I read this post by Rene Siegel on why she thinks LinkedIn Endorsements are going away.

I beg to differ because I think Rene is a victim of her own mis-use of LinkedIn, stated clearly in her own words:

Today, I received LinkedIn endorsements of my skills from five people I’ve never met.

There’s no way these people have any context for my ability to deliver the skills and expertise they endorsed. Don’t get me wrong. LinkedIn is still an invaluable tool for my business and I’ve written about it before. But I’m worried about these endorsements, which feel an awful lot like a popularity contest.

Of course, the quality of judgements people express on your professionalism is a direct consequence of how well people know you, which in turn is a direct consequence of the approach we have decided to take in building our network.

My choice was obviously different from Rene’s, inasmuch I have strived not to accept connection requests by people I do not know IRL; and looking at the numbers, these would represent a significant share of my connections (213 over 1200+ connections); it is true that the endorsement mechanism mimicks the ease of use of the “like” button and henceforth it should not be given too much weight; moreover, a certain level of background noise (i.e. random endorsements) is inevitable, so I usually consider only the big numbers: yes, someone endorsed me for my proficiency in using Microsoft Office. As someone coming from Lotus Development more or less straight into the Mac world, this is unlikely to be one of my strong suits, but what the hell.

Had I accepted these additional 200+ connections from people I’ve never met, I would significantly dilute how well my LinkedIn network represents my IRL network and, as a consequence, how realistic is the skill picture that this network paints of me, especially given that I have received endorsements from less that 10% of my connections.

So my suggestion to Rene (and anyone who wants to have an endorsement picture that’s more realistic) to start doing some spring cleaning, keeping only as a connection people who know her.

Again on endorsements

I continue to believe LinkedIn endorsements are a good way to self assess how you are perceived by the people who know you; I have today taken another look at where I stand, and here is what I found:

Does anyone know of a publicly available estimate on the average # of skills people are giving endorsements for? I have put my finger in the air and said 4, but it may be on the high side – anyway this says that I am well below 10% of my connection who can be bothered endorsing me. OTOH, I have no idea of how many people I endorsed for any skill, so I have no idea if I am a net giver or receiver of endorsements.

Also, I have divided arbitrarily my skills in “Old” and “New” and although the New category is growing a little faster, I still see a pretty balanced skill set, still in line with my previous assessment last month.

You saw it here first

Yes, I have started writing about the Digital Self in may, 2009 with this post.

It wasn’t a wild idea at all, and now Google offers a solution – the fatal flaw is that this is merely a technical solution, of which the world overflows. The real question is: do you trust Google?

Perception catching up with reality

Today is an important day for me – today, for the first time ever, my LinkedIn profile shows more endorsements for “Social Media” than it does for “Public Relations” – it is important to stress that I leave endorsement absolutely unaided and spontaneous, i.e. do nothing to influence them in one direction or another.

It should be noted that although the single skill I am most endorsed for right now is Social Media, the total of votes for the skills broadly falling into a “traditional” bucket still outnumbers the “digital” one by a small margin (144 to 140) so we can well say that the jury is still out; moreover, while Linkedin does not provide stats on how many of my contacts endorsed me in total, I see most people (including myself) usually endorse for more than one skill; assuming an average of 3/4 endorsements per contact, my 300 votes represent not even 10% of my contacts, these being likely the ones that visit LinkedIn more often, and therefore the most exposed to my digital exploits.

Despite these biases, however, and despite the many more years in which I have practiced PR vs. Social Media, the latter has left a somewhat lasting impression on the people who know me, which is also very encouraging because it demonstrates that there is at least SOME connection between how I describe myself and how people perceive me.

Archiving your digital Self

Very, very good article – if not that technically advanced – on the hygiene of a little maintenance to your digital Self on the NYT today, and I think some sound advice that applies to many other aspects of the DS: we must take responsibility for it

People are becoming aware of the importance of personal digital preservation. But they also need to make time for it.

Does Facebook play foul?

Marco Camisani Calzolari second (I think) book “Escape from Facebook” is out. I am very likely to buy it, but even before I do that I am intrigued at the debate that is happening around his thesis (“beware of using Facebook just like another commercial marketing channel”) which is striking given the fact it’s coming from someone – it has been noted – who makes a living also of selling Facebook programs.

The discussion seems to be flaming around whether FB is abusing its clearly dominant position to do unpleasant things that screw up our plans in mid-air; some seem to believe that the “greater communal good” requires some degree of regulation or oversight over Facebook’ activities.

I have three things to say on this.

1. the Digital Self

Sorry, mr. crying marketeer whose users have been “stolen” by Facebook: these were NEVER your users to start with. I like McDonald’s, Avirex and American Express, but I am not theirs. If anything, they are mine: they will be in my consideration set for as long as they prove to care for me and offer me products and experiences that I value / like / have fun with.

I will not repeat here my now-too-long rant on the Digital Self (but the brave souls can click on the Digital Self category in the cloud to read all about it).

The sooner we start designing marketing programs that take into account the inherent synallagma in ANY marketing program, the better we will be: consumers have an almost infinite amount of patience and will bend over backwards in way thought impossible if we offer something they value in return, but absolutely hate freeloaders.

2. is the race over, yet?

I would be VERY careful to name Facebook the race winner: there are parts of the world that are far from here where the dominant players are called V-Kontakte or RenRen; I am not talking of interesting but doomed ideas like Hyves which never stood a chance simply because they insisted on a geographical niche that was way too small to ever allow for economies of scale to kick in.

Besides, the sustainability and monetization strategies of Facebook are yet to be proven – with all due respect, Facebook is no Google or Microsoft and, IMHO, there is no guarantee it will own a well-defined, hugely profitable franchise it can milk indefinitely as it searches for the next idea.

3. how did you not see that coming?

But my biggest criticism perhaps is this: why put all your eggs in the same basket? Why think a bunch of “likes” were all you needed? What made you think you could do away with a marketing database, opted-in in your name (not Facebook’)?

Am I alone in considering FB just another promotional channel where achieving critical mass for a program is easier than elsewhere, but NOT the home for my programs? I thought that OWNING the ultimate destination asset of a marketing program was the whole point of a well-designed strategy.

So I share MCC’ alarm at some of Facebook’ practices, but since I do not think that the solutions lie in “public oversight”  measures  I will NOT sign his petition; in fact I am not in fear of the marketing programs I design will become broken; actually, the possible obsolescence of FB in favor of some, newer, shinier toy was a key design element.

Unifying my Social Graph – one painful baby step at the time!

Today I decided to do the unthinkable: merge my Social Graphs on LinkedIn and Facebook. Whether to be on any or all of those is obviously a personal decision, and there is no hard-and-fast rule that will apply to everybody.

Fact to the matter, I know my two Social Graphs are heavily disconnected (if nothing else because of numbers) but since I have curated my LinkedIn contacts very carefully, I know these people all really know me, so I resorted to a sort of mass mailing to ask them to also connect on FB.

By the way, the process is – in pure Facebook-esque approach – numbingly difficult: exporting a CSV from LinkedIn is simple (if you ignore the fact that selecting “all” on the contacts to export LinkedIn says it has selected 500, while in reality it has truly selected “all” your contacts), but finding this page to import them back into Facbook was a nightmare and I only found it through a depp link in another blog, which is why I am posting it here.

This is something I have said and written so many times: every time you (service provider of any kind) make me feel stupid, you are NOT adding to the experience. Every time I do not understand how to operate the hot water in the shower and every time I have trobe navigating the site, you are killing a handful of synapses on my brain, making me a little bit more stupid, and yourself a little bit less loved.

Your choice, after all, but I do not like feeling stupid. ’nuff said!

Obviously there will be some who will consider Facebook more fit for non-work related connections and that’s fine with me, they will simply ignore my request; for the numbers oriented: of my 1143 LinkedIn connections, there were 431 with whom I am not connected on Facebook.

Sadly Facebook does not allow me to personalize the message they get (why?) so I am hoping they may see this (unlikely) or simply do not ask themselves too many questions (likely); nor it tell me how many new friends I have added since…(why?), therefore I record here that I am starting from 587: in a few days will report back on the success of this mass mailing.

UPDATE: I also attempted the same merger with Twitter. This is slightly more complicated, as Twitter does not allow you to directly check a CSV list; the workaround is therefore to import the list as contacts of a dummy GMail account and then ask Twitter to check against this account’ Address Book. This time I found 231 Twitter users I was not following; another 750 users are not on Twitter at all (a surprising 66% of my LinkedIn contacts) but I did not have the nerve to ask them to join Twitter. Some of these may follow me back, (current follower count stands at 984) we’ll see.

UPDATE 8 nov: Facebook friend count now stands at 808, so it looks like 221 of the 431 friend request I sent went through in a little over 24 hours; on Twitter I am now following 860 people and my followers increased by 30 to  1014: the act of following someone does not bring as an immediate consequence the reciprocation.