Social networking – personal or professional, or both? Where to draw the line?

So those of us who work, for a small business, as a free agent or for a corporation, and have a Facebook or a Twitter account. How to decide whether to use that account for professional purposes?

I see it happen left and right.

For example, someone I know who works for a large corporation told me recently that their managers unofficially encouraged them to promote their products on their social networking pages to their friends and the outside world. For failing to find a better word to describe how it makes me feel, I’ll say icky.

On the other hand, I heard that one of the employees of the national news organization, the kind that specializes in breaking news, shared a piece of breaking news on his Facebook page before it hit the wires. So that person definitely treated his Facebook page as personal but misused it from the professional stand point.

Or, take the Russian President, who during his last

visit to the Silicon Valley signed up for a Twitter account as @KremlinRussia. I’m totally fascinated with the idea that the Russian President has a Twitter account and actually uses it. But it is not the point. I actually looked through it (it’s in Russian, I do speak the language) and there are obviously two different types of messages there. One clearly is posted by his press service, it talks about all sorts of boring stuff like appointments of local authorities. But the other looks like it’s coming directly from the President.

Tweets like “San Francisco – very beautiful city. Today I’m going to the Sillicon Valley to check out Apple, Yandex, Cisco!” (my translation)

Or like “The view from my hotel room.”

Or like “The weather got worse, instead of taking the helicopters, driving to Toronto…” or “Germany and England play today, I sincerely wish them both luck. In any case the best football wins.”

So whose account is that, Mr. Medvedev’s or is it an official account of the President of Russia.

Confusing.

I’m sure that the jury is still out for defining all of these new rules of the game and boundaries. But it seems like in the end the traditional perception of spaces – personal and professional – would be reset.

Facebook, I give up

So I wonder if anybody has had a similar experience to mine.

When I first signed up to Facebook, I thought of it only as of a personal communication tool, that allowed me to share my life with my friends, whom I carefully selected. I made a conscious effort not to friend everybody and their mothers. I thought of Facebook as of this very special place where I can be open and honest with some very special people in my life.

And not that what I wanted to share was inappropriate, but still there is stuff that I can share with some people and don’t want to share with others. Stuff like my feelings, what I do, where I go.

For example, I would update my status if I had a successful shopping trip and brag to my friends about a great deal that I got for a fantastic dress.

But then, I got a friend invitation from a colleague of mine. And that made me uncomfortable. It became a dilemma. What do I do? Not friending a colleague would be awkward. But at the same time, I didn’t really want my colleague to know everything I want to share with my friends.

So I decided to stay true to my initial decision to keep my Facebook account private and available only to my true close friends.

I meticulously declined invitations from people who I thought didn’t match my criteria of a friend and explained to them that my Facebook was private and that my professional network was on LikendIn.

And then the avalanche happened.

Everybody started friending everybody. I got dozens of invitations from people I hardly knew. I even got an invitation from my boss!

How what do you do with that?

I tried, I really tried to resist. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t any longer explain to everyone that I didn’t want to friend them. It just looked weird. I tried playing with the security settings – but I just don’t have the time or any desire to set individually who I want to see a particular photo of me and who I want to exclude from reading my status update – it is just too much trouble.

So I just give up!

That’s it. I open the gate and invite everybody.

Come, be my friend.

But I won’t be so open on Facebook any more. I won’t share my thoughts and feelings. I don’t want my boss to know when I get a great deal on a pair of shoes. I will just take my personal business elsewhere and consider Facebook a part of my public life…

Looking for a job? Start networking!

I’ve talked a lot about how technology affects our personal lives. But it revolutionizes how we interact in professional setting as well – from how we look for a job, to how we communicate on the job.

Technology is definitely a blessing for corporate America. It makes so many tasks easier and faster, saves a lot of time and money. From email and intranet, to virtual conference rooms, webcasting and screencasting.

We can have meetings with clients and colleagues from different offices around the world not leaving our desks.

We can train and get trained. I’m training an intern right now, for example, via email. I give him tasks, he sends them back completed, I review them and so on. With the number of questions that he asks me about every single small detail, I think all I’d be doing is answering them, if I had to do it in person.

Looking for a job is a whole new world as well. It seems like nobody cares about paper resumes and cover letters any more. We look for job offers online, we submit for them electronically and then we check out inboxes waiting for responses from potential employers. In many professions, like design, photography, videography, writing, candidates create entire websites as their resumes with work samples and links to their actual work online.

More than 70 million people on over 200 countries have their profiles on LinkedIn.com, including executives from all Fortune 500 companies. There is Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, and many other online job search engines. Most of the companies have their job openings posed online.

To make a sense of how to use all that cacophony of work-related technology, I talked to Allison Hemming, a founder and president of The Hired Guns talent agency, author of “Work It!” and a career management expert who has been featured in The New York Times, The Today Show, The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Newsday, CNN, CNBC, Good Morning America, NPR, PBS, Fortune Magazine and many other media outlets.

At first she agreed that technology has changed the rules of the job hunting and hiring game: “First, it has leveled the playing field - jobs that were previously only offered through headhunters are now accessible to everyone. LinkedIn has made it perfectly okay to have your profile (a stripped down resume+bio) out there 100% of the time for all the world to see. This means you can always be looking and people can always find you. Before LinkedIn job hunters had to sneak around.” She added: “Social media and blogs have allowed individuals to elevate themselves as experts (provided that they know what they're best in the world at and understand what their personal brands). I think we'll look back at this time and see it as tremendously creative and innovative.”

But then she dropped a real bomb - despite all that growth that online job hunting has enjoyed over the last decade: “The internet only accounts for 11% of all jobs landed. 80% of all jobs are actually landed through tried-and-true networking”.

No stop for a second, go back and look at it.

Only 11% of jobs landed are found online.

Now that it is staring me in the eyes, I realize that it’s true. Let me give you an example. My friends lost her job in apparel merchandizing last December, right before Christmas. Realizing that nothing was going to happen over the Holidays, she took a break and then literally chained herself to her computer for weeks looking for a job. She has been sending dozens of resumes a week. And all it resulted in was in her frustration.

After 3 months of doing that, out of hundreds of resumes that she sent out, she landed one job interview, for a position that turned out to be below her professional level. She landed two other interviews though networking with her ex-colleagues and ended up accepting an offer from an organization that she worked for before her last job.

So now why do we spend all this time working on our online profiles, surfing online job search engines, sending out resumes? According to Hemming 80% of people spend their time working the online job boards and only 10% networking.

What it leads to on the other end? Hemming describes: “Hiring managers are overwhelmed, because more people apply online than ever before, inboxes get stuffed with a lot of "noise" that isn't appropriate for the job at hand. In essence, your competition is spamming the hiring community making it harder for your great resume to get noticed”.

So what should we do? Allison puts is nice and short:

“People need to weight their time according to what's working”.

Airing personal life on Facebook

Facebook is a weird beast. It is a great platform for communication. But at the same time I think the society hasn’t realized how powerful of a tool it can be. A status update, an uploaded photo, a click on a ‘Like’ button now gets broadcasted way beyond the close circle of friends.

And that can pose a whole array of questions, like Can one be too socially connected? Can one have too many Facebook friends? What is appropriate to say on Facebook and what is not? And many many more.

For example, this morning I logged on to Facebook and discovered that a colleague of mine is divorcing. And apparently in a very public way. The colleague’s status update (on my wall) contained a very mean attack at the soon-to-be ex. It even included the kids. Ouch!

It pretty much felt like I was sitting in the living room and listening to them arguing in the bedroom. It made me feel awkward. I understand that people’s lives change, but flashing it in front of everybody on Facebook doesn’t feel right to me. Especially because we are colleagues.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like not knowing some of my colleagues’ personal lives.

I don’t really like finding out about important things in people’s lives on Facebook either. Somehow it feels impersonal. It’s great to share a photo of a July 4^th Fireworks or to share a link to an interesting article. But dissing your ex or breaking up with someone seems just inappropriate.

It’s like thank you cards. Ok, don’t yawn. Yes, thank you cards. They went from a card to a thank you on the phone to thanks to TX. And don’t’ get me wrong, I’m not anti-TX-er. It is just in some situations a TX, thanks or even thank you is just not enough.

OK, enough of being serious.

Here is a eye candy for you, a treat to reading through this post.

Chances are, you have already seen it, but even if you did, I’m sure you’ll watch it again.

What the inventor of the world's first digital camera has to say about digital photography today?

My last post left me thinking about how digital imaging is changing the way we communicate.

We email images, exchange them on Flikr, post them on Facebook.

Photo and video cameras are cheap and easily accessible not only as

stand alone devices, but in our computers and cell phones. Most of us have a camera at hand at all times.

Coincidentally, in the line of my work, I have just had an honor to

meet the inventor of

the world’s first digital camera, Mr. Steven Sasson. I asked him several questions about what he thought abo

ut the state of digital photography today.

He shared my fascination with the modern technology:

“Digital imaging today is ubiquitous,” he said. “It used to be a way to memorialize the event or a gathering. Now digital images are used as a part of casual conversation we all have. Pictures are everywhere, they are easy to capture, easy to store, easy to find. And I think it’s changing the way we live. To some extent we all are better behaved now because we all know that we are on camera almost all the time.”

But even though this visionary has retired from his engineering career at Kodak already, he still can not take his

inventor’s hat off, and so his brain is constantly working thinking about the challenges ahead in the development of tech.

“The technology has taken us to the point now where I think we challenge ourselves in how we are going to use this, to make it helpful for us.” Mr. Sasson continued. “I see no limit to it, I see challenges in being able to find, and to present and to communicate our images, because we take more and more all the time, but where are all those pictures going? How are they going to create a record of our world? And how do we find them? So I would imagine that the archivists are quite challenged now by what’s going on with digital imaging. “

But still, when I asked him to make a prediction of what’s coming our way next, even Mr. Sasson shook his head:

“Where it’s going to go? I must tell you I don’t know. I am as amazed as anybody else when I see some of these new developments that come along. I’m just astounded at the price, the reliability, the utility and the imagination that’s in these new products that come out. I’m very excited.”

If you didn’t know, Mr. Sasson’s digital camera took its first picture in 1975. The camera had a resolution of 0.01 megapixels. It took 23 seconds to record a black and white digital image to a magnetic cassette tape. A special playback unit read the information off the cassette and displayed the image on a television set. It was a first camera that didn’t need any film to take a shot, had no moving mechanical parts and didn’t need any paper to reproduce the image. It weighted 8 pounds, though.

Mr. Sasson also joked that if he knew at the time it was going to become so successful, he would have built it to look more beautiful. You definitely couldn’t fit this one in a cell phone. Oh wait, there were no cell phones back then.

I borrowed some images from that article on Kodak's website, to make it easier for you to check them out.

The power of mobile

The power of mobile.
A picture can say what a thousand words can't.
People documented their lives and shared that information with others in pictures way before the books, diaries, Facebook status, Tweets and text messaging have been invented.
Now the world of technology, especially mobile technology is placing this ability of documenting and sharing our lives in pictures literally in our hands.
Here is for example what I MMSed my friends and even my mom this weekend to let them know what I was up to. I didn't have to explain anything - a picture said it all.

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Why I hate Facebook, sometimes.

It was love at first sight.

I was 21, working very hard at my first job. He was my colleague, my partner, my other half.

Three years later he was my husband, four more later he was my ex-husband.

Two years after that I came in to work, checked my email, placed some calls and logged on to Facebook, following my daily routine.

And there is was.

Right in the middle of the 'News Feed' staring right at me, a beautiful montage of my ex-husband's wedding.

Do I care? Not really.

Did I want to see it? Not at all.

Our divorce wasn't the nicest one, if they ever can be nice. And despite initial naive attempts to stay friends, we didn't.

I didn't seek it out, I didn't look for it. It was just there, it found me.

One of my Facebook 'friends' posted it and it ended up on my feed.

This whole Facebook thing is still a bit new. And we haven't really seen how it would affect our lives over the years.

When we turn the six degrees of separation into reality on Facebook, are we getting a little too socially connected?

I love cell phones

I’ve been on the road for the last two days, traveling for work. Here is the tally:

Miles driven: 650.

Water consumed: gallons.

Bathroom stops: numerous.

Caught up with:

• a friend who lives in Texas, I haven’t spoken to her in almost a year and have been meaning to reconnect with all that time
• my mom
• my best friend
• my childhood friend who lives overseas
• my other good friend that I haven spoken to in about a month.

I know that cell phones are not new and that everybody knows how amazing they are, but I still can’t stop loving having one.

Have you ever had a fight over text messaging?

I had. And more than once.

Here is an example.

My friend was supposed to join me and my other friend for drinks on a Saturday night. She had said in advance that she had another engagement to go to prior to our meeting, so she was meeting us late. But when the time came, she got caught up at that other party and texted me that she was just going to stay there. I texted her in a short message that it wasn’t a big deal.

Then next morning, I was expecting her to contact me, to ask how my evening went, and she didn’t. I got upset cause I thought she didn’t care.

I texted her and asked if everything was OK, and she responded that all was well.

Another day went by and we hardly communicated, obviously being upset with one another.

Until we spoke on the phone and straightened things out.

Well, where things went wrong?

I say the problem was with the vehicle in our conversation –the text messaging. She thought I was upset with her for not showing up, when I wasn’t. I thought she was ignoring me, when she wasn’t. Assumptions, assumptions, assumptions. And all triggered by the format of a short text message.

Would the misunderstanding happen if we just spoke on the phone? No way, I’m sure.

So much gets lost in translation and so much is open to interpretation in text messages, that it is influencing how we communicate and how we react to each other. I’m not saying that text messaging is bad for relationships overall, but in this particular instance – there is a weakness.

Have you had an experience like that before?

Digital personality or Dual personality?

I met this man online. We emailed each other for about a week. I was really excited about him: as a matter of fact, I haven’t been that excited about anyone in a while.

He was very responsive, which is a good sign for me. We emailed each other every day several times a day. He was nice and attentive, asked many questions and answered all my questions. We seemed to have a lot in common – same interests, same tastes, same lifestyles. After several days of emailing he initiated a phone number exchange and we started texting.

It was great! I couldn’t even believe it, because it was too picture perfect.

Until we met.

And it was like a cold shower. From the first second I saw him, I realized that there was absolutely no chemistry between the two of us. We are like people from different planets, different universes even! We sat through an hour an a half of brunch and couldn’t run faster away from each other.

So now my question is the following: What was it that was missing in our digital relationship? What is so different between the man who wrote those emails and text messages and the real person I met for brunch?

Regardless of what it was, it made a huge difference. And it got me thinking about how we see each other in the digital world versus how we see each other in the real world, especially when we first start communicating electronically.

It seems that we have dual personalities – a digital and a human one. Or at least our digital personality is a stripped down version of our Self, missing some crucial non-verbal components.

I didn’t want to wonder about it on my own, so I talked to my colleagues and friends to see if they’ve experiences the same phenomenon as well. I will not be using their names at their request.

Interestingly, in unison, my interviewees brought in an idea of expectations, an idea that before meeting people in-person our imaginations create an expectation of what that person is like based on the digital exchange. And then when we meet that person for real, that expectation is either met or not.

Here is how one of my friends described it:

“I have been on dates that I couldn’t WAIT for I was so excited, and then I met the boy in person to find him terribly uncomfortable to be around. I have also been on dates that I went into dragging my feet, dreading what was sure to be an awkward and painful evening, and I have come out absolutely on cloud 9, dreaming of the next time I could see this boy.”

Another friend of mine compared online dating to online shopping, to be specific, Match.com and FreshDirect.com. Here is how she put:

“Certainly the products are different - in one case, its vegetables or used books and in the other it is a potential partner. But the main objective, at least for the first stage of the process is to "sell" and you can only sell something if you make it appealing. … So you bought the veggies and the Fresh Direct delivery boy dropped them off at your door. You opened the box, took off the plastic cover - you looked at it, you smelled it, you bit it. Is it still as good as you imagined, is it as good as it was on that picture you saw online?”

I know, it sounds a bit harsh to compare online dating to ordering produce online. But I think this view, despite making me uncomfortable, is very valid.

So let’s apply it to my situation - I had created an expectation of a man I communicated with online, and when I met him in real world, it wasn’t that he was a different person, he just didn’t meet my artificially created expectation.

Wow, I didn’t think of that – thank you, friends!

At the end of the day, I think this topic is huge and warrants an expert opinion. I know I’ve only touched upon online dating - a very narrow sliver of digital communications. But I’ll keep thinking about it and dig for more ideas that I can’t think of. So stay tuned…

Meeting people

I came to New York City a little under five years ago. I didn’t know anybody here. I was terrified.

How would I meet people, I wondered, panicking?

The room for some reason looked and felt even smaller than it was. But at the same time it seemed as though I was standing alone in the middle of the endless field.

It takes years to build relationships, I thought. Most of my friends back home I’ve known for years. I met them all before I graduated college. I had no clue how to meet people and make friends.

But then I opened the window.

The internet browser window.

And the endless field I was standing in instantly tuned into a land of opportunities. The internet browser became my window to the 8 million people living in New York City.

Meetup.com, dating sites, ethnic communities, interest groups – all became available to me on demand at my fingertips, literally.

I met many interesting people through those opportunities since and made one very good friend.

I imagine with horror what I would have done without that window.

Why?

6:30 am, a nice pleasant music plays and the dream is over.

The first thing I do even before I wake up is reach for my BlackBerry. No wonder my right eye is stronger than my left.

Throughout the day I communicate with dozens of people for work and for fun, mostly via electronic devices.

I IM with my friends, email with my colleagues, Skype with my parents, whiteness lives of some people I hardly know unfold on Facebook, once I have been broken up with via a text message.

I’m in touch with more people than I could ever imagine being in touch with.

What a great progress in communications.

But at the same time how much has been lost in translation, how much misunderstanding and confusion has been created?

More and more gadgets, apps and websites appear every day to help us communicate and I find it fascinating. So I want to devote this blog to looking at how technology transforms the way humans interact with each other.