Almost Savvy » Tips

Just Because We’re Social Networking “Friends” Doesn’t Mean I’ll Go To 3rd Base With You

Irene Koehler — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:34:16 +0000

You Don’t Bring Me Flowers Anymore

Where did the romance go? When did we stop asking, “Tell me about yourself,” “Do you like to take long walks on the beach?” or even the tired old line, “What’s your sign?” Suddenly, upon meeting someone new, they immediately try to score and ask me to go over to their place to seal the deal.

Am I talking about my dating life? Hardly. I’m talking about my relationships with people where I spend much more of my time – online.

Talk (And Listen) To Me

We’ve all read the advice that the most effective ways to leverage the opportunities to build relationships with new people online is to be engaging and interested in them, by having a conversation that includes both listening and responding. Why then are people and businesses promoting themselves and trying to get me to buy their stuff as soon as I connect with them? It feels like I’ve just walked over with my hand extended intending to introduce myself and I get propositioned. Uh…ewww. All I can say is this doesn’t work with me – not in the real world and not online. If this happened at a live networking event, the conversation would go something like this:

“Hi. My name is Irene. It is nice to meet you.”

“Well (pretend you heard your name here), I’ll bet it is nice to meet me. You’re lucky you met me just in time because, boy do I have the answers to all of the problems you have or may have one day in the future. I know you’ll love my product/service/website so much that you’ll want to run out and spontaneously tell everyone you know about it, so here are some extra cards to pass out to all of your friends. Hey, you’re awesome, hope to talk with you again soon. Bye now.”

“Uh, what did you say your name was?”

Have you had this experience? When this happens online, it takes the form of email, newsletters, Facebook mail or direct messages on Twitter. As soon as you’ve “friended” someone on Facebook or followed someone on Twitter, you immediately receive newsletters or messages telling you to “click here” to do something – which benefits the other person. I’ve seen this on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

(click to enlarge images)

You Lost Me At “Click Here”

I connected with you because I wanted to get to know you. Consider it a first date, or the possibility of a first date. I don’t want you to kiss me, tell me what I need or invite me over to your place. If you do, you’re out. On Twitter, this is one of many reasons I will immediately unfollow you. On Facebook, I’ll unfriend you. On LinkedIn, I’ll disconnect. Through our connection, you have additional access to contact me directly. This access is a privilege, not an opportunity take our relationship where I’m not ready to go. No, I don’t want to come over to see your etchings or listen to your stereo (yes, someone really did ask me to do this when I was in college). I most certainly do not want to click on your link to buy something or find out more about you. It’s rude and presumptuous. It’s spam and, most importantly, it’s all about you.

When you want to talk, let me know. I’ll be here. In the meantime, stop groping my email address and trying to get to 3rd base. It ain’t gonna happen.

How to: Turn On/Off LinkedIn Notifications

Irene Koehler — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:51:46 +0000

From the AlmostSavvy mailbag:

David asks, “How do I stop receiving an email each time someone connects with me on LinkedIn?”

Great question, David!

LinkedIn can be a real workhorse when it comes to our networking efforts. The potential benefits are huge, but filtering content can become a challenge. The good news is, like most networking sites, we have the ability to customize how we’d like to receive information from our connections.

I’ve recorded a short video demonstrating how to change how you receive these notifications from LinkedIn. Let me know in the comments if this was helpful to you and if you’ve got other questions.

LinkedIn-apalooza! Ready to rev-up your profile?

Irene Koehler — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:00:04 +0000

If you’re a professional or business person, you know you need to be using LinkedIn wisely, right? And, college students, that goes for you, too. If you don’t know why it matters or know deep-down in the pit of your stomach, you know that you’re really not all that sure what to do with LinkedIn, then this is for you……

I’m excited to be partnering with O’Reilly Media to present a free webinar on using the more advanced features of LinkedIn on April 20. Here’s the deal…this webinar is for people who have already customized and optimized their LinkedIn profiles. If you start actively using LinkedIn’s more interactive features without having done the critical work on your profile first, you won’t get nearly the value out of your efforts as you would have otherwise. In fact, this can work against you.

To bridge this gap and make sure to catch everyone up so you are ready to get the most out of the O’Reilly webinar, I am offering another webinar before then to cover all the customization tips and details which are often overlooked.

Be sure to register and mark your calendars for:

April 20, 10:00 am (Pacific) LinkedIn Beyond the Basics – In partnership with O’Reilly. This is FREE
April 23, 10:00 am (Pacific) LinkedIn Basics Webinar – Regular price $39 (a great deal!) 50% Discount code to be shared during O’Reilly session

What questions or tips would you like to have covered in the sessions? While I probably won’t be able to cover everything, your input is most helpful as I prepare the best presentation to meet your needs.

Who Influences You? (Plus, get a free book)

Irene Koehler — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:33:03 +0000

One of the best ways to learn is to watch others; see what works, what falls flat, what suits your style and what doesn’t.

Learning how best to communicate and influence others is no different. Don’t we all hope to influence others in some way? Whether it is to market our business, persuade a client or vendor, motivate an audience or capture the attention of potential employers, influence is important.

Seizing the opportunity to learn from people and brands who successfully build an audience (and those who miss the mark) allows us to develop our own set of best practices. Gaining traction as an influencer is no simple task. Adding “Become an influencer” task to our calendar for next Monday morning will not accomplish anything, at least not with genuine, long-term results.

To further muddy the waters, not only do we have different ideas how to become an influencer, we don’t all agree on what it means to influence others.

Is being an influencer something we do…

or, is it something we are?

Think about individuals and brands that influence your thinking, decisions or actions. Who are they and, more importantly, what is it about them that connects you so strongly to them?

Your Turn: Comments and Free Books!

Courtesy of Dale Carnegie Training to celebrate the release of their new iPhone app, I have 10 free copies of ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People‘ to give away as follows: Five will go to the first 5 people who add relevant comments. The remaining 5 will go to those with the best comments (to be selected by members of the AlmostSavvy fan page on Facebook). And, no, you can’t win 2 books! Comments posted by April 13 will be considered. Winners will be contacted on April 15, making tax day just a little brighter.

Please share! I can’t wait to learn from your experiences.

I Don’t Care Where. You. Are. Right. Now.

Irene Koehler — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 22:59:51 +0000

Hey, you! Yeah, you standing in line at Starbucks using your phone to check-in while waiting to get your daily latte. We need to have a word.

We’ve been connected for awhile on Twitter and Facebook. I like you, really I do. I enjoy getting to know you better through our connection. I appreciate the information you’ve shared about your interests and news in your area of expertise. The great thing about using technology and social networking platforms is that we can easily connect, no matter where we happen to be. See, that’s the thing…I don’t need to know where you at this very moment. I don’t need to know that you’re at the market, at the gas station, at work or on the train. In fact, and don’t take this personally, unless you are someplace really cool or unusual, I probably don’t want to know.

If I wanted to know these things, we’d be connected on Foursquare so I could follow along as you cruise through town going to meetings and running errands. If I’ve made the decision to not connect there, why then am I seeing your check-ins in my Twitter stream – and my Facebook stream – and often both? And, to make matters worse, since you’re not sure which service is going to win the geolocation war (see here and here), you’re using them all. For each stop in your day, you check-in with Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt, Whrrl and others. And it isn’t just you, there are more and more people doing this. I’m drowning in a sea of “I’m at Panera Bread (Free wifi FTW).” I can hardly wait for the Facebook geolocation feature to roll out soon (cue: sarcasm).

The results of my absolutely unscientific poll on Twitter and Facebook were unanimous. I asked people to raise their right hand if they liked seeing others’ check-ins in their social streams; left hand if they didn’t. Without exception, all I got were left hands. Just a sampling of the replies I received:

If you want to keep pushing out all of your check-ins to my social stream, that is certainly your prerogative. Just please understand that I, along with a growing number of like-minded folks, may end up unfollowing and unfriending you, or hiding your updates in our stream. It is disruptive because it makes it more difficult to see the content I really want to see and comes across as being all about you, without regard for those on the other end of your check-ins. Still, it is your choice. If it is worth it to you to tick off a bunch of your online friends to publicly proclaim that you just earned a GymRat badge on Foursquare and you’re comfortable with the privacy issues of announcing where you are at every given moment, then more power to you. If it works for you, your friends and audience to publish your check-ins to multiple sites, I hope you won’t take it personally if I’m not around to keep tabs on where you’re having lunch today.

And, finally, to those of who you insist on checking-in while you’re driving (and I mean driving, not being a passenger) – stop it, stop it, stop it. No badge, no mayorship, no virtual prize, no free sandwich is worth it. I don’t care that you’re at a red light or a toll booth. Stop it. Seriously, stop it! Please, stop it!

With all of these cool online tools, it is time we think about our friends first, ourselves second, lest we find ourselves with fewer friends caring what we have to say. Let’s remember to ask ourselves how each new application adds value to our network, in addition to simplifying our lives. Just because it’s hip and fun doesn’t make it the right thing to do.

Now, put down your phone and enjoy your latte. Carry on and enjoy your day…wherever it is that you’re headed.

Your turn. Right hand or your left hand?

How-to: View and Organize Fan Pages on Facebook

Irene Koehler — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:34:39 +0000

Today’s post is in response to a question I’ve received from a few people lately. With the most recent redesign of Facebook, some people are finding it much more difficult to keep up with their favorite fan pages as their updates drift by in the stream along with your friends’ status updates. Most often, you’ve joined a fan page because you’re hoping to learn, interact, take advantage of limited-time deals, etc. Much of this takes place in real time, so you may have missed an opportunity if you don’t see the update until a few days after it was posted.

Here is a quick and easy way to organize your content stream on Facebook using Friends Lists, so that you will be more likely to see the updates from your favorite pages.

You can easily take this a step further if you have a lot of fan pages you’d like to track closely. Simply create more than one list. You may want to create separate lists for business fan pages, retail fan pages, and hobby fan pages. Organize them in a way which makes your favorite content easier to find.

Was this tip helpful? Do you try to keep up with groups and fan pages that you join on Facebook?

What other questions would you like to see answered in this way?

Do You Have a Digital Business Card? (Register for .tel for free)

Irene Koehler — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:12:41 +0000

We all want to be found more easily online when our friends, potential clients and employers Google us. We’ve set up our LinkedIn profiles, started blogging, created websites, invited others to be our friends on Facebook and tweeted like crazy on Twitter. With all of these fragmented presences online, wouldn’t it be nice to have a directory of all the places we can be found, plus the option to include our email address, phone number and tags which help the right people find us and get in touch? That way, we could direct people to just one place to be referred to the various ways to contact us and find out what we’re up to. It’s sort of like a virtual phone book; you remember the phone book, don’t you? They used to be useful way back when, before we found contact information online and started using them only as doorstops and booster seats for kids not tall enough to reach the dining table.

There are plenty of easy ways to do this now. Each offers their own features and options for customization and discoverability. Among the options are:

Today, I am focusing on registering a .tel domain (you may be more familiar with other domains, such as .com, .net and .org). To help me understand the benefits of owning my .tel domain, I met with Vincent Largilliere of Digitrad, who was kind enough to walk me through the set-up. First, it is important to understand that registering a .tel domain is similar to registering any domain – it is not free, unlike the other sites I’ve listed above. For that fee, though, you have more control of your information because it is a completely different site, rather than just a page on someone else’s site. I encourage you to look at the features of each type of directory listing. There is no reason you can’t use more than one of the options above.

What is .tel?

From the Digitrad website:

(click image to enlarge)

The .tel allows you to store, publish and update online all your contact information and keywords under your unique domain name, without the need for a website

> For individuals, .tel is a business card fully secure and customizable.

> For companies, .tel is both a limited public directory open to customers, and a internal directory, complete and secure for you and your co-workers .

All the extensions are identical, .tel is different: classical extensions link a website to an address, .tel links an address to an identity. This is its specificity and main strength.

.tel will allow you to increase your visibility on the Internet, to optimize your referencing, but also and more importantly to manage your personal digital identity as you see it, with the flexibility and the security that you need

More information can be found on the Digitrad website here.

Want to register .tel for free?

Vincent has offered free registration of a .tel account for AlmostSavvy readers. If you’d like to grab a year’s free registration of your very own .tel account, take a look at the video and keep reading.

In the video, Vincent answers a few questions about the value of .tel and walks me through the set-up process. You’ll note that I had to do quite a bit of editing (it seems we both talk too much!).

Following our session, I continued the set-up process. Take a peek at IreneKoehler.tel now.

To get a code for free registration of your own .tel account, simply add a comment below sharing why you’d like to try it out. Be sure to add a valid email address in the appropriate field (that’s how I’ll get the code to you).

Many thanks to Vincent and Digitrad for offering free registration to AlmostSavvy readers to allow you to see for yourself how you might use it to your own best advantage to manage your online reputation and visibility.

Thanks also to the kind folks at the Skoll Foundation who loaned us their conference room to tape the interview above, and thanks to Adin Miller for connecting me with the Skoll Foundation.

Also, in the name of full disclosure, Vincent did buy me a crepe while I was in Paris attending LeWeb. The crepe was not in exchange for this blog post, but I understand that perception is everything. Frankly, if anyone ever wanted to compensate me for a blog post, I’d hope the going rate would be something greater than one crepe and an offer to give blog readers a discount code. Evidence of said crepe.

LinkedIn Lets You Show Off Your Best Assets

Irene Koehler — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:08:35 +0000

So you think LinkedIn isn’t as sexy as Twitter, Facebook or other networking sites? I encourage you to think again. If providing the most powerful professional networking and job search platform around is sexy, then I’d say it’s pretty sexy.

And, it just got a little sexier in that you can now show off your best assets more prominently. No, I’m not talking about push-up bras; the change I’m talking about allows you to bring more attention to your professional assets.

Until now, the LinkedIn profile was very structured and inflexible in its design:

Summary and Specialties
Applications (i.e., Blog, SlideShare, etc.)
Experience
Education
Recommendations

These sections were listed in this order and there was nothing you could do to change things around. If you wanted potential employers to know that you’d just received a PhD in Astrophysics from Harvard, you had to hope they had the patience to read through all of your part-time jobs as a paper-boy and as a cashier 7-11 to find your education way down at the bottom.

Enter drag-and-drop. You can now rearrange these sections and move the most important information to the top. Have you worked with Bill Gates and want everyone to see his recommendation praising your role in building Microsoft? Move your recommendations to the top. Have you increased sales for your company over 500% in the last year? Upload a slide showing the results to SlideShare and move it where it will best show off your talents.

Kudos to LinkedIn for allowing us to take more control over the look and feel of our profiles. In the future, I’d like to see the ability to drag and drop pieces of these sections, rather than the entire section. For example, when you move recommendations to the top to highlight the feedback from Bill Gates, all of your other recommendations move, too, which might make it difficult for someone to scroll down to find your skills and experience. Still, this is a fabulous step in the right direction.

Take a peek at the LinkedIn video and let me know in the comments what you think of this new feature.

Hey, Facebook, It?s Me ? Really! (Just Ask the Goat)

Irene Koehler — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 00:24:49 +0000

OK, people, who tagged the photo of the goat on Facebook? You know who you are. Stay right there; I?ll deal with you in a minute.

So, here I was doing my usual social media evening check-in to see who?s doing what and what?s news. I happened to see some news of yet *another* virus of some sort spreading throughout Facebook, appearing to come in the form of a status update from your Facebook friends. After reading a bit about it, I went straight to Facebook to post a warning to the AlmostSavvy fan page and to my own profile letting others know to avoid clicking on certain links. I did not include any links in my post, but did include the name of the allegedly malicious site.

After a couple of attempts to post the information, I was informed that I had been locked out of Facebook. Apparently, other users had flagged the name of the malicious link and when I tried to share it, Facebook couldn?t tell if I was one of the good guys or one of the bad guys trying to spread it around. Now, I?d think the fact that I only included the name of the site and no actual link might have given them a clue, but the approach seems to be ?when in doubt, lock them out.?

Annoying as it was for me, I can?t say that I blame them for immediately locking down on anything that seems possibly suspicious. The good news is that I was immediately directed through several steps to prove two things in order to regain access to my account: 1. that I am a real human, and 2. that I am, in fact, me. One might hope that proving point #2 might make #1 unnecessary, but I was willing to play along (not that I had any choice).

Proving that I am human is simple and accomplished through CAPTCHA. Easy, done in two seconds. What followed was much more complex. I was shown a supposedly random series of photos tagged as being of some of my Facebook friends. As with many on Facebook, some of my friends are *really* my friends whom I easily recognize. Others, well, picking them out of a police lineup might be a challenge.

For each photo, I was shown 5 friends? names. I had to select the correct name or click ?I?m not sure.? The instructions indicated that only two ?I?m not sure? answers are permitted in the series, and that is assuming that the correct name is chosen for the remaining photos. Knowing this, I felt the pressure to select a name as each photo appeared.

With so much on the line, I quickly came to the following conclusions:

I need to keep in touch with more of you so that I am better able to recognize your gorgeous faces
Many of my friends are terrible photographers, awkward photographic subjects, have or once were children, and/or are just plain wacky.

Imagine my joy as I was asked to identify photos which included:

20-30 year old wedding and school photos (Did we really dress like that in the 80?s?)
Small children with the family dog (Is that you when you were a wee youngster, your child, your neighbor?s child?)
A large crowd of people fishing at a lake (Can?t even tell which person is tagged in the crowd.)
People smushing their faces in the most awful way (probably when the photographer said, ?Now, let?s take a funny one.?)
The back of someone?s head in the audience at a large event (A guy with black hair. Helpful, thanks!)
A goat (OK, which of you allowed one of your friends to tag a goat with your name? Friends don?t let friends tag goats.)

Not surprisingly, I failed the test. When you fail, you aren?t given a score. I have no idea how many I missed, but it was enough to make my true identity open to suspicion. I?m assuming that I failed miserably, thanks to you and your funky photos.

For my next attempt, I summoned assistance. The college kid is home for winter break and, while she knows only a few of my friends, she?s one sharp cookie. I knew her input certainly couldn?t hurt. I wanted to either pass or have her laugh along with me at your impossible-to-identify photos as I failed once again. Together, we reasoned through the choices for each photo. One guy had a partially visible nametag. One bride I narrowed down to one of two names on the list and took my best shot. And the goat? I may never know. I was forced to choose the ?I?m not sure? option and hope that I had enough correct answers to pass this time. And pass I did.

So, what did we learn?

Be careful about what you post to Facebook, especially when it comes to anything related to security risks because someone may have flagged it as problematic.

And, you with the smushy face, the tagged back of the head and the goat?I?d like to speak to each of you privately after class. We?ve You?ve got issues we ought to discuss.

What is Your Favorite “Real-time” Tool?

Irene Koehler — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 16:10:00 +0000

The theme of LeWeb ’09 was “The Real-time Web,” but what exactly “is” real-time? And, at what point, do real-time tools stop being new toys which only truly-geeky people use and start becoming so embedded into our everyday lives that we don’t really think about them, but can’t imagine living without them?

While most of the conversation at LeWeb was fairly technical and focused on what’s ahead, such as exciting new applications and tech start-ups, I wondered what tools these uber-geeky folks are using day-to-day in their real lives which are simple enough for the rest of us non-geeks to use.

I invite you to hear from some of the attendees as they share a few of their favorite tools. Let me know in the comments which tool is your favorite and why you’re a fan.

Almost Savvy » Tips

Just Because We’re Social Networking “Friends” Doesn’t Mean I’ll Go To 3rd Base With You

You Don’t Bring Me Flowers Anymore

Talk (And Listen) To Me

You Lost Me At “Click Here”

Related articles which may interest you:

How to: Turn On/Off LinkedIn Notifications

From the AlmostSavvy mailbag:

From the AlmostSavvy mailbag:

Related articles which may interest you:

LinkedIn-apalooza! Ready to rev-up your profile?

Related articles which may interest you:

Who Influences You? (Plus, get a free book)

Your Turn: Comments and Free Books!

Related articles which may interest you:

I Don’t Care Where. You. Are. Right. Now.

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How-to: View and Organize Fan Pages on Facebook

Related articles which may interest you:

Do You Have a Digital Business Card? (Register for .tel for free)

What is .tel?

Want to register .tel for free?

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LinkedIn Lets You Show Off Your Best Assets

Related articles which may interest you:

Hey, Facebook, It?s Me ? Really! (Just Ask the Goat)

With so much on the line, I quickly came to the following conclusions:

Imagine my joy as I was asked to identify photos which included:

So, what did we learn?

Related articles which may interest you:

What is Your Favorite “Real-time” Tool?

Related articles which may interest you: