Anyone who reads me knows my answer to the social question—I’m not.
I don’t wear branded clothes or those with images advertising whatever, either, because if I’m going to be someone’s billboard I want to be paid, not to pay for the privilege. While that is more a quirk, I have a much larger problem online with the loss of privacy and the attitude of social companies that they have the right to use my data and that of my connections any way they choose for their profit whether I like it or not.
When it comes to social I have to admit that I’ve seen some fun (I’m partial to stupid cats) and educational stuff on YouTube. In fact, my company’s newly launched product is on YouTube, so I thought it was very cool that there are a number of people earning serious money there.
I’m not sure if texting is considered social, but the dark side to it is getting darker, with the darkest being death. Now, along with those who kill while texting and driving—cars, trains, subways—you can add lifeguards.
And what would a post about social be without Twitter (no, I don’t tweet). Actually, I have three links that you may find interesting.
Too many managers (of all ages and at all levels) tell me they are using texting, Twitter and email to manage their people. They’re even using them for performance reviews, layoffs and terminations.
When I ask why they use them I’m told some variation of ‘saves time’, ‘more immediate’, ‘modern way to manage’, ‘cool’ or the worst one, ‘lets me focus on what’s important.’
I may be a digital dinosaur, but I’m here to tell them (and you if you are on the receiving end) that that isn’t managing; it’s avoidance pure and simple.
It’s having the title while avoiding every single action required to lead a high-performing organization. It trashes careers and shows enormous disrespect for people.
In short, it’s a total copout; unfair to the team, the company and the investors.
What’s important are the people, because without the people there is no company and if there is no company you have no job.
In a recent column in the NY Times by Bob Herbert adds his voice to mine in condemning today’s wired, multitasking mentality, only he does it with far more flair. The part I want to share is near the end.
There’s a character in the August Wilson play “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” who says everyone has a song inside of him or her, and that you lose sight of that song at your peril. If you get out of touch with your song, forget how to sing it, you’re bound to end up frustrated and dissatisfied. … Other people have something to say, too. And when they don’t, that glorious silence that you hear will have more to say to you than you ever imagined. That is when you will begin to hear your song. That’s when your best thoughts take hold, and you become really you.
Just as individuals have songs companies do also and both need silence to hear them.
The song is MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) set to music; values and culture that sing to you and mirror you.
Songs are elusive and the cacophony that often pervades life and work makes it yet more difficult to hear them.
Why do people keep adding to it and then complain bitterly about the noise.
When I was young I realized that I could have all the stuff I wanted as long as I owned the stuff and the stuff didn’t own me.
Technology is like stuff—you can’t let it own you.
There is a marvelous world outside the window and inside yourself just waiting to be explored.
No thunderbolt will strike if you put it down, turn it off, look out the window, smile and say hi to those you can literally reach out and touch, feel the magic, hear the song.
I don’t Tweet; I don’t do Facebook; I don’t own a cell phone; I refuse all the invitations to join yet another 2.0 platform; I’m mostly inactive on LinkedIn, not and open networker and wonder, when I think of it at all, how to politely disconnect from the people whose invitations I accepted before I knew better;
I spend my time working on Option Sanity, the new product my company is launching; I write; I spend time with friends, in person and on the phone; I read, not “worthwhile” or business books, but for pure pleasure; I play in the dirt in my garden, which, after seven years, is actually looking good to me; I cherish my brain.
I know many people who are wired; who can’t imagine life without their smartphone; who have hundreds, if not thousands of friends; who totally freak out at the idea of not being connected 24/7.
What about their brains? Is the cumulative effect of all that information and connectivity positive or negative?
A series called in the New York Times this week offers a look at much of the brain research being done on this subject and it’s not a pretty site.
The boy, who Ms. Im estimates was about 2 1/2 years old, made repeated attempts to talk to his mother, but she wouldn’t look up from her BlackBerry. “He’s like: ‘Mama? Mama? Mama?’ ” Ms. Im recalled. “And then he starts tapping her leg. And she goes: ‘Just wait a second. Just wait a second.’ ”
Finally, he was so frustrated, Ms. Im said, that “he goes, ‘Ahhh!’ and tries to bite her leg.”
They [scientists] say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.
These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive.
Some experts believe excessive use of the Internet, cell phones and other technologies can cause us to become more impatient, impulsive, forgetful and even more narcissistic.
Younger people are particularly affected: almost 30 percent of those under 45 said the use of these devices made it harder to focus, while less than 10 percent of older users agreed. … One in seven married respondents said the use of these devices was causing them to see less of their spouses. And 1 in 10 said they spent less time with their children under 18.
And if the articles aren’t enough to make you rethink your wired state, here is a review of Nicholas Carr’s new book ‘The Shallows’: Is the Net Fostering Stupidity?
Americans now spend 8.5 hours a day frenetically interacting with their PCs, TVs, or, increasingly, the smartphones that follow them everywhere. In the process, writes Carr, we are reverting to our roots as data processors. “What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.”
It would be unfair not to offer up a bit of hope with all this.
Or you can recognize your brain’s finite capacity for processing information, accentuate the positive and achieve the satisfactions of what Winifred Gallagher, author of “Rapt,” a guide to the science of paying attention, calls the focused life.
It’s a lot of reading on a summer weekend, but the information will impact you and your kids for the rest of your lives—whether you accept all of it or just a tiny bit.
Darn! I knew I forgot one link. It’s in one of the articles, but here it is directly.
Social media; stories about it are everywhere, but I find the most interesting are about what companies are doing and how its being used.
Let’s start with Twitter. Everybody has heard of Twitter, even people who have no idea what it is talk about it—like my friend’s great-granny. But it’s their smarts in innovation that is most impressive—they outsource it.
Twitter’s smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, ‘Gee, let’s not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let’s outsource design to them.’ –Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T.
If you run a business these days you’re probably using Facebook or thinking about it—I know I am. So I found this article in the NY Times of great interest, especially since it’s written for folks, not pros.
You need to be where your customers are and your prospective customers are, and with 300 million people on Facebook, and still growing, that’s increasingly where your audience is for a lot of products and services. –Clara Shih, author of “The Facebook Era” (Pearson Education, 2009).
Do you know the key ingredient that helps police nab the bad guys? Stupidity—theirs. It used to be that they flashed their loot around and bragged to their friends, not they flash their loot and brag on Facebook.
Maxi Sopo thought he had made an excellent decision when he ran away to Cancun to escape a Seattle fraud prosecution. He also thought it would be a great idea to add a former Justice Department official as a friend and gush about his exploits on Facebook.
I love it when stupid gets stupider.
Last is an item that falls in the smart or stupid category—you decide. It asks the question; at what point does a CEO’s Facebook sharing cross the boundary to TMI (too much information)?
Recently Chip Conley, CEO of Joie de Vivre, a $230 million company with more than 3,000 employees, got enmeshed in a bit of a 2009 corporate culture snafu. Conley’s not your average Harvard MBA pinstriped buttoned-down corporate chieftan. He’s an entrepreneur. He writes his own rules. So to him, it wasn’t so strange to post some pictures of himself at the Burning Man whatever-it-is in the dessert on his Facebook fan page. Or to tweet on Twitter about the demise of his 8 year long relationship.
When his employees got upset he wrote about it on BNET. Read both articles and share your thoughts in comments.
You, my readers, my friends and whatever enemies I have all use social media (well, almost all), I don’t. No Twitter, no texting (no cell phone:), no Facebook, no MySpace—OK, I do business blog,
But I do read a lot about it; follow the trends and tragedies, as when Twitter went down. So I thought I’d share some of the more interesting articles I’ve come across recently.
First is a clear, concise description of three tactics to get your company up and using social media. Not strategy (as several commenter pointed out) but solid action items.
The Wall Street Journal offers (more) advice—why and how—on the importance of learning texting lingo—that’s one no one will ever sell me on, but you should if you plan to function in the cyber-world.
From Psychology Today, 5 Smartphone Rules To Live By that teach you how to own your smartphone instead of it owning you.
But not everybody believes that everything you do should be chronicled for public consumption. Protocols NYC, a salon created by five Manhattan news media types and those they invite, has banned texting, cell phones, pictures, etc. They call it off the record and just talk to each other—it’s called conversation for those of you too young to have experienced that kind of focus.
Two final offerings for kids and adults who think it’s cool put their life online. They should serve as a warning to anyone with kids and the second for anyone who holds or plans to hold a job at anytime in their lives. The first tells us that “one in 10 teens admitted posting a nude or seminude shot of themselves or others online.” Combine that with the second, “35percent of the 2,667 managers and human resource workers decided not to offer a job to a candidate based on the content uncovered on a social networking site,” and you have a recipe for disaster. Privacy settings aren’t the whole answer, since inappropriate pictures sent and information shared with friends may appear on their pages (and who knows where else)—and they never go away.
I don’t DO social networking, but I read a lot about it and I thought I’d share some of the more interesting items I’ve come across lately.
As I’m sure you all know, more and more companies, such as Ford, Southwest Airlines and Pepsi, are using social media both internally and externally.
When companies use new technologies they need to create policies regarding them for their employees.
And when they write policy they tend to do it in a self-generated vacuum, ignoring the larger world in which they function and the culture that has grown up around them. The result is often a fiasco as CNN recently learned.
Finally, I’d like to introduce you to my buddy Phil Gerbyshak. He’s a social media guru and if you’re interested in learning about stuff like Twitter click the link. Phil explains not only the how but the why behind using social media and can help you keep your cyber foot out of your online mouth.
But Phil isn’t a social media ideologue and is willing to share the other side of the equation—even when he doesn’t agree. Heh heh. I think he was thinking of me when he posted this video.
I had an interesting experience today—actually, I found it amusing, but ridiculous.
I used to live in Silicon Valley, the land of early adopters and the technically obsessed, and am still involved with several groups there.
Here’s the short version of what happened.
Around noon one of the project members sent an email to all of us saying he urgently needed certain information and asked if ‘Joe’ had it;
Joe replied around 1 that he didn’t have it, but maybe a Jean did;
Jean replied around 1:45 that only Mary had access to it.
I saw the thread around 2:15 when I got back to my office, called Mary and told her that she urgently needed to respond to the thread.
She did and the situation was dealt with immediately.
What was so ridiculous is that the entire group knows that
1) Mary is the only person with access to this info;
2) That she is ‘technologically challenged’; and that
3) she doesn’t read email as it arrives; she checks it on and off when she has the time.
That means that email wasn’t the best choice to contact her and everybody knew—if they had stopped to think about it instead of running on autopilot.
There are many ways to contact people these days, email, instant messaging, Twitter, but only if you don’t care that the world can see it, Facebook, ditto, etc.
The problem lies in focus; your choice should depend not on your preference, but on the preference of the person you are trying to reach.
So remember, communicating is like playing golf. The trick isn’t to play the whole course with one club, but to know which club to use for which shot.
As most of you know, I’m a digital dinosaur by design, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have rules about stuff like Twitter.
Too many managers (of all ages and at all levels) tell me they are using texting, Twitter and email to manage their people. They’re even using them for performance reviews, layoffs and terminations.
In a 
Social media; stories about it are everywhere, but I find the most interesting are about what companies are doing and how its being used.
But I do read a lot about it; follow the trends and tragedies, as when Twitter went down. So I thought I’d share some of the more interesting articles I’ve come across recently.
As I’m sure you all know, more and more companies, such as Ford, Southwest Airlines and Pepsi, are 
There are many ways to contact people these days, email, instant messaging, Twitter, but only if you don’t care that the world can see it, Facebook, ditto, etc.
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