Perry

Hewitt

Tag: social

  • 5 tips for your post-college social media self

    female graduate 1931If you’re reading this somewhere between finishing your last college final and returning the polyester academic robe crumpled on the floor of your dorm room, you’re in the commencement process. Your brain is on emotional and practical overload: you’re simultaneously figuring out how to say goodbye to friends; planning for (or praying for!) a new internship, job, or grad school; and wondering how on earth to pack up all the stuff you’ve accumulated during your college years. Here’s a manageable to-do list: five ways for new graduates to get your digital and social media presence in order.

    1. Set up and clean up your LinkedIn profile. Of the five profiles sent to me this week from recent grads, three of them had typos — and two candidates had misspelled their major. Have a friend read your profile for common sense, grammar, and spelling. Do the same for a Google+ profile. Pro tip: try your name on Google image search and see what comes up. If you don’t like what you see, update your online profiles and let indexing do its work.
    2. Review your social media privacy settings. If you’re 21 today, you were 12 when Facebook launched, 14 when Twitter emerged, and are now far too old to be messing around on Snapchat. Younger users tend to be savvier about privacy settings, but just in case: read these Facebook basics and settings controlling who can find you, then hop over to Google and check out Me on the Web. While not all companies will hire through Twitter like this the web is, increasingly, your resume.
    3. Put together a listening system. Are you still looking for a job or entering a new field? Set up a system of alerts and feeds to keep you informed. Google Alerts have been around forever but are surprisingly useful — enter one or more terms relevant to your area of interest. For blogs and sites you follow, try feedly and its fantastic mobile interface. Use the content you follow to your advantage — at very least you’re staying informed, and at best you’ll have current and relevant ideas to share with co-workers.
    4. Manage your inbox and contacts effectively. Email is an overwhelming and unwieldy system where, some say, information goes to die. Gmail does have a number of features to improve email management from starred senders to priority inbox; check out Lifehacker for a useful selection of hacks. Mobile email ninjas may do well mastering all the swipe actions of Mailbox to prevent overload. And while a new grad won’t need a fully-fledged contact management system, be sure to keep your contacts in a way that ensures they’re accessible and in context.
    5. Own your own domain and a sensible email address. It’s true that each new release of gTLDs makes your URL less relevant and search and social more important. That said, for less than 10 bucks a year you can have your own domain name, and refer it to a profile page on LinkedIn or about.me. And now’s the time to set up email forwarding via your academic institution, if they offer it, or settle on an email address that omits your year of birth or favorite Twilight character.

    Congratulations! The good news is that it’s neither difficult nor costly to set up a reasonable online presence. The even better news is that digital and social technologies provide you with the keys to find and connect with people and ideas to continue learning beyond the campus you’re leaving behind.

     

    Photo credit: Ladies Home Journal 1931, courtesy George Eastman House

  • Friday 5 – 05.17.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Google celebrated I/O by dialing up the design, it seems. There are some sexy, new fast actions in Gmail and a flat, card-based Google+ re-launch that shows they’ve been doing plenty of pinning over in Mountain View.
    2. David Carr on Snooping and the News Media: It’s a 2-Way Street. Best line about digital trails: “The absence of friction has led to a culture of transgression. Clearly, if it can be known, it will be known.”
    3. Twitter buys some visualization skills so we have more ways to make sense of all those tweets.
    4. Quartz takes a look at why iPhones still have the lion’s share of mobile data activity. “So while it is true that Android phones vastly outsell iPhones, Apple users seem to be getting a lot more out of their devices. For now, at least.”
    5. There’s a lot of crisp thinking and beautiful writing going on in this elegant longform piece on MOOCs, Harvard, and higher education by Nathan Heller in The New Yorker.

  • LinkedIn turns 10

    So, LinkedIn is turning 10. The Next Web ran this comprehensive recap of the pivotal moments in its evolution — complete with jazzy infographic and a fun look back at its clunky 2003 web design.

    LinkedIn’s main differentiator was being among the first user-generated content networks focused on expertise. As an early adopter (user 6818 — you can find your own member number embedded in your LinkedIn profile URL after “id=”), I pulled together some thoughts on what I’ve observed as milestones contributing to its success.

    1. Recognizing that they are a data company, and making some high-profile data scientist hires like Daniel Tunkelang — and enabling them to attract strong teams.
    2. Embracing mobile — a little late to the game, but a snazzy, much talked about tablet launch in 2012 and frequent updates since.
    3. Continuously improving the social aspects for average users sharing content — image integration that’s easy on the eyes, a longer character count than Twitter, a Like feature just like that other social network.
    4. Cracking the code for content original to LinkedIn. Other companies, like Facebook and Tumblr have shuttered similar efforts (here’s a good piece from RWW). While I’d argue that they have a natural advantage over Facebook and Tumblr in terms of shared audience purpose, they get credit for bringing in a range of thought leaders who make the site compelling and who become champions for the platform.
    5. Moving from text heavy resumes only to portfolio display opportunities — presumably the success of Bēhance and others has prompted LinkedIn to cast a wider net by supporting more visual experiences.
    6. LinkedIn email offerRolling out new applications like a new contact importing/ management service (see email offer at right — perhaps more compelling if the data pulls someone not in the office next to mine) that try to make LinkedIn the default drive for your connections.

    While not a specific feature, I’d argue that LinkedIn’s ultimate killer app was shifting the social norm around job hunting. Back in the day, leaving a copy of your resume on the printer meant only one thing — you weren’t intending to stick around your current role very long. Now keeping your LinkedIn profile up-to-date is more a sign of career attention than looming transition. And arguably, in some fields today the bias is in precisely the opposite direction: people who don’t update their LinkedIn profiles are less likely to be actively engaged in their own career development — which as Tom Friedman reminded us last week in his bleak 401(K) world column, is a dangerous place to be.

  • Try it: Graph your Facebook friends

    Last week, Stephen Wolfram released a long and interesting analysis of aggregated and anonymized Facebook user data from his Data Donor program. He offers some observations about how Facebook behaviors illustrate the trajectories of people’s lives — how many people they friend, where they settle, and how clusters of friends reflect communities (school, friend, neighborhood).

    In September I tried Wolfram Alpha to examine my Facebook use, and not much about the broad strokes observations changed when I re-ran it recently. I still use words more than pictures, and have roughly the same number of male and female friends. Geography is still fairly widely dispersed. This time, I took a closer look at the network graph.

    social_network_2013

    The colors indicate a typology defined in the web app. In brief:

    • Social insiders (purple) share the most connections with you. These include many colleagues in interactive, and my son.
    • Social outsiders (grey) share at most one friend with you. These include people I’ve worked with briefly during consulting gigs, or met traveling somewhere far away on vacation. I see far more of these than I would have predicted.
    • Social connectors (green) connect groups otherwise disconnected. In my network, this includes a friend who I went to elementary school with who also worked with me at the same software company in our twenties.
    • Social neighbors (orange) have few friends you don’t already know. In my graph, this includes late adopters of social networks, and skews older.
    • Social gateways (red) have a great many friends who you don’t know. If I were being more strategic about growing my social network, this is where I would focus, thinking that the strength of weak ties would provide more opportunities for connection that could be helpful for everything from a great restaurant in Montreal to job candidate referral.

    You can graph your own life and social network courtesy of Stephen Wolfram right here.

  • Morning Prayers @ Memorial Church

    Today I was lucky enough to speak at the morning prayers service, a Harvard tradition since its founding in 1636 (more here). Many thanks to Jonathan Walton, who is the Pusey Minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church and the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences — and a true proponent of making connections on campus and on Twitter.

    Good morning. My name is Perry Hewitt, and I work on digital strategy for the University. I’d like to begin with a reading from E.M. Forster

    “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”

    When Forster wrote that passage for Howard’s End back in 1910, he was, through the indomitable character of Margaret Schlegel, extolling connection as a means to an end, a way to live a fuller and more meaningful life. In the novel, Margaret’s lifelong attempt to get the stubborn Henry Wilcox to connect the prose and the passion within himself is for a long time met with deliberate obtuseness. Wilcox tells Margaret, “My motto is Concentrate. I’ve no intention of frittering away my strength on that sort of thing.” What he meant by “that sort of thing” was looking away from the task at hand, to see all around him.

    Of course, Monday’s tragic events at the Boston Marathon put this exhortation into especially sharp relief. The violence of the bombings, and then the subsequent moments of hope and humanity cause me to reflect more deeply on these themes of concentration and connection. 

    When I arrived at Harvard College, like many young people, I knew a great deal more about how to live my life back then than I can lay claim to today. My stubbornness and world vision bore an unfortunate resemblance to that of Henry Wilcox. As a Slavic Languages student, I immersed myself in the inflexible world of word roots, noun declensions, and verb conjugations through the work of Roman Jakobson and Horace Lunt. I was a devoted disciple of the “concentrate” and by and large eschewed the “connect.” And “concentrate” up until that point had been an effective means to an end — through the girls’ school I attended, through Andover, and then through Harvard. After Harvard, I was certain, I would pursue a similarly focused life and career path.

    But as the Yiddish proverb says, man plans and God laughs. Through a variety of professional and personal circumstances, my life ended up revolving less around the concentrate, and almost entirely around the connect. Rather than becoming the hedgehog I had envisioned, knowing one big thing, life conspired to turn me into a fox, in the business of knowing many things, and many people, and of trying to make useful links among them all.

    As I spent more time on the exploration of digital channels, mobile devices, and social realms, the question I began to have, and pose for you all to think about here, is what does it mean today to connect? How have the capability and meaning of connection been enhanced or diminished by the digital world we now inhabit?  

    First, I want to talk about the immediacy and ease of connection.

    Never before have we been able to connect in a tactical way so easily and inexpensively. When I spent time in the former Soviet Union in the late eighties, a telephone call to “the West” involved a long wait in the Central Post Office in Moscow. Picture if you will a pre-technology RMV, with long rows of people sitting and waiting for their turn to enter what felt like a Revolutionary-era Russian phone box. You waited for hours for your call to come up, and were prepared for a mercurial babushka-bureaucrat to change your place in line or deny you entirely. Calling abroad was a significant undertaking and time commitment. Because of this, you planned what you wanted to say, disguised carefully for those listening in, with great care.

    Compare this to the casual and inexpensive connection of the internet-enabled present. Earlier this week, my son, Tim, now the same age I was in Moscow, missed a connecting flight in Spain. He opened up a videochat in Skype to alert me of his new plans. He used a laptop computer connected to Madrid airport wifi; I responded on a smartphone while out for a walk in the woods with a friend.

    Does this ease of connection somehow change its nature? Is a world in which we are potentially always connected an unqualified boon? It certainly prevented me from sitting in an airport and worrying. But is there a case to be made that we put less effort into choosing our words because they can always be corrected in a subsequent call, text, or email across any geographic boundary? I have no desire to turn back the clock on telecommunications, but often reflect on how the newfound ease may affect the quality or purpose of connection.

    Second, I want to talk about the meaning of connection in a digital world.

    Facebook has amassed over a billion worldwide users, and represents one out  of every seven minutes spent on the internet today. But perhaps most interestingly, Facebook has succeeded in turning the noun “friend” into a verb, and inventing its unfortunate corollary, the “unfriend.”  What effect does this kind of online connection have on the nature of friendship itself?

    Why are people signing up to connect through pixels rather than in person? For many, there’s a clear benefit to online connection, particularly in societies where family members are more widely dispersed geographically. Teens form affinity groups of future freshmen; former classmates reunite and compare both headlines and hairlines; and everyone shares photos of children, dogs, and luscious desserts. Large networks enable people to benefit from the strength of weak ties, surfacing more professional and personal opportunities for online friends to be helpful to one another. Recent research also reveals that social content is especially memorable — you are more likely to recall a status update than a news headline or a randomly selected sentence from a book.

    And yet people are creating and navigating the rules of online friendship very differently. Some are indiscriminate and enthusiastic friend-ers, eagerly collecting people they meet and adding them to their network. Others are skeptical of online connections, wondering if we are now replacing genuine friendship with a feed full of a baby pictures, inane internet memes, and political polemics. Most of us fall somewhere in between, with self-created rules of who we friend on Facebook, who we connect with on LinkedIn, and who knows our mobile phone number.

    Finally, I want to consider these questions in the context of Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings.

    On Monday, digital / social / mobile led the way in communicating, collecting, and commiserating. Tweeters broke news developments the traditional networks could only chase. Digital led the way for friends and family to find, check on, and encourage one another. Now FBI investigators are busy analyzing our crowdsourced digital data to divine signals from the noise. In this sense, especially at times like these, it’s our efforts to connect that are improving our our quality of life and perhaps even our safety.

    I began today with Forster’s admonition. “Only connect,” he wrote, “and human love will be seen at its height.” This week, this seems particularly apt. Since I stand here at the pulpit, I would love to follow Forster by offering you definitive answers on digital connection. But I can’t. We’re wading together into new territory, building new rules that fit for the immediacy and intimacy of online connections, and doing it in sometimes troubled times. I do not have a map, digital or otherwise, for navigating the correct course. But I believe if we hold fast to the overarching principle Forster introduces, together we’ll head in the right direction.

    So, I bid you today to go out and chat, like, link, pin, plus, poke, post, text, tumble, or tweet. Or write an old-fashioned letter, and drop it in the mail. But in the end, do what matters — only connect.

  • Boston Marathon, and the value of social

    Please keep checking in.

     

    People often complain about social media. Facebook is time-consuming and pointless and self-aggrandizing and there’s no real connection — yes, all right. Twitter is a constant, exhausting, too-cool-for-school barrage. And both of them leave you feeling a little more distant from everyone, at the price of keeping a line open to everyone you’ve ever met.

     

    But when awful news hits like the explosions at the Boston Marathon, suddenly all of this feels less like a nuisance and more like a social network. Everyone I know has gone dashing to Facebook. The newsfeed, for once, is full of the bits of news that matter. I’m okay. Are you okay?

    — Read more in The explosions at the Boston Marathon and the Facebook huddle, the terrific latest piece from Alexandra Petri in her Washington Post blog

  • Why social content is extra memorable

    Turns out that people can remember social content better than a CNN headline, a sentence randomly selected from a book, or even than a human face. Psychology researchers published a fascinating paper back in January that showed through a series of experiments that Facebook posts — chosen with a range of emotions and writing styles — are extraordinarily memorable. But why?

    facebook_postA few reasons: the text is designed to be complete (unlike a sentence from a book); gossipy/entertainment content is inherently more memorable than straight news; and casually generated language, however “vacuous, narcissistic, or vapid” is apparently more memorable. This last reason is intriguing — the idea that copy created off the top of one’s head is somehow more “mind-ready” for the recipient to absorb and retain. No wonder no one can ever remember a corporate mission statement.

  • What words reveal about online community

    word usage in communities

    Research by Bryden, Funk, and Jansen looks at word usage in Twitter, and finds that communities can be characterized by their word choice. Even better, the words used by an individual can accurately predict the community that user belongs to.

    We all speak in our own workplace jargon and the acronym-laden tech community, myself included, is more guilty of this than most. This study reminds us that words are about more than information transfer—they also serve as tribal identification. The words we choose to use on a public social network are a way of signaling the community we belong to as much as the suit or T-shirt and jeans we choose to wear to work each day.

  • What happens in Vegas, Austin, etc. …

    life of the partyWhat happens in Vegas, Austin, or anywhere else is bound to stay with you forever these days. Many of us now live our lives in public, and embrace social media for the benefits of community and connection and in spite of the risks of indiscretion and overdisclosure.

    The kids are onto this. High school students applying to college change their names on the social web: Allison King becomes that TheAllie Regal — a code close enough for friends to decipher, but far enough to fool the Google. Apps like Snapchat and its less successful Facebook clone Poke hold out the promise of ephemeral content: what better way to foil permanence than an image that self destructs in less than ten seconds? The app even alerts you if a sneaky recipient attempts a screenshot of the content.

    For adults with established usernames and search results, interim transmogrification is less feasible. Instead, we’re left to do what we can to avoid the most frequent areas of social media faux pas:

    • too vitriolic (don’t be this guy)
    • too much lifestream (hard to be as compelling as the Feltron report)
    • too much life of the party
    • or, God forbid, a post sent from your company account rather than your own

    Spending a lot of time on the social web, many of us will commit one or more of these errors at some point. What’s the mitigation plan? A personal strategy of focusing on planting grass rather than pulling weeds — delivering consistent value through the content you share — is generally wiser than time spent on remediating the missteps. Delete, apologize, and move on.

    For those of you headed to SXSW, be careful out there.

  • How to manage your information diet

    information cloudIt’s beyond a truism that we live in an age of information overload. Email is overwhelming, connection is ubiquitous with most of us tethered to one or more mobile devices, and it feels like a new, must-see social web service emerges every day.

    Unless you’re a full-time social media specialist, there’s a lot more to your job than listening and posting on social channels. Apart from email, there are hours of meetings, and one would hope, some time carved out each day for focused work. So, how do you put yourself on an information diet that gives you what you need to survive and grow, but lets you stay productive?

    There are smart applications and tip-filled websites that will help you determine your own recipe for success, but here’s mine:

    • Start the day with filtered RSS feeds. Google Reader is a terrific service (although rumors of its demise persist). I keep a short list of feeds that are germane to my role and my interests, and prune the kudzu of sites I feel I ought to read frequently and mercilessly. A small number of recipes in IFTTT surface content to me more aggressively, like a favorite blogger’s posts as text message.
    • Schedule some of your social publishing. Now that you have great feed content, how do you share it? I mostly use Buffer to post; colleagues swear by Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. Scheduling enables sharing of relevant or interesting content throughout the day, but doesn’t replace listening and live interaction.
    • Use old-school Google alerts. Google Alerts is an undersung technology that still delivers a lot of value. Create terms that are tight enough a filter for only the truly relevant to slip through, and prioritize terms by importance (as it happens, daily digest, and weekly digest). Newsle is a great service for following real news about people in your social networks.
    • Select smart people as human filters. As digital moves into the C-suite, a lot of hedgehogs have to become foxes—moving away from an understanding of one big thing to represent a breadth of strategy, content, marketing, and technical knowledge. Topics I am fascinated by but rely on the deep expertise of others on the social web include: data science, information visualization, responsive design, and time management. Learn from others—and use social to connect and thank.
    • Hold 60 minute blocks for working where you don’t check email. Interrupted time is less productive time, but being realistic about small enough chunks to safeguard is what enables some focused work. I leave my phone facing up, and mark only a few folks for the VIP inbox on iPhone and iPad—if there’s a critical message I can see and address it, but no other noise breaks through.
    • Between meetings, read, act on, and delete email. This is easier said than done—but if the approach is to read it and get rid of it, it keeps the 1500+ received a day from overloading the system. When something becomes a task, move it to a productivity tool where it stacks up against your own priorities, not just the inbox-driven ones.
    • Find the right productivity tool. I’ve written about and tried a range of productivity apps supporting granular tasks and life goals, but Evernote, I just can’t quit you.  Task lists, document sharing, web clipper, IFTTT integration, audio, and Skitch make this indispensable. I was slow getting the app on my iPhone, and the recent addition has made even hallway conversations more productive.
    • Perhaps the biggest time saver/information management idea is a surprising one: carve out time every week to listen to colleagues and schedule regular 1:1 meetings, even if they are 15 minutes long. Try to put down the device and really listen. What’s your colleagues’ critical path? How can you help? How might you inadvertently be under-communicating or worse, hindering progress? Scheduling time in-person reduces email follow up, and builds the kind of understanding and connection essential for getting things done.
    [tweetable]Every knowledge worker with strategic projects, exploding inboxes, and looming deadlines can relate the the pain of the deluge of information.[/tweetable] These are my ways to wade in without drowning—what are yours?