Reality Overlaps

Blogging the Night Away

2010-11-13T11:25:00.000-08:00

Well, considering the number of responses to my previous post, I figure that in my hiatus from blogging, I lost at least some of my following, so the move to a new domain became a no-brainer. I'll let you know once that's up and running, which should be by next week. To nobody's surprise, the domain will be rebeccarachmany.com and the title of the blog will still be Reality Overlaps.

I'll continue writing about the stuff I write about, which is community, online and off. I'm also going to write more about games than I did in the past, not because of the increasing interface between games and reality, but because I'm now in that industry. Yay! What could be cooler than having a job where playing games and watching youtube videos of people playing games is part of your job? I never have to worry about my boss coming in just as I am fiddling around playing a game again!

And, for a blogger, what could be better than having a job that is interesting enough to blog about?

But that's not what I came here to blog about today. I wanted to blog about blogging, or more specifically about my experience with GoDaddy. I decided to put my blog there, frankly speaking, because it was the easiest thing to do. My hosting is at GoDaddy, so whatever.

In the name of laziness, I also just picked out whatever their blogging package was, something called Quick Blogcast. Although I wasn't thinking about videos or podcasts, I thought cool, looks good enough. Unfortunately, it's really lame. I won't go into its lameness, because I didn't spend more than quarter of an hour fooling around with it. Why should I? I knew that in 10 minutes I could figure out Wordpress, so I wasn't willing to devote more than that to this thing.

But then I was stuck, because I had signed up for a year. So I called GoDaddy. They were great. They walked me through setting up Wordpress. They walked me through putting the domain name I wanted on the hosting. Twice, because I hastily pressed the wrong button. They refunded all the money from the lame blogging account and credited it to the new hosting account.

Then they asked me if there was anything else they could help me with today. They always do that, and I'm always stumped. I mean, if I had anything else, I probably would have mentioned it.

But looking at it now, I have to ask myself, why isn't this standard everywhere? Why doesn't every support call for every service I have always end with "Is there something else I can do for you today?" How many times have you hung up the phone and gone "Dang, I forgot..." It usually isn't with your hosting company, either.

GoDaddy offers really extraordinary service. It's unusual, considering what they sell and what it costs. I spend about $100-$150 a year on this kind of thing. In other words, I'm not a very big customer. I probably call them 3-4 times a year, and these are pretty low-cost people, so let's say that they are spending under $10 on service for me. Still, 10% of cost for customer service is money. And they know it's me, too, because I type in my customer name on the dialpad before they pick up, so they could relegate me to the inferior-service department if they wanted.

Bottom line, more power to you, GoDaddy. Ridiculous ads aside, the product is solid.

Back to Blogging

2010-11-01T00:51:00.001-07:00

A combination of the following kept me from blogging over the past few months:

Being incredibly busy
Blogging twice weekly for the company blog (IOW, being burned out)
Not being able to figure out that Google has disconnected my blogger login from my mail/calendar login and that now I need yet more passwords.

I thought the whole idea was to have all my Google stuff in one login, but lo and behold, for some reason, Calendar, Mail and Sites are a separate login from everything else if you have a domain that is not gmail.com. I can't figure out the logic of this being different for @gmail.com mailboxes but not domain mailboxes.

Also, I can't figure out the logic of "Mail, Calendar and Sites". Mail and calendar, yes, but sites, why sites? Mail, Calendar and Docs, maybe. But Mail, Calendar and Sites? Do you know anyone who uses Sites?

Whatever. I'm back and now I am debating about whether to keep the account on blogger.com now that I no longer have the convenience of 1 login for all Google stuff. I'm thinking about moving Reality Overlaps to my RebeccaRachmany.com domain. I even started, but that's a whole new bunch of aggravating technical settings to deal with.

What do you think, keep it at blogger or put it on my personal domain?

We Respect Your Privacy

2010-05-17T12:48:00.000-07:00

I love when I sign up for some free thing, and they make me put in my email address to get their junk mail, and the form says "We respect your privacy."

Really?

Maybe that's the wrong question. Maybe the question is:

What privacy?

Most people today have an email address for stuff they don't want to read. Those who don't have a filter or some other methodology to toss the garbage out. Or they have given in, as I have. I just ignore most of the mail I get.

I don't know what's worse. That you don't really respect my privacy or that I don't care.

Farmville Could Change our Eating Habits

2010-05-14T00:00:00.000-07:00

I know this sounds truly asinine, but Farmville could to have more impact on our eating habits than Food, Inc. I'm sorry to have asked this question, but when I did, I found out that 63 million people are active Farmville users, and that Food, Inc.'s box office gross was under $5 million, and we all know seeing a movie costs more than a dollar.

Farmville isn't out to change our eating habits, but they do come up with all kinds of cool and interesting crops. I need to look some of them up. For some of the crops, like durian, I look them up and think "Oh, that's what it's called!" But just as often, it's like "Really? There is such a thing?"

So where could this change our eating habits. Well, if 30 million people suddenly decide they want to try a jackfruit, not much of a shift would occur. Fruit trees take years to grow, so you will either be able to get your hands on a jackfruit or not. Most people know this about fruits, and even if they wanted to try a new fruit, they aren't going to replace their apples.

But for amaranth, which is a grain, you could really create a shift. I don't think people will replace wheat and corn, but it's possible to imagine. I don't know about you, but corn is kind of wearing thin with me.

A while back I was talking to one of the largest grain importers in Israel, and he said the amount of grain imported annually doesn't change much, but the type of grain does. Right now, quinoa is "in". Grains take weeks or months, not years, to grow, and they can be stored and transported.

From what I read on amaranth, it's got a higher protein content than wheat, and it's easier to grow in various conditions. I bet I could find some in the health food store. With 63 million people already exposed to the product, this is an interesting marketing opportunity for someone.

Driving Out of Gas (TEDx Follow -up)

2010-05-11T11:49:00.000-07:00

As a follow-up to TEDx Tel Aviv, I spent part of my afternoon in the BetterPlace electric car visitor center outside of Tel Aviv. The facility is in the last standing oil tank left at Pi Glilot, which was the storage area for gasoline in central Israel. Apparently someone figured out that having such a facility adjacent to your largest population center isn't terribly bright. The petrol was moved out. BetterPlace managed to salvage one tank and convert it into a beautiful visitor center.

We were hosted by founder and CEO Shai Agassi himself, who spent over an hour answering our questions. I was so late to my next meeting that I missed it, not just out of respect (Agassi was late to his next meeting too), but because I was completely blown away by Agassi's generosity and devotion. The answers to the questions were jaw-dropping beyond all expectation.

I took the time out for this, not just because I like to mix with smart people, but because I truly care about this issue. I have had visions of overhauling transportation since I was 11 years old. I've thought about transportation deeply and often, though I haven't taken the time to make it a central part of my life.

I had a lot of questions, but I didn't ask any. I still have them. I am concerned about what's next, what we do to stop paving our earth with parking lots and freeways, how we cure traffic, and stop bashing into one another. I have a lot of questions, but I didn't ask them because they became instantaneously irrelevant to the conversation.

The conversation took place in the context of the singular, compelling vision of eliminating gasoline. The conversation lived inside the clarity with which Agassi has considered, research and planned how to make that vision a reality.

I have to make a confession here. Often, when I see or meet someone doing great things, I think to myself "I could do that." Sometimes I even think "I could do that better." I know, you never think that to yourself. You also never think "How the heck did he get that job?" or "He might be famous, but he's kind of a jerk." I know you never think those things. But people like myself, with big egos or big jealousy syndromes, sometimes think those thoughts.

But today I found myself, really, truly in awe listening to Agassi. I mean, this guy, he has a vision. He is out to end oil dependence. He is out to replace the gasoline industry. But that's not the main thing. Lots of people have vision.

This guy truly has the leadership and business skills, the audacity and modesty to pull it off. That's impressive. Very, very impressive, and very, very rare. But even that's not not the main thing.

What's fundamentally unique about Agassi, is that, on top of all those things, he has the ability to think, plan and execute at the level of the entire ecosystem. I should say "ecosystems", because the more you ask, the more you hear that Shai Agassi has thoroughly researched, questioned, analyzed, and created ecosystems. Not just one ecosystem. Multiple ecosystems.

He has considered the economic ecosystem of how people purchase cars and the lifecycle of automobile value to consumers. He has considered the entire ecosystem of where we get our energy now, how it could potentially be garnered, and how it needs to be delivered. He understands the entire car industry from manufacturing to distribution. He understands the ecosystem of introducing new technology. He understands his competitive environment and has multiple potential scenarios played out in his head.

Agassi has thought deeply, researched thoroughly, and asked the right questions. Come to think of it, he's asked the wrong questions, too. He's thought about it all.

The result is that at BetterPlace, absolutely everything is thoroughly researched and planned. Everything is considered from how the price of oil is determined; how to avoid impacting the power grid; how to build an outdoor charging station that will never electrocute anyone in any kind of weather.

The group of TEDx refugees asked intelligent questions. Every question got a thorough answer that showed depth of thought from macro to micro , from economic to engineering, and from basic human behavior to basic physics.

No words can describe the thoroughness with which this one man has thought through all the aspects of his business. No less astounding is his ability to articulate all of this with clarity and purpose. Yet even more indescribable is Agassi's humility and humanness. You are in the presence of a human being, not an idol or a figurehead.

One of the final questions was about tension between Agassi and his investors. Here, again, he gave a thoughtful answer on multiple levels. On the micro level, Agassi shared personal stories of trust between himself and Idan Ofer. On the macro level he spoke about how our society vilifies public figures and seeks scandal rather than inspiration. Agassi spoke of the loss of our perception of our leaders as heroes and our loss of trust in the human spirit.

In short, he spoke like a hero, whether you choose to believe that such things still exist or not.

This Side of the Line

2010-05-03T13:44:00.000-07:00

Mid-day Saturday, I remember that I don't have any hot-dog rolls. I recall that yesterday, when it was too late for me to do the shopping, my son had announced that we needed 15 of them for the Lag b'Omer bonfire.

Ok, I think. We'll just take a drive over to Jaljulia and get some. They must have bakeries there, and they don't close on Saturday. Tevel comes with me, and I'm vaguely aware that his dad might think that it's not a great idea to take the kids to an Arab village with me. Not that I don't buy my vegetables there all the time -- but that's on the edge of town and now we are going into town.

I ask at the petrol station where the bakery is, and they tell me that I need to go to Kfar Bara, another mile up the road. No biggie. Still, I experience a vague discomfort as I drive there, thinking, the discomfort is silly. It's an Israeli town, it's 5 miles from my house, I've never heard of any incidents, and yet, there's a vague discomfort.

The bakery owner sells me rolls and pita, tells me, yes, there's been quite a flow of people today and he had forgotten it was a Jewish holiday and the Sabbath, and he hadn't yet prepared for the potential demand.

As I drove out of town, there was a woman hitchhiking. When I see these ladies hitchhiking by the side of the road, it breaks my heart. We have them in my town too, because of the inconvenient bus schedule. When I seem them standing by the side of the road, I always stop, and usually go out of my way to take them to their destination.

Now I know I shouldn't stop in an Arab village and pick up a hitchhiker. But I just couldn't see her at the side of the road like that, so I stopped. I told her I could take her to the outskirts of the next town, but not into the town. She turned me down with body language, probably not because she couldn't speak Hebrew, but because she was in shock. She knows I'm not supposed to stop for Arabs and she knows she's not supposed to get in the car with a Jew. So that settled that.

It's weird, you know, or maybe it's not.

People live in their separate communities. I grew up in America, where the social norm says that pluralism and integrated towns are equivalent. After 200 years of failing to artificially integrate people, you'd think someone would have the thought that integration, in and of itself, may not be morally "good" (or "bad" for that matter). But Americans are stubborn, and the society refuses to accept that people, by and large, want to live with people like themselves. In fact, it's almost considered morally wrong to oppose artificial integration. It's as if there is something unethical about people wanting to live in a homogeneous environment.

In Israel, the social norm is that people want to live separately. Now, I'm not a fan of the "separate but equal" train of thought, because nobody is under the illusion that it's equal. Not in the US, not in Israel. It's not equal. But that's the end of the moral issue. Apart from problems of measuring equality, there is no reason why heterogeneous residential communities should be better than homogeneous ones. People have their tribes, they always have and they always will.

It's not necessarily a question of race. Sometimes "like themselves" means belonging to a socio-economic group, to an age group, or even to a particular profession. Sometimes it's just being someone who loves bar-hopping or a particular sport, or even a particular sports team. It's perfectly natural.

It's almost embarrassing for someone like me, that is, someone who believes in equality, who loves everyone, and who is something of a peacenik.

But when I look around at my friends, the people I hang with are pretty homogenous, socio-economically and culturally.

I was talking about this just last night with meezoog founder Tuvia Rosenthal. Meezoog is a technology that basically allows you to check out if someone is trustworthy or socially compatible. Right now it's a dating application, but clearly there are additional applications for this.

What I said was, indeed, when I meet a guy on Facebook, if we have no contacts in common, the chance of a first date being successful is very low. Tuvia pointed out that this is fairly true in Israel, that is, in a small population, if my social network on Facebook is well-developed and gives a good representation of my RL social chains. I can see that. The main communities in my RL are high-tech, roller-blading, synagogue, and Landmark (self-development). I have dozens of friends from each of those networks. If you don't know any of them, you might be a really kewl person, but we don't have a lot of interests in common, so we aren't going to have much to talk about on a date.

Obviously, an application like meezoog makes sense if you are in New York City or Paris, where the population is much, much bigger, and you need a better measure of trust than 1-degree of distance. 2 or 3 degrees of removal are helpful in this case for checking out whether someone is of dating caliber.

In other words, our compatibility and trust levels are directly correlated to how closely connected we are to the same people. Or to similar people.

Maybe it's the sad truth, or maybe it's just the truth.

Post-TEDx Thoughts: Next Generation Job Expectations

2010-04-27T13:51:00.000-07:00

I attended TEDx Tel Aviv yesterday. Rather than reviewing or saying how awesome it was, I'm just going to use the vast and bubbling inspiration and allow my thoughts to take off in various directions for the next few posts.

Not only did I hear astounding lectures, I met astounding people doing astounding things. The audience selection was indeed impressive. And I got to thinking about career expectations.

Career expectations have undergone a revolution in the last generation. You've heard people say that it used to be that people worked in one place for their lives, yadda yadda yadda. I'm not going to talk about that because I'm not old enough to have the right to do so.

I'm old enough to talk about what my generation grew up expecting in a job. (I'm middle-aged, if you must know.) In essence, there were two main streams of thought. One stream of thought, but not the predominant one, was "I'm going to get really rich." If you went to law or biz school, that might have been predominant, but certainly, in most places, that wasn't the main drive and expectation of my generation. The majority stream of thought was "I'll get a decent job and have a decent career in something I'm good at and that I enjoy."

Truly, if you have a job that you enjoy and you make a good living, you are indeed among the fortunate of the earth.

And yet, unlike in the past, people move from job to job every couple of years. And unlike in the past, many people I know, at one point or another, have started their own business. It might just be freelancing for a couple of years while the kids are growing up, and it might be doing a full-blow startup, but it seems like a growing number of people are doing their own thing in one way or another.

At TED, you start to hear something else. You start to hear it at the most base level from people like Martin Rapaport who simply could no longer bear to be part of the human rights abuses that were part of the diamond industry. It runs the gamut through to people like Paul Holman, who is looking for the coolest solutions to mundane problems, like killing mosquitoes with lasers (and, btw, in fact, bugs are much, much cooler than lasers, but you do need to look very closely to notice).

What you hear is that our generation and the younger generation are increasingly not satisfied with a good, well-paying job that they love. Increasingly, people are saying, it's not enough to do good business. We want to do good while doing good business, or at least, do no harm. We don't want a good job, we want an inspiring job. Yes, we may work at good jobs for some or even most of our life. But that's not the goal. The goal is to have an inspiring job, a job that helps other people, a job that improves our world.

If you don't get this, what we have is a completely revolutionary way of looking at a career path. I grew up knowing you should work at what you are good at and enjoy. Work is a means to an end, the end being having money to live your life and do other stuff. Work is not an end. Yes, you would hear that you should do what you love, for sure. But there was never any question about the fundamental function of work. The fundamental function of work, in the generation I grew up in, was to make money to do things that weren't work, like raise a family and be entertained, and even to give to charity.

The basic functionality of work is changing. From being a means to allow us to live, work for an increasing number of people is equivalent to contribution. They don't want to work so they can make money so they can contribute to a cause. They want to be a cause. The cause could be using lasers to eliminate malaria, and it could make a lot of money as well as save a lot of lives. In fact, it should.

In a world where we are saying that you get paid for your value, no conflict exists between doing good business and simply doing good. If your value to the society is great, you should be compensated. The way the world is today is that contribution is poorly rewarded, from teachers to peace activists. Those are not well-paid positions, and yet their contribution is enormous.

The new way of thinking is saying, all this needs to be turned on its head. Society should pay for worth beyond just monetary worth. Society should and will pay more for clothes manufactured in a humane way and for foods grown naturally. As individuals, we will work at what we believe in, and we will be compensated.

Certainly, for many people, it will be beyond their reach to have a job that is more than a means for money-making. And certainly, there will always be causes that are not-for profit, and there will be philanthropy and volunteerism.

Yet, the time is here when people are aligning with their core values, not just their core talents. People are asking not only what they enjoy and do well, but what their inner calling is, adn where their skills can make the most impact towards a better world for all.

It is astounding to live in this time. Simply astounding.

Where have I been

2010-04-24T13:55:00.000-07:00

Whoah! It's been literally months since I posted anything here! Where have I been?

I have to admit to being in the middle of a bit of a reset on my life. Not that anything major has changed. Same job, same kids, same home, same community life.

Sorry about that. Be back soon.

Mommy, I've gotta go online!

2010-02-19T06:08:00.000-08:00

Internet connectivity is essential. It’s as simple as that. You need to find Internet periodically, just like you need to eat and use the toilet periodically. You might be able to go without it for a day or two, but basically, let’s face it, Internet access has become a fundamental human need.

Unfortunately, with the spread of 3G and mobile Internet, it's getting harder to find Wifi, and even more difficult to find free WiFi in major cities worldwide. When you are traveling, roaming costs are too high to make that a practical option.

I lugged my laptop around London all day while there with my kids, because I couldn’t get wireless where I was staying, so I needed to get a fix during the day. The kids moaned and whined as the 4th café in a row told us they don’t have Internet (WTF?). Finally, we found a Starbucks (sad but true), where I was only too happy to pay a few quid to get online. Despite their grumbling that we don’t need WiFi, once we had found it, the kids (ages 9 and 11) immediately asked when they would get their turn, because they need to send mail and Facebook their school friends.

I got 20 minutes, and they each got 5 or 10, and then we were back on our way. It was worth lugging the laptop for 8 hours just to get that hour online, and I did it again the next day, despite the sunk cost of connectivity and the anticipated cost of the massage to fix the damage done by dragging the laptop around town.

It’s sad, but true. Even though I didn’t have a lot to do online, there are enough issues that demand caring for at least once a day for me and my kids to consider Internet access to be a basic necessity. I’d say that on weekdays, twice a day is the basic minimum. On weekends I can get away without. I do start feeling a bit dizzy after more than 36 or so hours, though.

The State I Found You In

2010-02-08T14:29:00.001-08:00

Outside Victoria Station in London, I met my friend AJ Pape. It was exciting, because this is the first time I've met someone from p5y.org face to face, though I've been volunteering for almost a year now.

I am in communication with several people from the organization per week, by voice, video and email, but I've never met any of them in person. Neither I nor AJ lives in London or even in the UK, we just happened to incidentally be in the same city at the same time.

So it was just a genuine thrill to finally meet AJ.

And it was kind of chaotic, both the planning and the meeting itself.

Early on, I figured out that AJ communicates most easily by email and twitter, and that he has a good mobile data plan in the UK. I also found out early on that I was going to have trouble being online while in London, and that my mobile data plan is prohibitively expensive. Also, both of us had demanding schedules, so there was only a small window on Saturday morning where we could meet, and both of us had schedules that were in flux, not just up until the time we met, but actually all the way through our meeting.

Leading up to this meeting were a number of e-mails stretching back 2 weeks, most of which were probably superfluous, and none of which included a specific time and location. General time and date along with the assumption of immediate means of communication are enough to set a meeting these days. The day of the meeting were no fewer than 6 additional communications through e-mail and text, as well as 2 or 3 missed phone calls. In other words, no voice.

So meeting at the train station aligned with the already-established air of chaos and disorganization; an air of trying to fit in just one more thing, competing with the other things in our lives. There's a thrill about that, about living life to the fullest, pushing what is possible for yourself. There's the thrill of being on the edge of what is possible in this world of constant communication, frontier-less friendships, momentary meet-ups.

And yet.

We met just to talk, so it didn't matter where we were, and certainly both of us had had enough of coffee shops. So we walked around looking for the ticket office as one of us had to buy some bus (coach) tickets. Afterwards, we talked on the underground on the way to the tweetup, on our way to meet others on the edge of immediacy.

We consulted GPS and twitter to find out who and where we were meeting. We were late, we didn't find the others, we walked in the wrong direction. We were distracted by the noise of the trains, the incoming calls and tweets, and the hullabaloo of the marketplace. Being in the city, we were was never quite at rest: concerned about keeping our belongings safe, finding the right item in the marketplace, taking in the sounds and smells, never quite able to make contact for as long as the level of camaraderie would demand.

We had an hour together. We achieved what we had set out to do: had our piece on the next pieces of peace, exchanged numerous hugs, communicated genuinely, were human with one another, created something to take forward.

And yet.

Lack of presence was present. The hour went by with the feeling of constant distraction, of squishing another human being into too small a cubbyhole, of being in one place mentally while physically in another. It was all a blur and a rush. After we parted, it took 10 minutes for my heartbeat to return to normal.

I want to live my life this way. Knowing anything is possible. Getting every last drop out of the time I am here on earth. Making a difference. Touching many lives, frequently, without hesitation, with the urgency that we have only the present in which to live.

And yet.

I want to live my life this way. Having inner peace and calm. Being present and focusing on the moment. Genuinely being with others, hearing who they are and where they stand. Standing and steady. Knowing that steadfastness and ongoing commitment, integrity and presence of mind are what create our future.

Walking the balance.

Between present and future.

Between presence and velocity.

Between passion and peace.

With agility and harmony.

And yet.

You've Got a Friend

2010-02-06T13:21:00.000-08:00

It's our fourth night staying at Susie's home in London.

As we were on the bus coming here for the first time, my son asks "How far is it to your friend's house?"

"I don't know, I've never been there," I answer, suddenly thinking about the choice of words. I don't actually know Susie either, she isn't exactly my friend. I mean, I've seen her in class, and she's seen me, but is she my friend? I asked her to help me find a place to stay this week, to save on costs, as the Landmark Forum for Young People, plus the flights, was already quite a stretch financially. And she simply offered to have us in her home.

Still, I wondered, in real life, it's not like Facebook, you don't just "friend" someone. Or do you? Children do. When they meet someone they like in the playground, they say it's a new friend right then and there.

In fact, what do you call someone who, sight unseen, offers to put you and your two children up in their (immaculately clean and beautiful) home for a week? Yes, I think, "friend" will do. And "Yes," I think, "In real life, you actually can just 'friend' someone, just like that."

It's Nothing Personal

2010-01-18T13:05:00.001-08:00

It was going to happen sooner or later. My personal e-mail address has gotten to the point where there is practically no truly personal mail in my inbox. We haven't migrated from dead-tree and ink letter-writing to electronic letter-writing. We have migrated to no letter-writing.

Why would you bother anyway? If someone wants to know what's going on with you, they can just check your status, online photo albums, and tweets.

That's not to say my inbox is empty. Far from it. I get updates from groups I belong to (several weekly inline-skating updates, 2 different religious organizations, team projects for my empowerment course, school updates for the kids, alumni association news and projects). I subscribe to plenty of stuff (word-a-day, LinkedIn groups, myriad of marketing gurus, health newsletters, daily click for TheHungerSite, my favorite charities). I get select Facebook updates, when someone comments on my status or sends me a direct inbox message. And then there's the odd mail where I'm not sure if I'm subscribed to that site or not. This week I found there is a single woman in New York who is interested in me. Wrong gender and wrong continent, but it's nice to know that somewhere, someone is interested in me.

In fact, my primary e-mail has become the place where I get stuff I know I should read as opposed to my RSS reader, which is the place for the stuff I wish I had time to read. I actually get one daily newspaper in my inbox, because I don't get to even read the news every day, and I don't want to be completely ignorant. Not that I could be if I wanted to be, because as long as I keep up with people's FB statuses, I have some idea of the major news events.

The emphasis, however, is on "should". I have a few hundred e-mails in there, over 100 of which are unopened. Just a few months ago, I always managed to keep it below 100 in my inbox total. Now, it's hopeless. I have separate e-mail for work, and for the main volunteer organization I am involved in, but other than that, the rest of the mails are lost in the pile. If I don't answer someone in a day or 2, forget it. That e-mail is lost in the pile. I try putting stars on the ones I really want to deal with but didn't get to yet, but it's only a week before any mail isn't even in the top 50 showing in the first page.

I've stopped feeling bad about it, though, because as I said, almost none of that mail is directed to me from a personal individual I know. It's almost all a blast of some kind, and when it's not, it's at the very least a group mail.

Now, don't get me wrong, I have a lot of real friends. A day doesn't go by where I don't talk to at least one person who is primarily a social rather than a business friend. But the medium is voice, not mail. It's as if e-mail has become a medium for action-oriented correspondence. We speak to someone by phone, and might send the exact address by e-mail or text, but mail isn't the primary personal form of communication. Personal communication is now by social networks for anything general, and by voice or F2F for intimate. E-mail, well, it's just something you don't take personally.

Consumption Reports

2010-01-01T01:03:00.000-08:00

Facebook and twitter are constant reminders of what a loser I am. I know in real-time exactly what parties I'm missing, what fancy restaurants I'm not eating in, where I'm not vacationing, and the beautiful weather I'm missing by being inside.

At first, I felt pretty good about all the parties and events I was invited to, and all the friends that I can prove I have. After a while, though, it became clear that my friends were throwing and attending more parties than I am, eating fancier food than I am, and visiting places I wish I were visiting. To top it all off, a lot of my friends have more friends than I do.

For a while, I consoled myself in saying they were RSVPing for parties they weren't really attending and tripitting places they weren't really going. But the pictures say it all. Even when my friends don't brag, their friends post pictures of them, quite obviously having a better time than I am.

As a marketing person, it makes me wonder about the future of promotion. My friends are promoting parties, restaurants and travel destinations, not to mention consumer electronics and other items. Nobody is monetizing that, and, in fact, nobody really can.

Another result is that a natural escalation of consumption reporting. This morning I made myself eggs and toast, and I made sure to post that I had salmon omelet, whole-wheat walnut/pistachio toast, and homemade kumquat marmalade. Most days I have a piece of fruit, and it doesn't make it to my status report, not even if it's a mango or pomegranate. If I take a trip to London, I tell you, but I don't tell you it's on business or just so I can do a course, or if I took a loan to fund my wild vacation. I don't mention that I actually didn't spend any time sightseeing or even shopping and that I barely slept for 4 days running and took the red-eye both directions and went straight from the airport back to work (unless I feel like bragging about what a martyr I am, which is definitely what I am doing now).

There's nothing wrong with this kind of reporting, but it definitely feeds into the culture of consumption and consumerism. I have 600 friends and follow another couple of hundred people, and I've never seen anyone report on their meditation practice.

Most of the posts regarding time spent with family are either about expensive entertainment (travel, amusement parks) or frustrations with sick or cranky children. You don't see much "Just watching my kids in the playground with extreme satisfaction." or "Stayed home with the kids tonight just because they said they wanted me home."

If I have to be perfectly truthful, though, it's astonishingly gratifying knowing that my son doesn't want me to go out, even when he's asleep, just because he wants me "around". Or at least that's what I tell myself while reading what a great time everyone else had last night...

Wishing everyone a very healthy and happy new year, and may your life be as wonderful, fulfilling and exciting as your posts and tweets.

In-Office Out-of-Office Replies

2009-12-16T12:58:00.000-08:00

Have you been getting a lot of e-mail lately, responding to your e-mail, telling you how often the recipient answers their e-mail?

You know, the mails that say: Dear Colleague, [polite explanation] I am checking and responding to my mail twice daily. [more polite explanation]. If you need urgent assistance [contact someone else/text me]. [yadda yadda yadda] Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and effectiveness. [additional politeness to cover for my telling you to sod off] Sincerely, [sig]

To avoid being accused of plagiarism, I acknowledge that this text is copied from The 4-Hour Workweek. Also, to be perfectly fair, Tim Ferris isn't completely to blame. Eben Pagan also deserves credit for these increasingly common autoresponders.

So, let me get this straight: you are making better use of your time by sending me extra mail to read? Hey, thanks, man. At the very least you could make it 1 sentence instead of 3 friggin paragraphs.

I'm not saying I don't understand. All I'm saying is "DUH." I know the difference between e-mail and instant messaging or SMS/text messages.

It is true that since the advent of the Blackberry, some people do have an e-mail infusion and answer at every hour of the day and night. For those people, the only cure is twitter. For the rest of us, the default is that Instant messages require Instant answers, and e-mail doesn't.

For those of you who work with colleagues who think that e-mail is an instant gratification machine, let me offer at tip to counter Tim and Eben. My tip is: don't send an autoresponder or any response until that time of day when you answer mail. People will get used to it, and if they complain, deal with them on an individual basis. Spare the other 90% of us your long-winded autoresponders.

Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and effectiveness. It will help us to serve you better.

Down and Out(sourced)

2009-12-08T12:20:00.000-08:00

This is a modification of a post I made to Digital Eve Israel (the women's high-tech networking group), following a posting by one of the members who was looking to outsource some writing to India. A number of respondents tried to explain that outsourcing to another country when our compatriots have the skills and it would be better for our economy to keep the jobs here.

Following is my response.

Many responses to the post on outsourcing to India have been defensive and talked about "doing the Right thing" and outsourcing locally. Some of the posts have hinted or stated that the Indian writers are not as good as local writers. To my mind, this kind of post is akin to killing the messenger.

Let's face it: some jobs are particularly susceptible to offshoring. In particular, if you are outsourced or freelanced already, you can bet that offshoring is a natural progression from what you are doing. Writing is definitely one of those jobs.

You can argue about the quality. I believe that if you are one of the top people in your field, you won't be terribly threatened by the offshore market. How do you know you are one of the top people? You know you are the top in your field if you are charging more than 25% above the average. If you are thinking those expensive guys are a rip-off, you aren't the top in your field. Sorry.

So, assuming you are an average freelance writer, it is inevitable that offshore writers will eventually be able to offer similar services for a better price. That's a fact. It isn't good or bad, and it isn't good or bad for a company to pay less for the same service. It's just the way things will go. If you are angry about that, great. Anger can be a call to action.

The call to action is to give a good, hard look at your career going forward. If it seems that you are in a job that can be offshored, create a strategy so you won't be out of work in 5 years. It might be re-training to a different job. It might be training Indians to do your job and then being their agent in Israel. It might be opening your own business on the Internet. Hope isn't a plan. Arguing that it shouldn't be this way isn't a plan.

My basic belief is that the way commerce works is that there is work for everyone. I also have a basic belief that most of us can find a satisfying and meaningful job, or at least something that they don't hate. I'm not saying most of the world can find that kind of job, but if you are reading this blog, you are in the category of people who has a choice in the kind of employment you can find. You are in the category of people who could start their own business if they chose to do so. There really is enough to go around, but it won't happen when we are guarding ourselves and defending against what is "out there". It will happen when we create value in the world.

Just Remembered my Right Hand

2009-11-28T12:26:00.001-08:00

Though I've been involved in politics and community action for many years, I haven't been at a real protest since I was in college. At the last protest I participated, in the late eighties, I came to the conclusion that protests have two possible outcomes: (1) nothing or (2) people get beat up. I haven't seen much to convince me otherwise in the last 20 years.

I didn't think twice about attending last night's rally (Hebrew), after one of the congregants at my synagogue was arrested at the Western Wall. When my daughter heard there was a protest, she also immediately exclaimed "We should go to that!"

Of course, that was after several failed attempts to explain to her why Nofrat had been arrested. "Wait. I don't understand. What did she do wrong?" asked Maya. As far as my kids are concerned, there is nothing exceptional or even mildly interesting about a woman reading a Torah scroll or wearing a prayer shawl.

At shul this Saturday, one of the congregants pointed out to me that this was precisely the problem. "We are raising a generation that doesn't think there is anything wrong with that. That's precisely what scares the ultra-orthodox." Certainly, that's at least part of the truth. Certainly, a number of non-orthodox movements are growing in Israel, and that does appear as a threat to the ultra-orthodox, and some of the orthodox movements.

What do I mean by "threat". I mean money. Big Money. Marriage, divorce, burials, jobs in the municipalities and government, tax breaks, government-allocated lands, grants and scholarships for education, and the Western Wall (among other tourist attractions). This is big money.

I don't want to go too much into my religious beliefs, but it is beyond offensive that in Israel, Jews do not have freedom of religion. Our congregation has a couple of dozen rabbis who can not perform a marriage or memorial ceremony in this country. Being persecuted for religion in our own country is too horrific for me to even think about, so I didn't think, and just took my kids up to Jerusalem, despite all I know about protests, and went to one.

It was a great protest, too. It was early enough in the evening for the kids to hang out and participate. There were a couple of thousand people, which felt like (and was) a victory. Our friends from the congregation came, so the kids felt like it was fun, and I felt it was secure. Nobody got beat up, not by the police and not by opposition protesters.

At the end of the day, I don't know how much came of it. At the very least, it gave my kids the feeling that we were doing something for what we believe in. And we got t-shirts. I like to think about how many more lawyers the Conservative and Reform movement have than the ultra-orthodox movement. I like to think that will make some difference.

The real difference will be made on the ground, though. When people get together and say they just won't stand for religious oppression of Jews by Jews in the Jewish land, it will stop. When we demand that the religious sites and institutions serve us all equally, it will happen. This is just a start, but it's a good start, a strong start, and a start that will lead to a future of religious tolerance for all of us.

Get on Board: The Greatest Marketing Challenge

2009-11-18T20:34:00.000-08:00

Last February, I got a mail in my inbox from Internet marketer/guru Eben Pagan (yeah, it's a weird link, but that's Eben), which said, "The "hardest" marketing challenge in the world". Now, Eben is an internet marketing guru and I've never met him, but he definitely sends me more e-mail than any of my friends. So I don't read them all. But this one I couldn't resist. This is the interview I heard (click it if you are still interested after reading the rest).

And so it started that I got involved in volunteering for P:5Y, one of the most amazing organizations I've ever joined. (Yeah, I know this is not the hottest web site, I'll get to that later.) It's amazing because the volunteers, mostly, are people who heard about it the same way I did, which means they are marketeers and business people. Even the ones who are historically peace activists (and there are very few) have their own internet businesses on the side. In other words, unlike other volunteer organizations I've been part of, this one takes on challenges like a business, like there's a deadline.

The founders asked themselves, what if we treated Peace like a business? What if we defined the problem, put together strategy and tactics, found out why the competitors didn't succeed, and set a deadline. They wrote plan. They published a book. Although the subtitle is Give Peace a Deadline, What Ordinary People can do to Cause World Peace in 5 Years, I have not met one ordinary person since joining the organization.

Now, we've had a lot of stops and starts, just like any new organization, and the web site doesn't look so great. The teams are functioning without all the tools we said we'd have running a few months ago, etc. But the strangest thing is happening.

About 2 weeks ago I realized that when they wrote the book, they said that in the first year we would go from 17 armed conflicts to 14 armed conflicts world wide. We are 9 months in. There are 15 conflicts as of this writing. I don't have a great explanation for that, but it's kind of cool.

I'm asking for your help. Let me tell you what you get, or at least what I got, and then I'll tell you how to join. The first thing you get is that you really are working on the world's greatest marketing challenge and the world's most urgent problem. That should be obvious, so if that sounds fun for you, wait, there's more! You get:

Professional value in idea exchange and networking: you'll be on teams with high-level professionals
A reason to get up every morning: you'll regularly have inspiring and high-level conversations with intelligent and thoughtful people, not pie-in-the sky dreamers
Fun and responsibility together: you'll be held accountable for what you say you'll do on these teams and you'll have access to mutual advice and coaching with your buddies on the teams
Friends: I've met some incredible people I know will be in my life for many years

OK, now join. Just drop me a line at rebecca@p5y.org, and I'll tell you what teams are forming and put you on one with other really cool people. The obvious urgent needs are a web site team (HELP! URGENT!) and a team to end 1 more conflict by February 15 2010 (also HELP! URGENT!) We have a Global Peace Treaty team with attorneys on it, and a Peace Commerce team with businesspeople on it -- something for everyone.

If you are skeptical, that's OK, join anyway. One thing I learned from roller-blading is that if you get a critical mass of people, and that's only about 40 people, and you do something kind of crazy, like skate through a downtown metropolis, the thing you are doing doesn't seem crazy.

I guarantee you that you won't feel like you wasted time on this project, and I guarantee that you won't feel crazy after the first 2 weeks. If you are, hey, quit.

So write me, at rebecca@p5y.org, and retweet or FB this blog so other people can do the same. Get on Board.

Note, I'm a volunteer and I don't answer P:5Y mail when I'm at work, so it might take a few days for me to get back to you.

That Syching Feeling

2009-11-13T01:51:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting next to a dear friend of mine at a dinner event, and he says "You were late, so I called you, but you didn't answer."

"Do you have my new number?" I ask.

He shoots me a dirty look.

"Wait, I'll call you and you'll get it on your screen." I open the address book on the phone, only to find that his number isn't there. "Um, could you call me?"

He shoots me an even dirtier look. "This is looking really bad for you," he says.

Later in the week when my kids wanted to call my brother-in-law to wish him a happy birthday, I found out I didn't have my sister's phone number either.

Backstory
I got a new job about a month ago, which meant I changed computers, cell phones, and Outlook/mail servers. (Fortunately, my personal e-mail never changes, so 90% of my contacts can always find me by e-mail and the other 10% know how to use Google.)

I exported my my Outlook contacts, Gmail contacts, etc. I synched up my phone and my GoogleCalendar. Miraculously, 2 weeks into the job, Plaxo offered me a free trial of Premium membership, so I was all set up for synchronization and duplicate elimination. This was going to be easy.

And it was, it was really easy. There were only two problems:

The technology didn't work properly.
For a change of phone number, you need a "push" technology, not a "pull".

Let me first say a thing about the technology that didn't work. I have nothing against Plaxo, but let me just state a general rule to any company. If you are planning to charge for a "premium" service, the service should actually work. Fortunately I got 30 days free, but seeing as it not only didn't work properly, but also caused damage, free turned out pretty expensive for me. Oh, and I can't cancel the trial except by calling them by phone during California business hours, which I most certainly will, and it will cost them more money than just letting me do it by Internet. I guess they figure they'll get more money from people who can't bother to call than it will cost them to answer the phones for people who do call. I don't have much to say about ethics on this one, but it's still a poor business practice to do something with the potential to piss people off. They might blog about it.

Back to my story.

I synched Plaxo with my Outlook, and then I used Plaxo's functionality for removing duplicates. (Actually, this was after trying Outlook's functionality for removing duplicates, which was really, really lame.) At first, I started using the manual functionality, but by the time I was up to 23 of 1156 duplicates, I thought it was impractical, and trusted the Plaxo functionality. Needless to say, I lost plenty of data this way. I don't know whether it was the sync or the dupe, but one way or another, information disappeared. (Yes, I have backups, if I want to return to the universe of 1156 duplicates.)

BTW, I am skipping a discussion of the miseries of incompatible file imports, etc., with Outlook because I assume you all know that it's par for the course. Apparently, if you are technical enough to know there is an "import/export" function in your mail app, you are technical enough not to be upset with a bit of fiddling with csv, pst and xls files. I'm willing to put up with a lot of scrap as long as in the end, my contacts are synched.

You'd think that contact synch would be easy to figure out. For any company doing contact sync, let me tell you a secret. This is a big secret, so you are going to owe me for this.

People's name are not unique identifiers. People's e-mail addresses and mobile phone numbers are unique identifiers.

Given this, it should be friggin easy to do a contact merge. Really. Yes, some people have more than 1 e-mail address. Yes, often I have the cell phone number stored in my cell phone and the e-mail address stored in my gmail account, and sometimes there is no overlap, so let me tell you another secret. Again, this is a big secret, so you are going to owe me for this one too.

If you are a social networking site, you don't need to ask me the correct e-mail address and mobile phone number, because you are probably more accurate than my address book. (Yes, I know there are privacy issues, but if I am linked/connected/friended with them, it's legit for you to just update the proper name. That's why I joined Plaxo and connected with people there in the first place.)

So, once you know these two big secrets, a computer program, especially a social networking site computer program, should be much smarter than I am when it comes to duplicate contact resolution. From the 23 contacts I did manually, I can confirm that the program behind Plaxo is worse than my brain is at duplicate contact resolution. Listen, Plaxo, you have great ideas of what we want from Plaxo. Close to perfect ideas, I would say. The execution falls way short.

Ok, that's my sinking feeling about synching. I want to have a quick discussion of the largest part of the puzzle that is missing, which is push technology to send out important new information.

Now, I have a lot of announcement technologies to publish my new phone number. I'm not a very secretive person. After all, my job is to be the company spokesperson, which means my cell phone is published on company press releases. Still, I'm not actually going to tweet it. I did update LinkedIn, Plaxo and FB profiles, and announce on FB and twitter that I have changed phone numbers, so if you are my contact, you can find it.

Still, these are basically pull technologies. Either you noticed or you didn't. More than half of my RL contacts are not connected to me through any online social network.

Ok, so next, I started sending out e-mails to say I'd changed my information. Now that you know how many duplicate contacts I have, you can imagine how many actual contacts I have. Also, Gmail hasn't saved all of them as friends. Some of the people I write to most are not in my address book there. (AAAAAH, how did this happen? What kind of feature is this?) I didn't know this when I started, either. And, of course, there are limits on how many e-mails you can send in bulk, both in terms of spam blocking, and in terms of patience in clicking boxes. I guess you could just do "all", but in most people's cases, that doesn't make real sense. Not all of my buddies from every group list I belong to need to get this notification.

Over the course of a few days, I got up to R. So if your name starts with R-Z, or you are listed in my address book in Hebrew, and you didn't get an update yet, sorry. Maybe I'll get to it. Maybe not. And then I have to go back and go through the contacts that Gmail didn't add to my address book and send to those ones. And then there are the people who aren't on my e-mail list, like the parents of all my kids' friends. I could SMS them, but again, with the number of people I know, that's both expensive and time-consuming. Mostly time-consuming, to tell the truth. I'd be willing to pay twenty bucks for it.

Technologically, it's not problematic to create this functionality. Spammers use it all the time. Normal people, however, can't. It would even be easy to provide this as a one-time service when you get a new phone number. I'd be willing to pay for that. Sounds like it is time to call my cell phone provider and ask them if they can do that for me. I'll let you know how that goes next week.

Cybermom and the Eyes on the Back of the Head

2009-11-03T12:53:00.000-08:00

1 Farmville Gift request.
"Who could be sending me a gift request at 3 in the afternoon?" (Nevermind that I'm on FB at work.)
Tevel Rachmany has sent you a violet hay bale.
(Opening up text chat in FB) "You are supposed to be doing homework, not playing Farmville!"
"Ok"
Tevel Rachmany is offline.
"That was too easy. I wonder when they'll figure out they can block me."

Or when they'll start reading my blog. For now, they think it's reasonable that I have their passwords, because I always have had them, and of course, just in case they want me to harvest their crops for them after I've sent them up to bed. They won't give one another the passwords, though, because they might spend Farm dollars. Or because each one has a certain amount of time on their personal login on the computer. They are clear that I can parentally block out Farmville, too (I {heart} Mac).

The kids' friending habits are interesting. They are clear that they shouldn't friend strangers, so when my high school friends wanted to friend them for Farmville purposes, they turned down the invitation until I gave explicit permission. (Yay!) Tevel doesn't accept friendship requests from the girls in his class. "They aren't my friends," he says. Maya is a little older, so she friends boys in her grade.

I don't friend the kids' friends, but as I am a Farmville champ, quite a number of them friend me, and I (obviously) accept those requests. Nothing like knowing what your pre-adolescent kids' class is doing. I also make sure that Farmville gifts go to the kids first (sorry adult FV neighbors.)

Tevel has a special name (it means "Universe"), so occasionally someone else named Tevel will friend him because of the common name. If the person looks normal, I allow him to friend them and I let them know he is a kid so they shouldn't send anything inappropriate. Mostly they are teenagers themselves. And some Tevels play Farmville, yay! Maya never gets other Mayas friending her for the name, since it's so common.

For now, I have the privilege of seeing what they do online and who their friends are. For them, it's just a fact of life that Mom knows what you are doing online. It's just a fact of life that you can IM mom at any time of the day or night. I think they know that other people's moms aren't as wired, but maybe they don't. Maybe it's all part of the knowledge that your mom has eyes on the back of her head.

As a parent, it means I have information other parents don't, and I don't hesitate to share anything that seems useful. The kids' crushes are probably none of my business, but some of their online and texting habits have had me calling other parents. Interesting discussions have ensued, about whether it is OK for them to play poker if it's just with virtual chips and not real money. Unfortunately, I'm starting to feel I need to sign up for Zynga Poker to find out. Hopefully it's not as addictive as Farmville.

Weekend Networking

2009-10-28T23:48:00.000-07:00

Way back when formal networking events were just getting started here in Israel, and I was a lowly technical writer, I attended an event of the Israel Technical Writers' Association. I remember a bit of tension there, where we were talking about business objectives and why we needed to boost membership, and at one point, Mark Levinson, the head of the organization at the time said "There's nothing wrong with just wanting to make friends." The tension disappeared.

I do a lot of networking. I recently identified networking as one of my most leveraged activities, in terms of the long-term results I get in my life. It also turns out that one of my long-term (and short-term) goals is to have lots of friends, so that's not a surprise, but even if taken just in business terms, networking is up there near the top. It's not surprising. Business is about people. Getting anything done is about people. Knowing, helping, and having good relations with people is how things work. I think of networking as the oil that keeps the machinery of the world going.

I do so much networking that this blog is almost all about networking.

So if I tell you that I went to the best networking event of my life last weekend, you know it was something special.

I spent my weekend at the Kellogg Connect International EMBA event in Eilat. This was a weekend event at a nice hotel, and I was pretty sure I was going to have to wear the hot-shot pose all weekend long and "do the networking thing". To my complete delight, the event was totally casual, the people were warm and caring, and no poses were attempted.

We are talking about some of the most successful business people in Israel, and a few very successful ones from Europe and Canada here. The Kellogg International Executive MBA is the top ranked program in the world. We could easily have pulled out poses -- we've got lots of them. It just didn't happen.

The weekend started off with the obligatory fascinating lecture on Thursday night, but from there on in, it was all leisure. Boat rides, water sports, lots of eating, a fair amount of drinking, and just the right balance of organized activities versus free time. Unlike most networking events, there was no need to "work the room" since we spent a whole weekend together, and there was a natural flow of people and a natural flow of conversation.

OK, so some of our conversation might seem a little weird to normal people. When we talked about movies, we talked about box office numbers and marketing campaigns, and when we talked about restaurants we talked about the challenges of the food business. For us that was the most interesting and comfortable way to address those topics. YMMV.

The bottom line, as with any networking event, was the people. I could talk about how they were all top executives and smart people and how we all made concrete business connections, because all of that's true, but it would be missing the point.

You know, most of us have limited vacation time without the kids and limited vacation funds. You don't normally take a day off from work, ditch the kids for the weekend, and spend time in a resort town with a bunch of strangers.

I can't express in words how easygoing, open, fun, and caring each and every person was on that weekend. There wasn't a moment I felt out of place -- it was just a great weekend with people I was happy to spend my vacation with. Not a shark in the bunch. I don't even think the scuba divers saw a shark the whole time.

Note: This is an exclusive annual or semi-annual event only for EMBA Kellogg or Kellogg IEMBA graduates. It's a great model to copy if you have the right kind of group, but I can't get you an invite. Unless you become my boyfriend, and I do have an opening for that position at this time. If you are a Kellogg EMBA grad, feel free to contact me and we'll get you on the mailing list for the next event in March.

Genius of Farmville

2009-10-23T10:14:00.000-07:00

I feel kind of stupid, blogging about Farmville. It's not like you don't know, I mean, it's all over my Facebook profile. I'd like to say that I am doing it for the kids, but I think we all know that it's like watching SpongeBob. It might start by being something you do with the kids, but not really. You know you really wanted to do it yourself.

As the Farmville craze started, I knew this was something I needed to stay away from. People were posting their achievements on Farmville on their FB profiles in the middle of the day. My thoughts were, "Ok, you are playing this game. We all play games at work sometimes, but don't you have the common sense not to post your achievements where your workmates can see them?" Or, "Great, you play a game, but don't you want to keep it a secret."

This is part of the genius of Farmville and its genre of games. Your friends get benefits when you publish your achievements. So you are a good citizen and you publish. So far so good.

Actually, I did protest when my kids asked me to join, but I didn't protest too much. And of course, once I had joined, I had to be "better" at it than the kids. And of course, I had to get "better" status than my friends, either. I couldn't be stuck down at level 5 when I have friends at level 35. Level 35, man, I don't want to think about the time invested to get to that level. (I gotta find some way to do that, I can't have people being "better" than I am...)

Of all the online games I see my kids playing, though, I have to admit that Farmville is one of the better ones, really. You plant different crops. Different crops have different costs and different payoffs and different ripening times. I found some nice spreadsheets online that someone had done with all the ROIs for all the crops. I showed them to the kids, and we actually have discussions about what is the most worthwhile thing to do with the space.

Eventually, you figure out that the percentage of profit doesn't matter, because money stops being an issue, and the actual scarcity is space on your farm and time that you have to invest on the crop. The spreadsheets can also help you calculate that, because they tell you how much space your crops take up. You can also have trees and animals on that same space. Different animals have different yields and take up different amount of space... you get the idea. It's actually not bad, if you are going to waste your time on something. Which, apparently, I am.

The other thing that I find useful as a learning exercise is the whole thing about how you handle your money. Generally speaking, you only get more money by investing it. The bank doesn't give you interest. These days, that's a fine lesson for my kids -- invest the money because it's useless just sitting there. Despite that, my daughter would rather have lots of money spare in the bank. She has a kind of a fear of spending it. So that's another thing that we can talk about and get some insight.

The second interesting thing is how I am behaving with money at the higher levels of the game, when I really have more money than it is possible to invest (because land becomes a scarcity, so you can't invest any more). I've found my spending habits interesting to observe. Even when I think I want to save for the big thing, I figure, eh, it doesn't matter, I am going to earn more (true on the game, less true in life). When I have nothing I want to buy, I probably fool around and go shopping anyway, because, whatever, it's fun, you know. In this particular case, it's not real money, but it is real time. It's also just interesting to observe myself when it's not real money and say, OK, I get how easy it is to just buy stuff because the money is in your pocket. So that's been a good exercise in awareness for me.

The best thing for me about Farmville is that there is only so much you can play it. Crops take hours or days to mature, so I make sure to plant things that take a couple of days to grow, so I won't spend all my time on the stupid game. Lord knows I'm capable of it, so I like that built-in protection of having to wait. The kids, meanwhile, have installed a bunch of other games to fill up their time, but they're kids, and it's their job to play games. I think I know myself well enough to stay away from the temptation to try the next new thing.

Because I Need the Eggs

2009-10-09T04:44:00.001-07:00

Today's post isn't about community or networking, but it's a good story anyway.

I needed some eggs, but mostly, I thought it was a good way to get out of the house and do something mildly interesting with my son, so we walked about 10 minutes across the fields to the place with the "fresh eggs" sign out. Although I definitely live in suburbia, there are still some fields left. And although I usually get free range eggs, I figured we'd learn something (like why I usually get free range eggs.)

"Do you want to go see the henhouse?" I asked Tevel when we got there. We don't actually have appropriate vocabulary for the hangar-like buildings that now pass as henhouses.

"I don't care," he said.

As we approached the hangar, the, um, farmer (more lack of vocabulary) approached us and explained that we can't actually see anything, because it's a controlled environment, and the wall flaps are now down because the air conditioner is working.

Farmer Eitan gave us a fantastic explanation of how it works, too. You see, the food is all weighed so they know how much comes in, and around 2 in the afternoon they start to collect the eggs. There's no way to know what hen is laying which egg, or if one of them isn't. They just live in the hangar for 2 years, getting their food and laying their eggs, and then they are sent off to become shnitzel.

He used to sell the guano to the farmers in the area, but now they won't pay for it. They prefer to use chemicals because they are just mixed in the irrigation system, so it's much more consistent and easier to distribute. He's grateful that the farmer on the neighboring land is willing to take the guano for free. That farmer, he said, gets a better yield than the other guys, but he doesn't turn over crops as quickly . He also makes more money by putting the crops in a refrigeration system and selling them when the prices go up, while the other farmers are in a hurry to sell since they have payments to make on loans and land, etc. The neighboring farmer has more invested, gets his fertilizer for free, and takes his time to get better crops and a better price, and is doing very well financially compared to the other guys who are just scraping by. The guano parable, in and of itself, is a telling story about farming and business in general.

"How many chickens are there?" I asked.

"90,000."

Ninety thousand. If you saw this place, you would never guess he could fit that many hens in those two buildings. They are big buildings, but still. Ninety Thousand. "They're bigger in America," says Tevel.

We got our tray of eggs and started back home to make egg salad for tomorrow's pot luck.

"What did you think," I asked Tevel.

"I dunno."

I dunno either.

Reference for the title of today's post, from Woody Allen's Annie Hall: It was great seeing Annie again and I realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was just knowing her and I thought of that old joke, you know, the, this, this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, 'Doc, uh, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken,' and uh, the doctor says, 'well why don't you turn him in?' And the guy says, 'I would, but I need the eggs.' Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships. You know, they're totally irrational and crazy and absurd and, but uh, I guess we keep going through it...because...most of us need the eggs.

The Way of All Things

2009-09-26T11:48:00.000-07:00

I wouldn't say I enjoy funerals, even if I did, but I consider them an opportunity. They are an opportunity to reflect, to learn, and to grow.

I've been to quite a few funerals this year, and will probably continue to do so, not just because I have a lot of friends, or because I'm a particular age, but mainly because I belong to several social and community circles.

Funerals are the ultimate reflection of community. They are never pre-scheduled, frequently at inconvenient hours, announced almost exclusively by word of mouth, and the person being honored often can't ensure that certain guests get the invitation. Despite all of this, universally, and miraculously, almost everyone seems to get enough notice and attend the event.

Funeral attendance is a telling reflection of a person's life and social status. The largest funeral I attended was of a woman who was a fairly well-known figure in her community. When her husband passed, a year later, his was a tenth of the size. Clearly, if the order had been reversed, things would have looked quite different. Funerals for the young are always crowded with peers and parents' friends. Once you pass the age of 90, even your younger friends may not be around to see you off.

What I have learned, above all, is that funerals are truly about community. The attendance at your funeral reflects directly the attendance in your life.

If you have lived your life, as most of us do, as an individual, you belong to two main community groups: your family and your work communities. Typically your friends are individuals, or a loosely-connected group.

By nature, we feel alone much of the time, even when we are surrounded by people. Think of yourself at any type of social event. There you are, surrounded by people. Either you have found the group of people you know and will stick to for most of the event, or you are doing your best to make conversation with new people, or debating whether you should go say hi to that person you think you know from somewhere... you get the picture. This is how our lives look most of the time. We are surrounded by people, yet our individual life seems to be flowing in its own solitary direction.

By being active in an organized community, we can ease the feeling of being alone. For me, that community is at my synagogue, Hod v'Hadar, a place where you have the feeling of togetherness. Most of the funerals I go to, in fact, are for members or relations of the people in that community. It's not spoken and not questioned. We simply attend all of one another's life cycle events. I can't think of any other place I've been where the community is so solid and so simple.

To tell the truth, it took me quite a while to accept this. Today, we have very few structures that are permanent in our life, and so few communities that support us unquestioningly. It's astonishing, really. I wonder how much life used to be like that, when we lived in small communities, that we simply had to accept everyone in the community, go to all events, and support one another however we could. It seems the more we have materially, the less we connect.

It's telling that this level of support happens in a framework where there is a specified structure for face-to-face meeting at a minimum of once a week. It's hard to imagine any online community with this kind of commitment. Indeed, it's quite clear to me that even my most intimate online friends are not likely to be in a physical position to attend my funeral. Most of my online friends wouldn't even relate to who my family is, if one of those people should go the way of all things.

In short, there's not a day that goes by that I am not grateful for the real-life community I have in my congregation. As well-connected as I may be, and as many close friends as I may have, there is simply nothing to compare with a community with norms and rituals set up to accept, support and handle the inevitable ebb and flow of life.

After the Holidays

2009-09-23T22:43:00.000-07:00

Those of you who know me personally know that I've been looking for a new job. The company I was working for had to cut back dramatically, you know the story. (Director or VP Marketing, for those of you who are hiring or know of openings.)

If you live in Israel, you also know that the holidays are upon us. They started last week, and they end in mid-October. And everyone knows that last month was August.

While I've been looking for a job, one of the phrases I've heard from people is that "things will pick up after the holidays". Let me be more specific. The people I've heard that most from are job seekers and placement agencies, not companies.

For all of you "After the Holidays" people, I have to wonder, is that how you run your business? Or your life? Just to put that in tangible terms, if you are an "After the Holidays" type, this is how your calendar year looks, if you live in my country:

January (minus the first week, rest of the world still on holiday)
February
March
After the holidays
May
June
After August
After the holidays
November
After the holidays in the rest of the world.

If you are an individual, you also have events like ""After the kids settle in their new school," and "After my mortgage is paid", etc. Businesses also have things like "After the big trade show," and "After so-and-so gets back from overseas." It's easy to see how at least half of your time can get wasted by "after..."

News flash: customers aren't waiting for your holidays to buy products or get their existing products serviced. The love of your life isn't waiting until your mole has been removed to go out and date other people. Your kids grow at the same rate regardless of the calendar date.

Successful companies aren't waiting until "after" to do their business. If they need to fill a position, they start advertising for the position. I've had interviews in August. I've had interviews right smack in the middle of the holidays. And this week it I got it: these are the kinds of places I want to work. Places where when they need to fill a position, they do it. They work around this guy's flights and that guy's vacation, and this holiday and that event. What needs to get done gets done, without excuses, and without delay. Without "after".

Look at your own life. How often do you find yourself saying "After..." or "Someday..."? Look at the price you are paying for waiting. And then, get off your rear, and do it. Today.

Unaffiliated: Why I'm not an affliliate marketer (and probably will never be)

2009-09-17T08:47:00.000-07:00

I took some time over the summer to learn about Internet Marketing through something called the Thirty Day Challenge. It was a low-pressure but time-consuming course (offered free in August) that teaches you to make your first dollar on the Internet. I have to admit that I didn't finish the entire course, though I did a good part of it, and I didn't make my first dollar yet.

I learned a lot about Internet marketing, and much of the content is definitely applicable to what I do as a regular marketer. In general, it was also fun.

The two main takeaways I got were: (a) Affiliate Marketing is a real job, not some scam; and (b) Affiliate Marketing is not for me.

Just like any kind of marketing, your job as an affiliate marketer is to get people to know about and buy stuff. I think affiliate marketing is actually a lot tougher than regular marketing, because of the massive competition. The bottom line is that you are selling stuff that is already out there to customers who are probably looking for that stuff, and they could find it through you or through other means. If you aren't totally on it, some other affiliate marketer is going to be on it, and that customer will buy the stuff without your getting a cut. Or if they click through on your site, and then they decide to buy a different model, you don't get a cut.

It's pretty brutal. There are some ways to make good money on affiliate marketing, but you have to know what you are doing and have an advantage over the masses.

But that's not the main reason I don't really connect with the idea of affiliate marketing. The main reason I don't connect is because it doesn't appear to me as something adding real value to the world. Again, no offense if you are in this field and you love it or are doing well at it. But for me, affiliate marketing is fundamentally reallocation rather than creation.

I recently saw an online video of a talk by Umair Haque discussing "perceived value". Perceived value is what we learn about in business school, and it revolves around the idea that if a product is perceived to have value over a competitive product, that is worth money. In other words, you pay more money for a can of Coca-cola than a can of no-name-cola, because you perceive these to have value. Haque says, fundamentally, that perceived value isn't value. In other words, if all you are doing is putting a fancy label on it, you aren't creating anything of value in the world.

I'd go even further and say that a can of cola has no value at all, or negative value, if your health is considered.

Haque actually postulates that businesses that don't add real value will fail. I'm not sure I believe that, though I would certainly like to.

At any rate, when it comes to affiliate marketing, I just don't think that my blogging about the awesomeness of flea jump-ropes and pointing you to the site to buy them is really adding value in the world. You might all value my opinion. You might find it slightly easier to find the right flea jump-rope for you. Probably not. Probably it would have more value on the Amazon review for flea jump-ropes rather than on my blog where I get a percentage for pointing you to Amazon.

I do believe that there are zillions of products that can be created and marketed through the Internet. Creating a new product that answers a real need -- that's where value is. If you can create a better flea jump-rope, because you are the expert on flea jumping, you should create the product, not plug a different product. That is a contribution to the world.

When I was doing the course, one of the guys on my team said "It is everyone's dream to have their own product and sell it through the Internet." He said that as if: we are doing affiliate marketing because creating your own product is harder. He might be right, too. In any case, if that's your dream, that's what you should be doing, not something that appears easy and, at the end of the day, doesn't add real value to anyone.

So that's my take on affiliate marketing .Again, no offense to anyone, and I'd be glad to hear your comments below.

Spooky Spokeo

2009-09-03T02:03:00.000-07:00

It was only a matter of time before all you had to do was know someone's email address and you could find out all about them in one click. Recently Guy Kawasaki posted a blog on a new service, Spokeo, that ostensibly does just that.

The idea is, you put in an e-mail address and the service calls up all the social networks and finds the person in those networks. You can it out (with limited info) for free here. The price for the full service is reasonable: just $2.95 a month.

Unfortunately, it works rather poorly. I don't want to be harsh on the Spokeo Folkeo, but I am totally on all the social networks and they didn't even get my name right. I mean, my e-mail adddress is rebecca@ and they still didn't get my first name right. (They got my son's name with all my info, actually.) There's no place to fix this. Even when I fixed it on the original site where I had that name listed, they didn't update. BTW, the site they are considering authority is Flickr. Not Yahoo, even. Flickr. Now on the upside, if your priority is photographs of people, maybe Flickr is a good authority. Still, I don't think that most people would associate the words "authority" with the site "Flickr".

Further, they don't check the social networks very well. They found me on 5 social networks, when I know I am registered on 15 and use 6 of them regularly. I don't have a grasp of exactly what technical challenges are involved in this implementation, but it doesn't seem too difficult to check for me in the network using my e-mail address. OTOH, if you don't actually know my name, and you are searching by name, that could be an obstacle.

I checked Spokeo for a few of my friends and colleagues, and found similarly disappointing results. For a few extremely well-networked people, the results seemed fairly good. It's hard for me to say, because one of my social-networking friends came up with participating in 9 networks. I am "friends" with him on 6 or 7, so I can't make an assessment if 9 is good coverage for him, but I suspect not.

I won't comment on the fact that Spokeo doesn't have all of the major social networks listed. This is a new product, and I'm sure with time they will get additional sites searched. However, considering they are already charging a monthly fee, I'd expect the engine to work better at least on the sites they claim to cover. Still, I think the general business model is sound and I am looking forward to seeing them with a more mature product in the future.

One Thing They Haven't Changed Yet

2009-08-29T13:15:00.001-07:00

It's never nighttime on the Starship Enterprise. They very rarely beam themselves onto a planet's surface to find it's the dead of night and everyone's sleeping. Come to think of it, who are the people on the other shifts, and why isn't the First Officer the one to man the ship when the Captain is sleeping? ...

2:35 am. Laptop boots but Skype still churning, nothing seems to be online. In that half-funk between sleep and psyching yourself into presentation mode, I hobble over to the router. No blinking lights. Pick up the phone. No phone line.

On the one hand, you can't really blame the ISP for choosing 2 am as a good time to do standard maintenance. On the other hand, I'm supposed to be speaking to Tokyo, Sydney and Mumbai at 3 am.

Fast forward 20 minutes, an all-night coffee shop, after ordering some decaf to pay my rent, hooked in with my laptop, earphones and mic.

"We're getting a little background noise," says our host in the US.

"I'm having a few technical difficulties, sorry I can't do much about that," I answer. I've asked the waitresses to turn down the background music, but there's not much I can do about the coffee grinder and putting up the chairs to mop the floors.

While I narrate, my colleague shows the demo from his laptop, in his home, 30 kilometers from my coffee shop. The host in the States and some unknown people in the Far East ask questions, and 40 minutes later we're through. It went well.

Looking 2 tables over, I wonder about the lone geek with his laptop. What's his excuse at 4 am? I go home.

The host has thanked us several times for being flexible for the international sales meetings. We tell her this is infinitely better than having to fly to other time zones.

Truthfully, there really is very little in life that beats international web or video conferences for just general coolness. There's something about having 20 people from 12 countries in a virtual room together, speaking to one another and asking questions. You'd think by now the cool would have worn out, but no matter how many times I do these calls, it just cools me out all over again...

On Starship Enterprise, nobody seems to think it's even the least bit cool to talk to beings from different planets or to just beam yourself around.

When someone teleports in, the host never says: "How is your spacelag? Gosh, what time IS it on your planet?". Of course, the answer would be something like "It's 37 minues past the hour, " because on any given planet, it's every hour, but it's the same minute, everywhere, except in those weirdo time zones that are half-hours. Or where they don't have minutes.

Nobody wears a watch in space, because there's no time of day. Indeed, there's no standard length of day. You have to start wondering what kinds of work shifts they have to work out, with all kinds of different beings whose bodies are adapted to different sleep patterns. I'd be really surpised if any other planet came up with a standard of 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day...

Anyway, even if I can't time-shift, I can sleep-shift, and I can location-shift. Thank goodness for all-night coffee shops.

Here a tweet, there a tweet.

2009-08-17T04:49:00.000-07:00

I have to confess, I'm a sporadic tweeter. Some days I'll be on twitter regularly, reading all your tweets, and tweeting a bit on my own. Some days I'll just follow a few people. Most days, to be perfectly honest, I just can't be bothered.

It's easier to admit this behavior because it's quite obvious at this point that many people are occasional tweeters. You see it all the time, a sudden spurt of 5 or 10 tweets in a day, then for a week, nothing.

Or then there are the occasional tweeters, who put up a tweet every week or two. I'd ask what the point of that is, but actually, those are people I probably will never un-follow, since they are no trouble.

In fact, I don't see myself changing my habits any time soon. When I am on twitter, it's on days when I don't have a lot to do, and it's nice to see what the latest geek-speak is.

The true mystery is that even when I've been off for a couple of weeks, I don't get that feeling like I "missed" something important and can't follow the new conversation. On the other hand, I feel like when I am reading the tweets, I am getting information I needed. Truly mysterious.

I suppose it's no different than what Yossi Vardi discovered with ICQ: being in communication is a basic human need. Wherever the conversation is, it brings us human value to be part of it. Apparently, the business value is secondary, and comes mainly as part of the "being in communication" rather than some specific tweets that you just can't miss.

Annual FB Birthday Report

2009-08-13T23:54:00.000-07:00

As another birthday passes me by, I am overjoyed to report that. like last year, I got lots of birthday greetings. Unlike last year, I really know almost all of the people who greeted me on FB or by email. I didn't get even one birthday tweet, which I also consider "in good taste". Twitter doesn't seem the right forum to get or give birthday greetings.

Two main trends appeared this year. One is that I got fewer greetings. I don't know about you, but as I have more and more friends and contacts, it becomes more difficult to check in and birthday greet everyone every day. So I definitely got fewer greetings than last year, but the ones I got were a bit more meaningful, that is, from people that I feel more warmth towards.

The other change noted was that social networking, for some people, has become a substitute for real relationships. I saw a griping youtube clip on this a couple of years ago, saying that FB is for people who don't want to talk to you. In other words, if I don't want to talk to you, I can send you a Hatching Egg or an e-card, and I got out of my obligation to actually speak to you on my birthday.

I am sure lots of people wanted to talk to me and just couldn't get through because my phone was busy talking to the people who did get through. Almost all of my good friends had the good taste to actually call. Those who didn't probably forgot my birthday, which in my book, is totally cool. I don't usually tell anyone my birthday either, so if you don't pay attention to Plaxo or Facebook, I expect you to forget.

Unfortunately, in a few cases, this year, I definitely identified a few cases of people who left two-word wall postings because they were too cheap, too busy, or just didn't want to call. I'm not really insulted by that. It's just a trend, from my perspective, towards people becoming further from the people that they had originally intended to be closer to.

Baggage Check

2009-07-28T13:18:00.000-07:00

I sent my daughter, aged 10, to the US to visit her grandparents. On the way back, she goes through the usual routine.

First the security officer asks her if she prefers Hebrew or English. She says she doesn't care, so he asks her in Hebrew, "Who packed your bags?"

"What?" He repeats the question in English, but she still gives him a look like: "What?" Grandma explains they packed together.

"Did anyone give you anything to bring back with you?" (She's just spent 3 weeks with grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins.)

"Yes."

And so it goes. Apparently she did manage to pass security despite the suspicious gifts of girly toys, clothing, Webkinz, and Hershey's shower gel (don't ask).

I guess, at the end, she understood why she was asked those silly questions. I wonder how many times it will take before she figures it out and does the same as all of the rest of us. That is, if asked if anyone gave her anything, she'll say "No", irregardless of how many presents were showered on her by grandparents.

Come to think of it, shouldn't it arouse suspicions when someone travels to family and tells security that nobody gave them anything to bring back? What kind of cheap family do you have? You came all the way out here and they didn't give you ANYTHING?

How about over Christmas break? If you traveled somewhere for Christmas, and you tell the security guy that nobody gave you anything to bring back, shouldn't that arouse suspicion? Shouldn't you be immediately detained for resisting the authorities?

It's time we put an end to this rampant lawlessness. From now on, when we get to the airport, we should give detailed lists of each and every person who gave us something and what they gave us. If we all join the truthfulness campain, we could probably increase the required personnel by 20%, doing our part to combat global unemployment.

A tweet on twitter

2009-07-01T06:51:00.001-07:00

I had my Tweetdeck open one morning, and it was making those faint tweeting sounds, as it is wont to do. My son walks in the room and says "What's that sound?"

"It's Twitter," I answered.

"It's annoying."

Amazing how an 8-year-old can sum up my Twitter experience in just 14 characters.

Untweetable

2009-06-22T11:27:00.000-07:00

The first time I read about someone giving up their RSS feeds for Twitter feeds was about a month ago. I recovered from the shock quickly, but am not likely to make the move. Ever.

Twitter is an instant-gratification machine. No doubt, I have found articles and information on Twitter before it appears on RSS, and I've gotten info I would have not found otherwise. However, the main drawback of Twitter is that it's happening NOW. If I have a busy day and want to catch up, Twitter simply is not going to offer me a solution. If I want to catch up on just what's important to me, again, Twitter and its accompanying clients are inadequate.

RSS feeds are far superior for batch-mode newsing. I've got the key information under more than one category (tag) so I can quickly see what I've missed. RSS automatically displays at a glance what I usually read and what I usually ignore (427 unread posts -- obviously something I don't care much about).

And threading, where would I be without threading? On Twitter, of course.

Other than my personal preference, though, I have to ask myself what it means when so many people are talking about Twitter as an alternative to other news sources. Truthfully, if you are more than 200 tweets behind, you aren't going to catch up on your tweets. In other words, if you sleep or have meetings, you start to fall behind. If you don't tweet on the sabbath (hey, some of us don't), you miss information.

One issue with this is what it means culturally, when you have a group of people who basically have committed themselves to almost-constant connectivity. On top of that, it's non-threaded connectivity. This marks a major change in attention span. Firstly, if it's not happening now, it's not happening. Secondly, if you are online in this way, you are constantly dealing with interruption. Any task that requires more than half an hour of concentration is a challenge.

In other words, you are wasting a tremendous amount of time. I've seen a lot of apologists about how Twitter is useful for business, and how twitterers are more effective, etc. I don't find that particularly likely.

The main issue, in my eyes, is what something like Twitter does to the culture. What does it do for the culture when you need to be updated all the time, and anything that happened over 2 hours ago is passe? What does it mean that if you go to sleep, you are missing several hours of your important updates? Moreover, how can you enjoy anything when you need constant update?

I use twitter, a couple of minutes a day, usually, and definitely no more than half an hour a day. Let my friends say I'm old-fashioned or out-of-date. Me and my RSS will just have to live with it.

@shidurey vs. @ynet_co_il

2009-04-29T04:25:00.000-07:00

Firstly, my apologies that this post is not in Hebrew. If the title caught your eye, it's a sign that Hebrew is probably your native language, but it's not mine. Take my word for it that you'd rather read my English than my Hebrew.

Secondly, I want to clarify that I am very fond of @yosit and @liorz. Their broadcasts are fun, smart, sometimes silly, and surprisingly entertaining. If anything, the experimental broadcasts prove that being real and having a compelling personality holds an audience regardless of the value of the content.

Still, the @shidurey vs. @ynet_co_il challenge is just a bit sillier than usual, so I felt compelled to comment.

Background: Yosi and Lior decided that they can get more followers @shidurey than @ynet_co_il. @shidurey, so far, doesn't broadcast much of anything other than news on this silly competition. @ynet_co_il is a bot put up by someone anonymous, to tweet the feed from ynet.co.il, the top news site in Israel. @ynet_co_il in fact says he/she/it isn't associated with ynet, so when you get to the profile, your inclination to follow the feed immediately dissipates. @shidurey, otoh, is friendly and funny and says it's run by some real people.

@shidurey passed its competition a day or two ago, and now has almost 800 users and @ynet_co_il has over 600. The race is apparently to 1000.

I started searching around and found some interesting tidbits, in no particular order:

@ynet_co_il came alive and encouraged people to follow it, claiming that bots have feelings too.
@nana10News, @nrgnews and @newsfromisrael are plugging for @ynet_co_il but even combined they have fewer followers than I do.
In general, news sites in Israel don't have impressive followings. Haaretz (in English) has over 1300.
It's unclear whether ynet knows this is going on, because their search engine is pitiful, but from browsing the site, it appears they are oblivious.

On the one hand, it seems like an unfair fight: A twitter ID with nothing to say against the top news feed.

On the other hand, it seems like an unfair fight: Two lovable guys with huge followings against a poorly-marketed bot whose feed is coming from an oblivious host.

Obviously, all of the parties benefit by getting increased followers.

Bottom line, as usual, is that this won't prove anything, but I think we are all having fun in the meanwhile.

Peace by Any Other Name

2009-02-28T11:57:00.000-08:00

Before you read this post, you need to promise not to think "yeah, right" until you've given it a few minutes of thought. I got an email from one of the lists I subscribed to describing "The Greatest Marketing Challenge of All Time." Admittedly, my first reaction was "Yeah, right." But then I listened to the interview and decided it was worth my time, and it's worth yours, too.

The challenge, if you haven't heard, is world peace in 5 years. The first thing I heard in the interview that convinced me it was possible was that these people actually created a definition of "peace" that was measurable. They also set up a deadline and wrote a business plan and workbook. In other words, they are looking at world peace as a business venture.

I didn't have to think about why they perceived peace as a business venture, because they laid it out clearly. By and large, almost all business benefits from peace. In other words, peace has monetary value, so it makes sense to perceive it not only as a humanitarian venture, but as a business venture.

In a nutshell, that's why I think that this particular marketing challenge has a chance of success. Even if it doesn't, the people putting this venture together strike me as the kind of people I could learn from; the kind of people I'd be glad to spend my spare time with. And they just might achieve their goal.

What are you waiting for? Join now. P:5Y.org.

Why 25 Things

2009-02-09T22:35:00.000-08:00

If I had a nickel for every chain letter I hadn't responded to or passed on, I'd be better able to handle this recession. Still, I can't resist Facebook 25 Things. I read them, and I've even written one. Despite some sarcastic press coverage (more sarcasm), 25 things is indicative of how we've reconnected with one another.

Suddenly, I have connectivity with friends from high school, old companies, college, and random events. On the one hand, I don't have time to renew all those old friendships on a one-on-one basis. There are a few gems there, for sure, but actually I don't want to write a personal note to everyone who links, fbs, ff, tweets, or plaxes me. And although my LinkedIn and FB profiles provide some information about me, it's somewhat limited. 25 things provides an opportunity for me to say a few things which give some insight on where I am in life and what my personality is like.

Although the objective is differerent, in some ways it's correlary to the LinkedIn recommendations. Rather than the dry description, you get a bit of color by reading what people say about one another. In LinkedIn, the purpose is to know whether you want to do business with someone. In FB the purpose is to know whether you want to really spend the time to go further in the friendship.

I'm curious to see how this will affect things like high school reunions or first business meetings. Before showing up, you can go through someone's profile online, and start from a different point in the conversation. At my last HS reunion, I literally had no recollection of some people who I'd been friends with (maybe that should be one of my 25 things). This time, I"ll know everyone! Already I do show up in business meetings knowing more about my colleagues than ever before. Too bad most people keep their FB profiles hidden from the general public. I guess they still believe in privacy.

My Facebook Inbox

2009-01-29T07:32:00.000-08:00

Looking over my shoulder, Maya glances at the number of unread messages in my Facebook Inbox. "How do you have so many?" she asks. "Those aren't real messages from people." I say. And they aren't. As far as I am concerned, FB Inbox is not a real inbox.

I have two real inboxes: my personal gmail box (rebecca@ganglysister.com is Gmail) and my work mailbox which sits somewhere on the servers in my office where people named Alex can find it.

FB as it is designed now can never be a real mailbox for the following reasons:

No forwarding of messages.
No filing, tagging or archiving of messages.
No searching messages or senders.
No saving, backup or export of messages.

As far as I am concerned, the bottom line of this is that my messages in FB belong to FB, not to me. I'm pretty sure FB feels the same, considering the lighthanded way they can choose to simply discontinue their service at any time and you have no way to protect yourself by using an export or backup function. You can't even export your contacts.

I know some people use FB for real and even business/professional messages. I don't get it, but it's their funeral. I use my FB mailbox as a toy. My Inbox has invitations to events, messages from groups and fan pages, etc. Every now and again a friend writes me on my FB inbox, and I almost always answer them using my gmail account, so I have a gmail record and they will start using real mail to speak to me.

The main advantage of FB is you can send mail to anyone, even people you don't know. The main disadvantage of FB is anyone, even people you don't know, can send mail to you. I have found numerous business contacts through FB, and I have not sent them business email through that methodology. Either I come up with their business email legitimately (pretty easy to do, actually), or I don't write. As far as I am concerned, people are on FB for fun, and the last thing they want is to have people accosting them at the playground to do business. My FB inbox is just a playground. If you want to be serious with me, find me somewhere else.

Why would anyone watch me?

2009-01-25T13:41:00.000-08:00

It suddenly hit me how bizarre the discussion on privacy is, after reading a blog by Steve Smith on how delighted he is that he's finally getting targeted advertising.

Regardless of where you stand on the privacy issue, the fact is that a great deal is known about us. Our browsers and web sites track where we've been (though our ISPs are forbidden from doing so). Our credit card companies know where we've been or what we've bought. Our supermarkets and pharmacies, if we have a frequent-buyer card, know to a high level of granularity exactly what we've bought. Our cell phones know where we are located, so in theory, our cell phone company knows at a minimum where we've been roaming to, but also in theory, who our friends are and how long we spend talking with them. Our employers can track our computer activity and know what we did on our computer all day long.

All of the above is for people who don't use things like Twitter, Facebook, Pandora, Skype, Plaxo, or instant messaging. If you use any of those, in theory, someone knows a lot more. In that case, potentially, anyone could know who your friends or colleagues are, what music you like, what parties you go to, and what you ate for breakfast this morning.

For most of us, that's at least a bit disturbing. For many of us, it's even intrusive or creepy. Most of us don't want to think too much about what could be done with that level of information, if it indeed could be made sense of (not trivial at all).

The sad, indeed, pathetic, part is that the only thing our society can think of to do with all that data is to sell us more stuff. Most of the privacy debate revolves around varying levels of outrage of what corporations are going to do with that data, what they are going to advertise to us, and how intrusive they will be in their marketing efforts. Now, I don't know about you, but I have a feeling I will be seing more, not less advertising in the future, and if it's going to be brash, at least let it be for feminine hygiene products and not for prostate treatments. (Either you agree with me on that one or feel just the opposite, as the case may be.) If it's not going to brash, let it be about ice cream and not cars (again, your taste may vary).

But back to my point.

What does it say about us that the only thing we can think of to do with personal data is to monetize it? Some of us are aware of how to use that data for the greater good, but at best, the implementaitons are marginal.

What does it say about us that our opposition to using personal data is revolved around corporations wanting to monetize it? Some of us are aware it could be used to really harm us or for our government (or someone else's government) to keep tabs on us, and we certainly oppose that, but it isn't the dominant conversation.

Yes, it is frightening that corporations own so much information about me personally.
But to me, it's even more frightening that we are living in a society where the primary, if not only, meaure of the worth of anything is in dollars.

War and Social Networking

2009-01-20T23:00:00.000-08:00

I'm sure most of you have noticed that I've been living in a war zone for the last 3 weeks. Personally, the effects aren't major; the war is a hundred miles south of me and it's more-or-less business as usual in my life. I'm not going to write about that. As usual, what I'm going to write about is social media.

Some of my colleagues have made huge efforts to support Israel through various online media. I assume the other side also has its supporters doing the same, obviously not from the Gaza strip, because getting online is a problem, but they have their supporters outside the strip. I've gotten email from various international charities supporting humanitarian efforts, as well.

Before I go into the war specifically, let me be clear that social media and the internet have made an enormous contribution to the non-profit world and to do-gooders everywhere. The most obvious and successful examples are Kiva and One, but there are many, many more. I do not for a moment place doubt on the power of the digital media.

However, the digital and social media world isn't going to win the war. It isn't going to impact the war. It doesn't matter one byte, and these are the reasons:

War consists of things like killing people and destroying stuff. Your blog and youtube video are all nice, but they will neither destroy more stuff nor prevent stuff from being destroyed.
Your blog and youtube video aren't going to change anyone's opinion. That includes this blog. The sides are so far apart, and almost everyone following the news on this subject has an opinion already, so forget it. If you like watching videos of soldiers either helping or shooting guys on the other side, you will find videos to your taste. If you don't want to hear the other side's opinion (the most likely scenario), you won't watch those videos.
It could be argued that being bombarded with this much media desensitizes us to it. I don't know about that, but personally it just makes me sick, so I avoid it.
I know this will shock everyone (not!) but you know those online polls asking whether you support Israel or the Palestinians? They don't actually influence the results. They don't actually influence international opinion either. The only thing they represent is how fast Jews can pass along email as opposed to how fast Arabs can pass along email. Since I think we all know the answer to that question, you don't have to feel any obligation to cast your vote in those anymore.
And finally, the reason that social media won't win the war is that the concept of winning the war is an oxymoron. It just isn't conceivable to me that killing people and destroying stuff is "winning". I mean, it's measurable, and that's all good and fine, and we definitely got a higher "score" on destroying stuff, but what kind of "win" is that? We're going to end up paying for putting it back together, directly or indirectly, so it's a little ridiculous.
Moreover, the huge amount of media attention is counterproductive, in particular to Israel. Israel is constantly complaining how it gets the short end of the stick, how it is accused unfairly of atrocities, etc. Ya know, it would help if we would just shut our traps for a while. The more we talk, the more we get other people to talk about it. We say "when x country committed worse crimes, nobody said anything..." Yeah, because they knew how to shut their traps. We just can't shut up, and then we complain how the world looks at us with a magnifying glass. Honestly, keeping our traps shut would serve us a lot better than trying to win a war of words. Nobody can measure that, anyway.

It's been common knowledge for a long time that this kind of war doesn't solve anything. The conflict will be resolved through negotiation, if at all. Meanwhile, the debates in the social media are counter productive. It really doesn't matter who is right, or who is horrid, who is generous, who is winning, or who did what to whom first. It happens to matter who is dead and what is destroyed, because the more dead and the more destroyed, the less chance to reach a compromise both sides can live with. It also matters that we spend our time accusing others and justifying ourselves instead of working towards something productive.

I'm not saying the other side is right. I'm saying, it doesn't matter who is right because we are both losing and we are using old-fashioned metrics to try and prove that we aren't.

It's about time we took responsibility for our words and actions in the social media, and stopped thinking in terms of "winning the war of words". It's completely irrelevant. Save your breath and your bytes and start thinking of how to say, do, and post something that could bring about a solution in the future rather than describe misdeeds of the past.

Inactivity

2009-01-08T02:07:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since I blogged, for two main reasons:

I have a new job at a cool startup and it's keeping me busy.
I have given some thought about where I want this blog to go, and it wasn't clear to me yet.

While the state of social media is still of some interest, at this point it's way overblogged. Anyone following the blogs of Chris Brogan or Jeff Pulver will get that they have started to run a bit thin on material that specifically talks about social networking. Like any technology, at first there were lots of new and cool things happening, and now it's just kind of a part of life.
Also, regarding social media, I use it more and more as part of my daily life. As a marketing tool, it's unbelievably effective in getting me where I want to go. However, I am not at liberty to talk too much about what I am doing at my company, at least not on a weekly basis.
So, the blog is going to morph a bit.
First of all, I'll add a bit more about my personal life and adventures, including my personal use of social media and some of the fun stuff I get to do in my job. Secondly, I'll talk about marketing in general, and social media and community will be part of that.
Secondly, I am writing the company blog at AdsVantage. Since the company is in the area of ratings and advertising, it should be of interest to those of you who are following me because I talk about marketing. For those of you who are following me because I have a sense of humor, you may be out of luck. Or not. For those of you who just like me, the intention is that this blog will be a bit more fun and a bit less business, and that I will continue to update every week.
And for those of you who are concerned about "the situation": I am safe, life is pretty much business as usual, and there is some chance I will blog about it in the coming week.

Roaming Salsa

2008-11-16T08:22:00.000-08:00

The concierge recommended a club in LA where we could both eat Cuban cuisine and dance to a live Salsa band, but when we got there, the joint was empty, in a seedy neighborhood, and the proprieter had had a tiff with the band leader, so there was no music. So there we were: myself, my boss, a colleague whose booth we were sharing, and his PR agent, somewhere in LA, hungry and without a dance floor.

First thing's first: one of us whips out a phone with a GPS and we start looking for a place to eat. Easy-peasy, you might think. The problem is, all you get is the name of the place. No star rating, no description of the cuisine, no pricing, nothing. Just a name and a street. Eventually we gave up on that and just picked a restaurant that looked nice and had a lot of customers in it.

Next, we started to try to figure out where to go Salsa dancing. Now, we had already looked on Google, and this first place didn't work out, but what else could we do? Actually, none of us wanted to surf to look for a place because roaming charges for data are so outrageous, it's cheaper wasting petrol than accessing the internet. So we asked around, and were instructed to drive about 15 minutes to a place which we found to be... closed. Again.

At this point, the one member of our group with a US phone made some attempts to surf and find something suitable, with no success.

I had a similar problem the next day, looking for a hotel in Chicago (more about my new life in a future post). The important and relevant parameters to me were: price, proximity to public transport, and shuttle to the airport. It was simply impossible to search with those parameters. In the end, I asked some friends and was directed to somewhere just great. I had to order on the phone, though, since you can't order online for the same night because it takes time to process.

I could add to that my failed attempts to find a good British Pub online during my London stay, my inability to locate a printer in Anaheim through the Internet, and a slew of other informational and technological disappiontments.

In theory, we should have never had to ask a concierge, the girl on the street, or the friend about hotels or restaurants. In theory, it should have been easy to find an open dance club, and maybe even get some live video of the dance floor. In theory, it shouldn't take 10 minutes, much less 10 hours, to process my online order for a hotel. In theory, restaraunt star ratings could be incorporated into your GPS listing. And, mostly, in theory, it should not cost an outrageous sum to surf the internet just because you are out of your "home" mobile zone. It also shouldn't take so damn long to get a response from the network.

In fact, the best way to find a good restaurant, hotel, or dance club still appears to be by word of mouth. It's a good thing we can all still depend on the kindness of strangers, because the technology is still practically very far from helpful in a real crunch. And no, we never found a place to dance and ended up in a bizzarre piano dive.

LinkedIn Catchup

2008-11-11T00:50:00.000-08:00

While the high-tech world has a tendency to favor first-movers, moving second can have its benefits. LinkedIn is arguably way ehind Facebook in terms of forming groups, and just recently LinkedIn has made it simple to use applications. I've been waiting for this capability since I saw LinkedIn and Google showing off the calendar application on the release of OpenSocial.

Although Facebook is increasingly being used for serious networking and setting up get-togethers, including business networking meetings, Facebook isn't intrinsically designed to be serious. Facebook is fun and colorful, while LinkedIn is black-and-white, I've heard it said, but I don't wear my party shirts to business meetings.

For business networking, LinkedIn is far and away the most popular social network, and by adding groups and applications, they are poised to really take a leap. A minority of users are actively using the professional lists, the bias is clear. If you go to LinkedIn to set up a group, you are doing so for professional networking purposes, and dramatically enhancing your reach to other professionals in the area.

I've been warmly welcomed to every group I attempted to join, and offered connectivity to other group members. This is networking at its best.
You may have some doubts as to the quality of the links acquired through this type of networking, and I agree. However, fundamentally, it's no different than having a coffee at a professional conference with someone. You still don't know the person; you might not necessarily recommend them or refer them to a colleague; but you would be inclined to at least read the e-mail they send to you. The major significant difference in the LinkedIn connection is: you can actually remember you have it and search for it when you need it. Whether you store your paper business cards in a binder of a box, no matter what sorting system you use, there's no denying that it's going to be easier to find a LinkedIn connection than a business card.

The only major feature lacking is "notes", such as you would scribble on the back of a business card. I would like to see that feature on a social network: the ability to write your own personal comments on how you met the person and the ability to apply your own tags for later search of the person's profile.

Apps are just in the nascent stage, and don't yet include the kinds of tools that will connect online to real life encounters. To do that, applications need to correspond real-world activities with online and professional profiles. For example, if you are attending an event, and you want to meet a certain type of professional, you should be able to make the proper search. If you are on business in a foreign city or a particular hotel, you could use some kind of application to put together a minyan, or find someone to go jogging with who is also a professional in your field.

Most business travelers find themselves alone much of the time they travel, so this could be incredibly effective. Imagine being able to find the right person to sit next to on a flight instead of ending up next to the crying baby. Not that I have anything against crying babies; I've had a couple of my own. Still, when on business, the benefit of sitting in a plane next to someone visiting the same conference or belonging to the same industry is clear.

At this stage, the applications tend to restrict your life to the virtual. I'm looking forward to LinkedIn's providing apps that cross the gaps and create meaningful relationships. Recent developments lead me to believe that time is drawing near.

Skype Gripes and Swipes

2008-10-27T13:35:00.000-07:00

I've heard plenty of gripes about Skype. I've heard analysts and bystanders say that Skype can't compete with other VoIP platforms. I've heard it's got security holes. I've heard people say it's annoying to talk from your computer. I agree that ebay paid too much for Skype.

Despite all this talk, Skype is now used for real business. As far as I can tell, it's at least as popular as fixed line.

In other words, these gripes and swipes simply aren't true. While it is true that Skype is essentially a proprietary client, and other softphones are "standard" SIP (I know enough about SIP for the idea of standard to be in quotes.), meaning they should be able to call one another, in fact this isn't of much concern to anyone. People still use regular phone numbers and for all intents and purposes, SkypeOut and SkypeIn are no different than the interfaces of any other VoIP interfaces.

For all the talk of Skype security problems, I have not heard one live actual account of a security breach due to Skype. I spoke to one of the Skype founders who told me the same thing. Not one live incident. If you know of one instance, by all means comment (and I don't mean you heard of it or read it on the Internet -- I mean, do you know an individual who had such a problem, not an IT manager who claimed it was a problem).

The bottom line, basically is that Skype has got it right. I can't put my finger on exactly what is right, but everybody has it on their desktop. Today, it's absolutely acceptable to tell a business contact to Skype you, and it's relatively rare for anyone (at least in the technology industry) to say they don't Skype.

The main convenience of Skype over other forms of communication is what people in the industry call "presence". That means I know if you are available before I, um, "dial", the, um, "device". It's also convenient that it's free, you don't really dial, and you see people's name instead of their telephone number, but those features don't change the basic functionality the way presence does.

Presence is revolutionary for two reasons. The main reason is that we no longer need to set fixed meeting times. I recently set a teleconferences with a collegues defining the time as "Some time between 4-6 pm. Look for me on Skype." We didn't have to sit by our desks, worry about stopping in the middle of the previous call, or any of that. We just "saw" one another online. Another meeting was defined by "Wednesday or Thursday afternoon next week when we are both online." Obviously, these weren't the most important meetings on my schedule, and they didn't involve more than 2 people (though Skype is amazing for that, too.), but you get the idea. Using Skype is changing our concept of scheduling. I don't know whether this is good or bad, it just is.

The other reason presence is revolutionary is that getting a phone call really never needs to be an annoyance anymore. Although sales guys have my Skype address, they don't take advantage of it any more than my regular fixed or cell number. I'm an extremely accessible person, being as I have customer-facing as well as spokesperson roles at my company. It's easy to find my cell phone phone number.

Despite my accessibility, my experience is that the best sales people are never an intrusion. With Skype, if they want to call, the usually will open a "chat" first and ask if it's a convenient time. Yes, they could have done the same thing by picking up the phone, but somehow, the quick chat is much less of a bother. Sales people who don't use Skype are starting to be much more of a bother to me than those who have access to knowlege about whether I'm online.

Given this, it makes sense that Skype would also integrate a feature that would allow me to define "work" and "real" friends, and define my status accordingly. That is, when I'm at work, my work colleagues would see me online, but they wouldn't see me online when I am at home. If it integrated with Plaxo to adopt those attributes, wow, I'd really be in heaven then.

Meanwhile, feel free to Skype anytime.

Uncommon Marketing: Out of Touch

2008-10-22T15:43:00.000-07:00

In my last entry, I talked about common sense as a marketing tool, and in this blog I talk about common courtesy as a marketing tool. You can apply this one to social networking if you like; it works for both analog and digital relationships, so to speak.

I can't begin a discussion of lead follow-up without the soapbox introduction. (start soapbox)Can you believe that in this day and age, the best way to keep track of the people you meet is by exchanging a piece of paper with ink on it? Even if the person has inconsiderately used glossy colored paper or if the card is two-sided, you can still fit in some scribbled notes in the margins. Nothing invented to date can take the place of having that pile of cards with notes on it. You get back to the office and scan the cards in and put the notes down in a database file, but fundamentally, we are still using little cards to introduce ourselves.

It's true that the booths at trade shows have barcode scanners, but they are useless. They offer no way to identify the real leads from the giveaway-vultures, and now way to put in personal notes next to the name of the person whose badge you have scanned. And of course, only the exhibitors have the scanners at the booth. Even if the scanners were useful, they are useful in the minority of situations (trade shows) and for the minority of participants (exhibitors only). Booth visitors have to take a slip of paper or other physical reminder they have been there.(end soapbox)

Given that you've been to a trade show or networking event and have collected either scanned bits of digitized contact information or information rendered on thin dead tree scraps, the next step should be to do something with the information gleaned. Amazingly, this step is overlooked by the overwhelming majority of people. The most "professional" booths scan your card and add you to their newsletter list, which is ok, but it doesn't actually create any useful business contact.

It is rare for you to get any direct personal mail from the person you met, or from the person they said you ought to meet in their company. I wish I could think of any logical explanation for this behavior but I can't. Well-organized sales people are the only follow-ups you get. You can immediately tell these people are using a lead management system. You have to wonder, why don't all the staff use the lead tracking system? Why shouldn't product managers, financial managers, and ops managers track their contacts in an organized manner? It's really a matter of common sense.

It's also a matter of common courtesy. If you meet a new person and say you will be in touch, the idea is that you want to be in touch. Maybe you are secretly hoping they won't hold you to it, because actually you don't have any business interest in staying in touch. One of the beauties of online social networking is that you can "friend" these new people or add them as business contacts, without any obligation to really have a communication.

In fact, it is much more common for me to go to a networking or other event, meet someone I frankly have nothing in common with, and have them friend me on FB or LinkedIn than it is for me to meet someone I have real business interest in and have them send me a personal communication. Think about that for a moment. People would rather add you to their "network" for no particular reason than contact you for a business reason.

But you know what, at least some of the blokes you send out there DO add those guys to their business network and now have another "link" when needed. Some folks are too reserved even to add the link or friend the people. Now, when you think about who you are sending to expensive trade shows, you have some insight about their effectiveness. It's easy to find out who in your company at least LinksIn or Facebooks, right? It is the ones who have more than a couple of hundred friends/contacts, many of whom are from the industry. Before you book those tickets for your staff, check their LinkedIn profile (If you targeting European markets, check their Xing profile.).

Hopefully, you don't have to resort to this methodology with your sales people, because the sales people are tracking their leads already, and you have a quantitative idea of who is or isn't effective at large events through an automated system.

One final word on follow-up. Amazingly enough, if you do follow up and send a personal e-mail, most people don't answer you. I can understand they might not really be interested, or they are overwhelmed, or whatever. In fact I know why they are overwhelmed. When I don't get an answer, I have a tendency to send them another e-mail or two before giving up. No wonder they can't keep up with the flow. If they'd just answer me in the first place and say they aren't interested, it would reduce their incoming e-mail by 50%. It would also be just plain decent.

I know that you are thinking "gosh, if I answered all those annoying sales people, it would eat up my day". Truthfully, that is just ridiculous. I answer all those annoying sales people at my job, because it is my job to work with suppliers and offer my company various marketing options. I can't know about them if I don't talk to those annoying sales people. I often tell them right up front it's not interesting, and then they go away. Sales people work on commission and if there is no chance of commission, they go away very quickly.

Having common courtesy is so uncommon these days it leaves an amazing impression, even on people who will not do business with you. No matter who you are, there is some way to get through all that e-mail in a courteous way. You might need an auto-reply, but frankly I doubt it. One of my most memorable e-mail exchanges was with Guy Kawasaki. I wanted to add this blog to alltop, a library of top blogs and I wrote to the info address (or whatever it said there). Guy personally answered me and we exchanged a few mails.

I don't know who you are, but if you are reading this blog, it's safe to say you aren't busier than Guy. It's worth asking yourself, what is it that is preventing you from having the common courtesy and business sense to simply behave professionally and politely with all of the people in your network on a weekly (if not daily) basis.

Uncommon Marketing: Giving it all away

2008-10-11T12:29:00.000-07:00

The longer I'm in the industry, the more it appears that the most commonly overlooked marketing tools are common sense and common courtesy. Note: today's entry talks about traditional marketing with no mention of social networking.

It hit me recently following a trade show I had visited. As the marketing guy at the show, I have several roles: marcom (booth manager), competitive intelligence (visiting other booths with a high level of curiosity) and lead generation (approaching potential customers or partners.) Within this framework, I can't help but noticing the absurdity and lack of common sense of the giveaway and lead follow-up cultures. In this post, I'll talk about the giveaways and speak of lead follow-up in a future post.

The marcoms of the world have an established giveaway exchange system going. At the end of the show, nobody wants to ship extras back home, so we give them away to whoever is around during those last few hours of the show. In other words, we swap with other marcoms. We also trade info during the show about who has what, so we know who we want to swap with, if we haven't already just gone by and boldly asked for the item we want.

On the other hand, when I go to booths with genuine interest, either as a potential partner, customer, or supplier, almost never am I offered a giveaway. Since what I really want is information, I never ask for one, unless I've been tipped off (and as the lead generation guy, I might not have a good marcom to tip me off).

In other words, if you are sending giveaways to trade shows, you can be pretty sure that the majority of them are going to marcoms or giveaway-hunters. Almost none of them are going to the people you want them to go to, that is potential customers or partners.

Just to give people an idea of the cost of participating in these shows, companies who do booths put out from US$20,000 (for a tiny booth and associated costs), on through upwards of $1M for the big booths and big productions. Generally, the total costs for a medium sized booths runs in the neighborhood of $300-500K. Giveaways are a small part of the outlay, something like $5-$10 a piece. The total might be $1000-$3000 if you give out one to every serious booth-visitor at a good show.

In other words, if you are already spending half a mil to show up in the first place, it's worth putting in the extra grand to be remembered. After all, that's why you made giveaways in the first place. Most brochures don't make it to the hotel room, much less the luggage of the person who took them. Most people have poor filing systems for business cards (more about that in the lead follow-up post), so that's not going to remind them. Give them an item, they will at least pack it and get it home and remember the visit to your booth when they unpack.

Some companies will claim they just don't have giveaways or don't give them out at shows anymore. Yeah, right. We all give them out less than during 1999, but any company with one or more salespeople either has giveaways or an open account for alcoholic beverages at the duty-free (or both, depending on the target market).

I used to have common-sense ideas about giveaways, but I've been proven wrong repeatedly. For example, I said not to get things for the kids, because people just give them to their kids, instead of remembering the brand themselves. However, I must have tripped over that noise-making light-emitting bouncy-ball at least half a dozen times this week. I used to say don't give useless gifts, but I swear I've dreamed about Light Reading monkeys and Hatteras cows (boy, am I ever sorry I googled that one). My common-sense theory is that it should be visible and useful, but given that the most memorable giveaways for me were neither, just go with whatever strikes your fancy. Just don't forget to give it away to people who you want to remember your company rather than just swapping with your fellow marcoms.

If you are making a cheap (under $2) giveaway as a way to get people to come to your booth, then you want to proactively give it away, by having a booth hostess actually offer it graciously to passers-by. This mostly is relevant to companies doing mass branding campaigns, or in very targeted conferences. Bottom line=common sense. If the gimmick is for a purpose, use it for that purpose. If it is not, don't bother to produce it.

Incidentally, I found the booth stinginess syndrome runs over into coffee and chairs. Many booths have drink or food bars, or comfortable sitting areas. The concept is that if you spent a quarter of a mil, you want as many people as possible to visit the booth.

Yet in several cases I was either refused a drink or asked to leave the booth area if I wasn't talking to a company rep at that moment. I found this particularly odd at booths which appeared empty. If your booth is empty, you should be pleased that me and my buddy are free-riding at one of your 3 empty tables. If we are there, at least your booth isn't full of your own staff with no visible interest from anyone else.

Even for a customer truly in need, there is something off-putting about stepping into a 20-foot square space with 8 logo-shirt-clad sales guys ready to jump you. OTOH, if you are a competitor, it warms your heart to walk by a booth with nothing but logo-shirts. Plus, just between you and me, I'd rather waste the coffee on anyone in the industry who might have a good word to say about us afterward than to my own staff, who I can treat to cheap instant coffee at the office when we get back.

By all means, if your booth is bustling, kick out the freeloaders. Otherwise, offer me a coffee; or you know what, say coffee is on the house, but we are sending Bill over here to chat you up for a few minutes. At least find out if I am someone you want to know or offer your services to. You can be pretty sure that if you ask me what my company does, I will answer you; that's what I came to the show for.

At the very least, scan my badge, something more intelligent that booting me from your booth. Rather than saving $5 on bottle of fizzy drink, you can be building a story for your boss about how many people visited your wildly successful booth. Incidentally, I can tell you that just by this common courtesy I ended up talking to a number of people I had didn't have any business with. Mostly nothing came of it, but in some cases we were able to refer one another to someone who was of interest. It's called networking, but the basis is just common sense and common courtesy. Again, you've spent the time and money to be there: chat up everyone you possibly can. (Incidentally, I am serious about the $5 fizzy-drink; exhibition organizers force you to buy the drinks from their approved caterer, and that's what they charge. You get some plastic cups and a paper-bucket of ice thrown in for that price, if it's any consolation (which it isn't because you're paying $150/day for the mini-fridge rental).)

Again, I'm not saying you must offer this common courtesy to anyone, but if you aren't planning to, get a meeting room instead of open tables, and keep the coffee maker in the meeting room. Don't get couches. (In general, don't get couches and comfy chairs, unless you are a furniture manufacturer. You don't want people lounging around in your booth.) But if you are thinking "drinks attract people", attract them. Don't let your attraction go to waste by being inhospitable.

Community Atonement

2008-10-09T12:41:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, is that you don't have to make up the text yourself. Let's face it, none of us remember all the things we did wrong, and even if we did, we mostly don't admit they were wrong.

When I read through the list they give me in the prayerbook, there are some I am pretty sure I've done, like giving bad advice. I give lots of advice, so for sure I have given bad advice, and I need forgiveness for that. I've definitely been stubborn and insensitive and done bad deeds unintentionally. On the other hand, there are those things on the list that I'm pretty sure I didn't do this year, like having sexual relations with a family member.

It was pointed out to me, however, that the text doesn't refer to things that I did, but rather to things that we did. It doesn't say, Lord forgive me. It says, Lord, forgive us. If you've been following this column, it shouldn't be surprising to you to hear that this had a special meaning for me this year, as I reflected on the responsibility we have as members of a community, not just to do the right thing, but to influence others to do the right thing. The text of the prayers makes it starkly clear. We aren't just responsible for our own actions; we are responsible for our actions as a community and for the actions of members of our community.

For most of us, this is something of an annoyance. I have enough trouble keeping myself in line; you want me to watch that troublemaker, too? Unfortunately, the truth is that what others do influences our lives. For example, in most Western societies, people recycle because of social pressure, not because there is any real incentive. In this context, it's obvious that what our neighbor does has influence on our lives, and that our behavior influences theirs.

The same goes for our online behavior. Recently I read an article that one of the mobile operators is now reporting that Google searches for "Facebook" are outnumbering searches for pornography. You may debate whether this is an actual change in behavior; but at any rate it illustrates something about social behavior. Shifts in behavior online happen rapidly, and are immediately measurable. (One of my favorite sites in this area is Compete.com, and I follow their blog regularly.) You might argue that people no longer have to search for pornography when they are lonely; now they can just search for other people. It sounds pretty good when you put it that way.

Regardless of what it means, online social networks are one of the most obvious places where you can see that our behavior influences others. Just as an example, Jeff Pulver posted that friends don't bite friends, so anyone following him (and he's one of the most influential Facebookers around) probably won't add the Vampires application. Not that it's a real bite or anything, but in that particular circle, that particular behavior has become unacceptable.

The tools available for sharing what you consider moral or amoral behavior have rapidly expanded. People know what you are doing through status messages, what you are reading through shared RSS feeds, and what you do for fun through applications you add to your profile.

More than ever, we are responsible for our influence on our colleagues and friends. Let us resolve to use that influence for the good, so that next year we will have a longer list of things we have influenced others to avoid, not just avoided doing ourselves.

Clean Slate

2008-09-29T06:03:00.000-07:00

Thankfully, I don't belong to one of those cultures where we make new year's resolutions. If I did, keeping up with this blog would probably be on my list. It's not that I've run out of ideas, but I have been just a tad short on time. When I can, I'll go public about it, but right now, suffice it to say that this coming year promises to be a wild ride for me.

The Jewish New Year (for those of you who are oblivious to the ways of the "J Club", we celebrate the new year in September), we reflect on what we've done over the last year, and we get an opportunity to repent our sins. We are told that the big guy upstairs will forgive us, but as with everything in J-land, there's a catch. The catch is that you can't repent to the big guy until you have gotten forgiveness from your fellow mortals.

I don't know about you, but I find it much easier to ask forgiveness from God than from my fellow man. Not only that, but it's all written out for you, how to say it and how to apologize for stuff you don't even know you did wrong. With my fellow mortals, I have to come up with something that doesn't sound to stupid, plus I probably need to apologize for things I didn't even know I did wrong (but the fellow I'm talking to certainly does). So like most people, I typically I skip this step.

What we don't realize is how critical it is to forgive and be forgiven. This is the root of leaving the past in the past. You know how it is when something isn't complete with someone in your life. You skip over their phone number, and you get that funny feeling. You avoid thinking about them or talking to them. Or you talk to them about everything except that funny feeling. In these cases, there is no chance for anything new to happen in the relationship. It isn't clean.

Same with yourself. If you have broken promises to yourself, you can't move on. You can't create new things. The act of getting forgiveness from God is not far detached from the act of getting forgiveness from yourself. We dress in white, and we close the book on last year, and then it is behind us, symbolically.

Whatever you haven't personally left behind, it gives you that funny feeling. Whatever you have left behind is invisible, and leaves an empty space, a new year, a new world.

I think that's why Judaism doesn't talk specifically about new tasks or challenges for the new year. It's a recognition that if you have a clean slate, if you have resolved all the issues that needed to be resolved, then what you have is the potential to fill the clean slate with whatever you choose. This can be a year of new relationships with new people, or new relationships with the same old people -- if you have done the work of leaving the past behind you. It's not easy work but it's mandated, so here we go.

I've committed over the next 10 days to make calls to resolve open issues in my relationships. If I don't call you, and there is anything open or unresolved between us, by all means call me. Let's just keep it clean.

For myself, I am declaring this a year of all-out love, all-out fun, all-out freedom, and astonishing results. Stay tuned!

Shana Tova v'metuka to all of you.

Um, Do I Know You?

2008-08-26T02:54:00.000-07:00

Before the days of social networking and on-line profiles, I frequently failed to correctly correlate people's names to their faces. That's a nice way of saying that I forgot people's names. I'm even worse with faces, actually.

I'm so bad that I couldn't recognize my first cousin at a railroad station. ("He had a hat on," I told my then-husband, who had recognized him immediately despite having seen him only twice before.) Thank goodness most people don't have such poor facial memories, because I can usually find people because the person at the train station is looking at me, and their facial expression shows that they recognized me.

Now, when I forget a name, if I get the context right I can go through the people in my social network, and remind myself of the name. I'm pretty good at remembering names once I've read them in text, meaning my retention has gotten much better. If I'm meeting an old friend, or one I can't quite recall despite having seen him the day before, I can look them up online to remind myself.

It's fun meeting someone for the first time and knowing what they look like, or doing a telephone interview and never meeting them and still knowing what they look like. I mean, it could be potentially fun for people who can remember those types of things. (Yes, I have been unable to recognize someone in a coffee shop despite having looked up their picture online an hour before, too.)

Unfortunately, my poor facial recognition skills have been replaced by non-reciprocal relationship intimacy.

I frequently update my Facebook status, which means that anyone paying attention has a fair idea of what my life probably looks like. I am fairly careful not to write anything too intimate, or anything I don't want my employer to know. However, I do update at least once a day (less on weekends usually), and my profile is public, plus I friend anyone who wants to friend me.

What this means is that I can run into someone at a networking event, and that someone I have never met before could walk up to me and say "Hi, Rebecca! How are the home repairs going?" Now I am totally out of context with the person. I don't know how I know them (I don't), they are into my personal life (because the answer to the question is that I now have a carpet with mint-green paint splashes all over it), and worst of all I don't know their name and don't know that I am not supposed to know it.

They probably know I don't know, or at the very least wouldn't be insulted if they learned I don't know, and now it is too late because instead of giving them a blank look, I did the thing they train marketing people to do, which is too look them in the eye, smile, and confidently launch myself into the conversation. This is what I call non-reciprocal relationship intimacy. If I'm lucky and the context is right, I can exchange business cards with them. Unfortunately, this doesn't work in contexts such as a roller-blading, synagogue, or a supermarket.

I've always been active in online communities, and for at least the last 5 years I have met people who asked me "Are you THE Rebecca Rachmany?" (I wonder why they ask that; there aren't any other Rebecca Rachmanys I know of.) When people asked that I knew they were either members of Digital Eve or Tech-Shoret. Now, if someone asks that, I wonder what happened to their Internet connection. Not only do people not ask, because they've seen my picture, but they also know all about my professional life, and something about my personal life (usually that I am addicted to roller-blading), and they jump right into a conversation.

At the end of the day, despite a bit of discomfort, I've found the status updates have kept my friends closer to me. Often people say they feel they know what is going on in my life even though we see one another infrequently. That's a warming feeling. Even though it often seems nobody notices, people are reading those status updates, and it is creating a bond that wouldn't otherwise be there. So.... what are you doing right now?

Social Networking Birthday

2008-08-13T22:02:00.000-07:00

Birthdays have always been inevitable in that you get older whether anyone knows the official date or not. I've tended not to make a big deal over my birthday, since it would mean I would have to remember yours.

Now, birthdays are inevitable in that everybody knows when yours is if you participate in Plaxo, Xing, Facebook, etc., not to mention BirthdayAlarm. Last year, most of my real friends weren't in social networks, so I got a bunch of e-cards and wall posts from people I might even recognize if I ran into them in the mall.

This birthday was the absolute best since the Sesame Street birthday my parents did when I was 5 or 6. I really cannot thank you, my real and virtual friends, enough. It started with dinner with my friend Suzie, went on to warm regards from my roller-blading friends at TAR, waking to virtual greetings, cake and e-cards from my work colleagues, a phone that didn't stop ringing all day, a private guitar concert, and a political meeting with birthday cake and hugs.

WOW!

If I was waiting for the one day when I would suddenly see the impact of social networking on my real life, yesterday was that day. Thanks, everyone, for making this year's birthday absolutely amazing!!!

Displaying One's Privates

2008-08-11T12:51:00.000-07:00

Last week's blog talked about control and this blog is going to talk about why I might want control. Anyone who knows me might get the mistaken impression that I am a control freak. I don't know why that is, but leave it for now.

My friend Terri teaches a college-level constitution course and she tells me it's amazingly difficult to explain to people why you need the 4th amendment. Invariably, one of the students says "If you haven't done anything wrong, what do you care if you are searched?" Fortunately for her, it's almost always a woman, and so Terri gives the standard answer, which is, "Ok, I'm an employee of the State. Empty your purse right now so I can check it out." Although I don't have anything incriminating in my purse, there really is only so much I want the general public to know about my personal hygiene.

The constitution doesn't explicitly protect the right to privacy (for those of us living in a country with a constitution); but even if we didn't have a right to privacy, there are some things that are intrinsically private. Nobody can go inside your mind and find out just how close you got to throwing your 3-year-old out the window, for example. And even a dedicated FB user does not have to fill in the blank for "We hooked up and it was ___" even if we did and it was (or wasn't).

And yet...

When people start to twitter, you get a granular accounting of their life. When people upload photographs with name tags, you know exactly what parties your friends didn't invite you to. When you watch what someone diggs or deliciouses, you start to get an idea of whether they are moonlighting or thinking about a new startup, and in what field. Tracking who is friending who on what network? How about whether your spouse added the "Hot or Not" application or found a new match on the blind date app? (What are married people thinking when they add these apps?)

So about my privacy. I am realizing that some of my casual friends and colleagues could make some pretty good guesses about what I do with my social life, or with my spare time. I'm relatively aware regarding how public this information is, and still, I probably rely more on "people don't have time to snoop" than the reality of how easy it would be for them to do so.

Forget about my right to privacy. What about my right not to know? What if I don't want to know my nephew's hottness rating? Who my mother-in-law is hooking up with? Which of my friends are going out to dinner without me? Who can afford a nicer mobile device than the one I've got?

Yes, having privacy would be great; but increasingly I'm thinking I would just settle for not having a public display of everyone else's private parts.

Control Freak

2008-08-11T07:43:00.000-07:00

Ever since social networks showed up, I've lamented that this great technology has simply created a situation where I have multiple profiles in various places, with different collections of contacts. It's a bit of a bizarre world, in fact.

Facebook is a kind of place where I collect pretty much anyone I would say "hi" to, my personal address book which is people I actually contact regularly, Flickr contains only friends who I really want seeing pictures of my kids, etc. If only I could have some control over all of this. So far, I've tried some different solutions, like Plaxo Pulse, Flock, and Gaim/Meebo (for IM consolidation). I spend a lot of time thinking about, configuring and playing around with my system, needless to say. I can justify it because I'm a marketing guy... what's your excuse?

Anyway, the latest thing is Friendfeed. Friendfeed is designed to connect up all these networks. It's kind of like a control panel for my online life, in particular my activities and status. My "friends" can now know what I am doing at any time.

I can't help but feeling, though, that while all of these solutions are helping me consolidate my world, and make it easier to manage, none of them are really giving me "control". Only Plaxo differentiates between business contacts and friends, supposedly with the purpose of allowing you to publish different things to friends or family than you would to business contacts. That's obviously the level of control I want.

However, with Plaxo, I don't really get the control at the end of the day, because the other services don't allow that. Ideally, if this blog had a "public", "business" and "personal" setting, I could have a situation where some posts would be available to the general public, some only to my actual contacts, and some only to my real friends. I should have those same options on Facebook, shared RSS feeds, Flickr photographs, whatever. That would be actual control, rather than what I'm getting today which is more like convenience.

Group Paradigm

2008-08-03T21:29:00.000-07:00

Groups are a great thing. Groups give a sense of belonging. Groups are a reference point for getting recommendations and assistance.

Different social networks seem to have different group paradigms, but the underlying assumption of all the social network "groups" seems to be that there is a leader and then there are joiners. The paradigm also seems to assume that the joiners will come on a "pull" basis to check out what is happening with other group members. This paradigm is vastly inferior to a listserv (think yahoogroups) where anyone can post to a group. In fact, it's even inferior to blogs, which I can at least get in my RSS feed. Yes, the truth is that Facebook and Ning groups suck. Now LinkedIn is following suit. I haven't joined a group there yet, but let's just say I don't have any great expectations.

The one real use of Facebook Groups is to find more friends you know and attach names to faces. So you join a group, let's say the Digital Eve Israel Group. Now you can see the actual faces of all the women you've been e-mailing for over 5 years on the list. You can "friend" them and then you seem really well-connected. Yay! Not.

Now if you join the Tel Aviv Rollers group, that is really useful because you see these guys ever week but for the life of you can't remember their names. Yay! Only they look totally different in their pictures than they do in RL and half the time it's no use. But the other half, Yay! Not.

I mean, it's not totally useless, but it's hardly what I would call a "group" in terms of allowing you to communicate with other members of the group. It's amazing that an application that Yahoo has gotten so right for so long is completely mysterious to the builders of social networks. A group is where you communicate among the group, not an announcement list where only the administrator can send something to the group.

On Yahoo or Google groups, anyone can send a message to the whole group. On Yahoo there is a group calendar, so all events are in one location. As a list member, you are informed when anyone uploads files or pictures to the group. This way, whenever anything happens in the group, you, a member, are notified.

On social networks, the groups are just kind of there. You can post on various boards (discussion, wall, etc.), but you aren't informed when someone posts on the board. So if I have a great event going on in Hod Hasharon, and I want to inform the 1000 members of the FB Hod Hasharon group, I can post there, but most of them don't check the discussion groups regularly, so none of them will know. The only person who can actually send to the whole group is the group administrator.

One of my associates, Sharon Weshler, has a group where he sends out weekly announcements of what is happening on the group. You shouldn't have to do that. Your group should inform you in some way, preferably a configurable way. You could choose to get a weekly update from Ning or Facebook, or you could get on-the-fly updates through your RSS reader.

I've administered and led a lot of groups. No matter what group I've been a part of, virtual or real, the power of the group is in the GROUP, not concentrated in the leader. A great leader is one who delegates and leverages the strengths of the group members. So far, none of the community sites I've seen have put together the right paradigm for allowing great leaders to do this.

How to Succeed Failure

2008-07-22T01:48:00.000-07:00

Most of the projects we set out to do end up as failures.

Today is the last day of the Self Expressions and Leadership Program I've been doing, and one of the most important skills I gained was not just to measure the results in my work, but to measure the results in all of the projects in my life, and to be able to look those results in the eye and call them what they are. Often, what they are is a failure, or at least a partial failure, when compared to the original intention of the project.

So my project to have the teens in my city create and perform a Broadway-style musical has now been distilled to the possibility of a once-a-week activity for 5 weeks in cooperation with the city. On the one hand, that's not any where near what I envisioned. On the other hand, it is something, and it's something that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Furthermore, I've gotten closer with a number of parents in the patrol, been able to help them out with some personal stuff in a number of instances, and several parents who hadn't participated began to participate. Also, as a side effect, some interesting things are happening for me in local politics.

The same thing is going on with almost all of the other projects in our course. A few happened as envisioned, but most of them turned out either smaller in scope or different than planned. All of them had similar side effects in the communities and for the leader of the project.

If you look at your life, you'll probably see similar results. You set out to have a great relationship with your kid, or a specific partner, or a particular job or salary, or start a startup. Most of the time, you didn't get exactly what you set out to get, when you set out to get it.

But you got something.

So then the question is, if you know you are going to fail, or get less than what you set out to get, how do you set out to your project in the first place?

It seems obvious to me that if you want to get what you want, you have to set out with a much, much bigger goal and a plan to reach that bigger goal. (It's not enough to set the goal, obviously, you need to start executing some plan.)

Kung Fu Video

2008-07-14T03:55:00.000-07:00

One boring afternoon in high school, hanging out in a friend's backyard, someone, I think it was Eric Pullier (maybe it was Andrew Goldman, but I'm not attempting to Google someone with that name), came up with the idea of filming a Kung Fu movie with a home video camera. We filmed a few scenes, which was both memorable and entertaining. I don't recall that we finished the film, but Eric seems to have done alright.

That was more than 20 years ago, when creating your own independent film was just a dream for a bunch of high-schoolers. Now my kids walk around the house with my mobile device, filming the cats and disappearing magic acts. We can publish anything we want to YouTube, as soon as I can figure the right resolution on the mobile device (it comes with 3 built-in resolutions, every time you film, apparently).

The online content catching my attention lately isn't the home-made, YouTube type. Two major trends have emerged, trends that make it hard to imagine paying for content in the future.

One trend is entertaining propaganda. Corporate advertising is one example, but increasingly you get clever people entertaining you with important messages. The Story of Stuff is one of my favorites, because, honestly speaking, it doesn't say much I don't know; it would be faster for me to read in text; but it's still entertaining and I watched it all the way through, and showed it to my kids.

The other trend is independent filmmakers are creating content. Some of them are hoping to get funding or looking to merchandising. To some degree, watchers have become tolerant of buffering, and an advert or two before or after a program is no more intrusive than the adverts on commercial television. Everything from worldwide live television to independent films is available free.

What all of this means is that entertainment is becoming more and more free. The concept that the digital world is becoming totally free is relatively mainstream these days with Chris Andersen writing a book about it.

I know a fair number of people who are trying to make a living or raise money for various ventures involving video or animation. I have to wonder about that. I'm not saying video can't make money. In fact, my searches came up with clear advice on how to monetize video on the net. But it's not easy these days.

What's happening with video is pretty much the same as is happening with all kind of art. A lot of people in my family are artists, as in painting and sculpture. They create these works of arts primarily for themselves and their families, as a form of self expression. You know, like people who write poetry for themselves and never publish. All of these fairly talented artists make a living doing something else, and they create art for pleasure.

We've been seeing packaged and popular art, video and music, for so long that we've forgotten that developing art as a form of income is a relatively new invention. Throughout most of human history, the primary form of entertainment was music or storytelling that people made up for themselves and their neighbors. Few and fortunate were the artists and performers who found a patron or made a living from it.

The movie and music industries may find themselves horrified by the idea that anyone can produce a movie or music, and that there will be an increasingly smaller market for their wares, but truthfully, for most of human history, that's how it's been.

Modern society is global, meaning that some media will continue to be global. A small proportion of movies and music will still reach very large audiences, becoming the foundation of our common culture. Increasingly, however, our communities will be creating their own media, bonding our closer ties at the expense of some of the broader ones.

ככה לא בונים חומה

2008-07-13T10:17:00.001-07:00

Not everything translates.

In case you've been wondering, I've been light on the blogging because of an extended trip to the States for both business and pleasure. It started with NXTcomm and ended with my sister's getting married. Here is my sister Sara and Brett, my new brother-in-law. They smiled like that practically the entire time I spent with them.

Sara and Brett decided to build their home on some land out in the Catskills. Meanwhile, they are living in a rickety trailer. While visiting we stayed in a pop-up camper we borrowed. Other friends and family stayed in various places, including inside the trailer, in an array of tents on the grounds of the farm, and I don't know where else. Some mornings I woke up and couldn't find all the people I knew had gone to sleep there the night before. By mid-day everyone emerged, but it's still a bit of a mystery to me where they had been all night.

Since it's taking a while to get the building permits for their house, Brett has taken on a number of other useful projects, like clearing the future driveway and the future space for the home. He's upgraded the barn, and started building a stone hen house. So when we got up there, there was plenty of barn-painting, cement-mixing, and other stuff to do. And there were plenty of us to do it. Almost all of these people in this picture were staying in tents, pop-ups and the trailer at some time during the week. At some points there were 16 of us, so there was plenty of work just making food and cleaning up after eating (There's no dishwasher and we tragically out of paper plates for a few meals.) Oh, and we were organizing the last details of the wedding, too.

The most intensive job was building the hen house. I have never heard of a stone hen house, but Brett dreamed it up and everybody got involved. You know, for people like me, who produce things like blogs, there really is nothing to compare with the satisfaction of creating an actual solid thing out of stone. Unfortunately, joint injuries prevented me from taking active part in that activity, but I got a good shot of my kids, nephew and brother doing it.

Brett's brother, Brad, spent many a day on this project, happily. When the friends of Sara and Brett came up to the farm, they also pitched in building as well as painting the barn.

I looked for some good pictures of myself among the many taken by myself and family members. I chose this one for this blog, because it is a testament to my and my family's ability to express skepticism in any situation. Here we are, dressed to the hilt, in one of the most beautiful settings imaginable, rehearsing the wedding. My daughter, my brother, and I have the unmistakable look of disbelief and suffering, despite having faith and enjoying ourselves.

I've been involved in a number of community projects, as you, my faithful followers, probably know. One of the main secrets to successful projects (of which my last one was not) is to get other people on board. No matter how ridiculous or enormous the project, if you can get enough people on board, you can get the project completed. How else can you explain landing on the moon? How ridiculous was that?(I know it's unpatriotic to say so, but to this day, I am not sure exactly how useful the moon-landing activity was.)

Brett is exactly the kind of person who could get people to think that landing on the moon is a good idea, or that it makes sense to build a hen house from stone, or that the barn must be red because brown just isn't good enough. He doesn't convince anyone of anything. He's not slick in any way. He's just a guy who believes. He isn't skeptical and he never puts down an idea. He believes it's going to be fun, and, in fact it is. Everybody had a blast.

This vacation helped remind me of the importance of the kind of optimism and love of life that is necessary to achieve truly great results. Hey, if nothing else, I have to drop the attitude just so I can have some decent photographs of myself.

On the road again

2008-06-24T04:09:00.000-07:00

Over the last 2 weeks I've been in more airports than I care to count. At half of them, my bag didn't pass the X-ray screening and I've been subjected to having a gloved guard go through the contents of my bag. I had a few giveaways from NXTcomm there. The freebie disk-on-key was suspicious, but apparently a melted chocolate bar does not count as a liquid.

On the one hand, I understand these people are here to protect us. On the other hand, does baby formula really pose a security threat? We all know the answer, and we all put up with it because we know that even if they have prevented one terrorist attack, it has all been worth it.

But have they?

I've done a bit of online searching, and the TSA is very good about posting all of their amazing successes here. Not one of their glorious press releases cites catching or preventing a terrorist attack, unfortunately. But did you know that they confiscated 13 million prohibited items over the course of a year? That includes my bottled water from one of the legs of my trip. YOu know, if they did consider melted chocolate bars as liquid, I bet they could at least double the number of confiscated items.

Honestly, I personally don't mind the delays. I do believe there should be some level of screening. But it needs to be rational and human. I found it fairly humiliating to have a guy with gloves asking me if there was anything sharp that could pop out of my bag and endanger him when he opens it. I found it offensive watching them search families with small children and take away their baby formula. Traveling with a baby is hard enough as it is.

I'm still waiting to hear about the apprehension of one terrorist disguised as a mommy with a baby to justify all this. But there are zero. After 5 years of no baby terrorists, perhaps it's time to rethink the policy.

404 people

2008-06-24T03:10:00.000-07:00

Last week I was at the communication industry's largest event, NXTcomm. Again, I was surprised at how few of my colleagues are available by doing an online search and that some of them don't seem to use any social networking tools.

I keep thinking to myself, shouldn't everyone in sales in marketing in the technology industry have a profile in LinkedIn or Spoke? Even my mother has a LinkedIn profile. Am I exaggerating to say everyone in the industry should have online presence?

In my mind, when I meet someone, I don't necessarily have to exchange a business card with them in order to find them. If I know their first name and the company they work for, I should be able to find them. If it's a large company and their name is John, probably I need to know their last name or what department they work in, but in theory, that should be enough to find someone in LinkedIn. Strangely enough, though, it isn't. There were marketing people I couldn't find in a Google search, even when I had their business card in my hand, with every one of their professional details.

I honestly feel puzzled. Is there something wrong with my world view? Are there really that many people who are still wary or have privacy issues? Are they so behind the times they don't list themselves anywhere online? Do they think it is useless to have a listing? What reasons have people given you for not having an online prsence?

Media Talk

2008-06-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

For some strange reason, I am head of the media team for my course in Self-Expression and Leadership. Although I am a company spokesperson and marketing guy, I felt I was not leveraging my knowledge in my personal life to promote my community projects, so I wanted to get over that barrier.

Being in charge of the media basically means that people in our class call me up to get coaching regarding the media. I am sure everyone reading this column knows how much easier it is to give advice than to actually use that advice in your own life. However, at some point you look like a fool if you give advice you aren't taking, so I've done what I tell people to do.

The number one question people ask me is "What do I do to get an article in the media?" In fact, that's basically the only question people ask me. So far. (Hopefully next week I'll get questions like "that didn't work, what next?") This blog seeks to answer the first question.

What do I do to get an article in the media?

Have an actual story. In this particular course, this is assumed, since all the projects are just amazing.
Have faith that it's easy. Assuming that you reach the appropriate news outlet, it is their job to come up with interesting things to report, so if you are doing something interesting, they will want to report it. National news outlets are putting up articles every 10 minutes, so believe me, they need lots of people to tell them stuff, because they can't make it all up in their heads (They make up quite a bit of it, judging by the zillions of articles on what someone said about what someone else said.)
Identify the appropriate outlet. If you are doing a project, for example, where the kids in your school are giving out MP3s to the seniors in the old folks' home down the street, you can't expect to get a spot on the 8:00 TV news (though you might if you did really good footage, know someone, or are a good salesperson). You can, however, get into your city newspaper or on an online news site covering local news.
Have visuals. Open a paper or an online news site. Amazingly, every article has a picture with it. Some are pretty lame, like a headshot of the person doing the project or a stock photo of a grandfather and a child. The less lame your visual, the more likely the paper is going to want to feature the article. An amazing picture can definitely sell a mediocre article.
Make it easy for the journalist. Send an e-mail where you practically write the article for them. Remember that they are trying to put something new on line every 10 minutes? If it's all written, the 10 minute goal is easy. Include quotes and all the information you can think of. The most important information goes first, and then you go into detail.
If at all possible, quote relevant and credible people. If your project is enforcing fishing laws and preventing overfishing, you could include a positive quote from someone at an environmental organization who sounds like an authority. You could include a negative quote from the ministry of agriculture who told you that nobody enforces the law and they don't plan on bothering with it.
Use the contact details on the web site, then follow up by phone if the journalist doesn't get back to you. If you know the name of a journalist who covers that particular topic, call him up. Again, pitching to a journalist isn't like pitching a sale. Assuming you have an actual story, there is no reason the journalist won't want to talk to you. Every news outlet has an official way to contact them either electronically or by voice, and a system for dealing with those calls.

That's it. No big secrets there.

The one thing you want to keep in mind is NOT choosing the wrong outlet and being careful not to step on toes. Journalists want to be the first to report something. If yours is not a must-have news item, getting it published somewhere may prevent competing journalists from publishing it. In other words, if it is a national story, go first to the national media, because they won't like being "scooped" by local media.

Keep in mind specialty media. For example, if your project is recording opera so that kids can download and hear opera with their parents, music magazines and web sites might be interested.

BTW, the two projects I mentioned as examples are actual projects from the Landmark course I am doing.

Thanks and Flower

2008-05-27T04:01:00.000-07:00

My good buddy Yariv Dror is putting together a project called Thanks and Flowers, where the central idea is that parents will all give a flower to their teacher on June 20th, creating a positive atmosphere in our schools. Funnily enough, Yariv's daughter is too young for school. Almost as funnily, as much as we parents gripe about our kids' teachers, my kids think this is a great idea.

Yariv has combined social media, including online petitions and Facebook events, as well as personal meetings, phone calls and e-mails, so I asked him what works and what doesn't in organizing a national movement. (Wow, that sounds grandiose! A national movement.) By the way, the timeframe for this national movement is less than 3 months start-to-finish, and it is definitely happening. He has support of two national parents' organizations, the mayors of two cities (so far), the national students' organization, and my daughter.

Yariv's tips on various kinds of media:

Social media has its place, but the most support comes from direct contact with people.
The best contacts were referred by someone. It didn't have to be someone he knew personally, but personal referrals worked well. This could be because people referred him to the right person, or because when he said "so-and-so referred me" it worked better.
E-mail was good for initial contact, but calls to action and details had to be worked out by phone.
Publications in on-line media made him feel great, but didn't give a noticeable increase in the hits on his home page.
The Facebook event setup was good way to spread the word, but most people ignored or declined the invitations to join. Some people who were invited that way also sent e-mails to various mailing lists in the country.
Social media is so prevalent it's hard to categorize it. For example, he spoke directly to the education coordinator in his city, who said she wanted to post the information on the national on-line forum for education coordinators.

For me, the bottom line is that there is no such thing as social media anymore. Everyone uses certain forms of communication on a regular basis, and those forms flow into one another. Personal contact still rules, but getting to people is easier.

Yariv used to be the kind of guy who didn't answer phone calls from unidentified numbers. Now he answers them all the time. He can't track exactly how people heard about his campaign, but he's convinced that each of the methodologies has enabled him to broaden his coverage.

What are you waiting for? Sign the petition and spread the word!

Breakfast Hugs

2008-05-22T23:05:00.000-07:00

Wednesday morning I set out for the Tel Aviv port with the mission of seeing what would happen if I combine Jeff Pulver's Social networking breakfast with the Free Hugs Campaign.

I put together a few dozen "Free Hugs" tags, put them out on the table, put one on myself, recruited Jeff to the campaign, and we were all set for the Free Hug Social Networking event.

It didn't work out amazingly well: only a few people chose the tags, and a few hugs were exchanged, but not enough to significantly change the ambiance. Well, what did I expect?

It takes a while for the movement to catch on, and it takes a while to change group dynamics. Honestly speaking, there's only so much warm and fuzzy feeling you can infuse to a networking event. But it was a fun experiment. And it's all about fun, if you ask Jeff.

Over the last few months, I've been working on adopting hugs as the standard greeting in some of my communities, rather than the standard kiss on the cheek. It makes a difference in the group dynamics. It takes some guts and it takes some persistence, but my finding is it is worth it when it comes to creating a warmer group atmosphere.

If you are a community leader, to be effective you need to create a group people want to belong to. For voluntary groups, one of the major obstacles is preventing people from leaving. Although it seems trivial, greeting people with a warm hug can make a huge difference. You might be saying to yourself that this doesn't make sense in some contexts, but I have had success with the Green Party (political) group, which is a pretty serious context.

Think about how you feel as an onlooker, sitting in a coffee shop. A couple of people are at a table, and they are joined by their colleagues. As each one arrives, everyone stands up and hugs everyone (with a huge smile, because it's almost impossible to hug without smiling). You want to be a part of that.

If you aren't convinced, just watch the videos.... Free Hugs Campaign.

Do you know where your children are?

2008-05-10T21:03:00.000-07:00

YOW! It's been several weeks since I posted a blog, so let me tell you what I've been up to that's been taking up my time. It's my own community project.

I'm a member of the Parents' Patrol in my town, Hod Hasharon. We walk around the public parks on Friday nights from 11 pm to 3 am, just kind of checking in on the youth, talking to them about what's on their minds, trying to give them some educational info, driving kids home if they are too drunk to stand, etc. We aren't enforcement officers; just caring parents who want to know what's going on.

Most parents have no clue what's going on. Their kids are "good kids" and only try that stuff occassionally, if at all (yeah, right). Unfortunately, in the public parks, your good kids are sitting on a bench across from a group of 15-year-olds smoking a bong, with an "escort" who is in his late 20s. Unfortunately, your teenage girls are hanging out in the same park where men (ages 20-30), from a nearby town are offering them gifts in return for their attention. These are the kind of guys who, if they caught their sisters doing what your daughters are doing, the sisters would be eliminated for staining the family's honor.

I love being on the parent's patrol, because the kids really appreciate us, and it gives us the ability to communicate and help them. It seems like a little nothing, but lots of little nothings together are making a real difference in our town.

With the summer coming up, what struck me is the unbelievable level of boredom. The kids simply have nothing to do with their time. During the summer, they are going to be in those parks every night, bored out of their skulls, with ample alcohol and etc.

What they need is something to work at, something to contribute to, something that shows results, something they enjoy, something that connects them to the community.

I decided to put on a musical, as an extension of what we as the Parents Patrol is offering.

Now, I don't know a lot about doing a musical. I was the assistant director of the musical twice in high school, and what I remember is that it was fun and that it needs a lot of different talents.

So to succeed, we need people who can act, play music, and sing, obviously. We need people to help with logistics, sets, costumes, adverstising and fundraising. Once we are well into rehearsals, we will perform some of the songs in hospitals and senior citizens homes, to promote the show as well as connect to the community, so we need people to organize that.

In short, hey, come join, and get your teens to join! It will be fun. It will make a difference. I'll write about it more in the context of what works and what doesn't work in online and face-to-face encounters. Oh, yeah, if anyone wants to help me set up a home page, in Hebrew, that's more than welcome

To give credit where credit is due, I am putting together this production as part of the Self-Expression and Leadership Course in Landmark Education. There's a Hebrew site too.

I'll also be telling you about some of the other projects in the context of on-line vs. F2F networking. One of the projects is using Facebook and e-mail to get the word out. I'm following that campaign with great interest.

Where Status Doesn't Matter

2008-04-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

If you are a kewl social networker like myself, you update your status message on Facebook regularly, as in more than once a day. If you are a Twitterer, you do it as part of your ongoing Twittering, meaning you update something like once an hour unless you're in an airplane. Honestly speaking, there is something nice about knowing the status of my friends and their mundane lives. It's not totally mundane to me, and it does give something to talk about when we get together or speak.

Potentially, the status message could be useful. I've seen a number of blogs from big social networking types regarding how they've gotten immediate help by Twittering or updating their status message on Facebook. I've made a point of responding to a number of friend statuses to see what happens, and every now and again I've gotten some responses to my status messages (usually claiming I was being funny, a sign that at least a few of my friends have humor as dry as my own.)

By and large, though, the status message just doesn't matter. Honestly, 90% of what most people do is what they did the day before. I'm sure it is of no interest, even to my good friends, to have updated info about when I am at work or at home. There are only so many moods you are going to put on there. Thus, those of us who update our status regularly spend a fair amount of brainpower thinking of something clever to write in there. And being entertained when someone else puts something clever there.

I've made some genuine attempts to use the status message to do useful stuff, like get a babysitter, invite friends to something, get you to read my blogs, catch a coffee with someone in Tel Aviv, etc. Unlike the big social networkers with 4999 friends or followers, or those who post specific questions on how to configure their web servers, I've found the status message basically useless.

Assuming that most people don't have thousands of friends, and that their requests are more arbitrary, and that most people don't check their friends status on an hourly basis, it's pretty reasonable to assume most of us will find our status to be insignificant.

Status messages, furthermore, suffer from configuration scatter problems much worse than e-mail. We may have a few e-mail accounts, but most of us have our mail forwarded to one or two, both of which we check at least daily. But status messages? I have status on every social network, status on g-mail, messenger, Skype, etc., and each one needs to be set separately.

Do you know anybody who, when they answer the phone, sets all of those to "busy"? I think not. Presence and status actually are of importance in communications; but today's implementation is incredibly crude. Add to that the minimal amount of attention our associates are spending worrying about our status messages, and the value of them diminishes even further. I guess that just goes to show that there's only so much status to go around.

You're Never Alone

2008-04-15T11:41:00.000-07:00

When I travel for business, it tends to be to conferences. As the marketing guy, I am there to learn, my main job is to meet new people in the industry. What this amounts to is that what sounds like "getting away from the bustle of daily life" ends up more like a non-stop marathon of being friendly to strangers and desperately trying to keep up with work in between.

A typical day starts with my waking up 2 hours early to catch up on e-mail, walking over to the conference center, mingling and attending conference sessions all day, making my way back to the hotel, and answering more e-mail. Often I have a scheduled meeting before, after, or during the conference.

You might ask how I have time to blog, and the answer is, obviously, I don't and apologize for the 2-week delay since my last post.

Despite having come on this trip alone, I don't get much of a chance to actually be alone. So I greatly cherish the one hour I religiously take for myself, no matter how busy my business trips are: I take myself out to a proper dinner in a proper restaurant.

Being in downtown London, I'm not the only diner eating alone, and on Monday another lone business traveller entered and sat at the table next to mine. Keeping in mind that it's basically my profession to strike up conversations with strangers, this should not have made me in the least uncomfortable; but being as I was quite determined to have this one hour to myself, I immediately started thinking of ways to avoid conversation. Fortunately, the gentleman pulled out his cell phone and began texting away.

Indeed, it's noteworthy how unaccustomed we have become to being alone. One of the VPs at a local cellular carrier told me that they actually have tracked the phenomenon of people who pretend to be talking on their phones in public places, just so as not to have the appearance of being alone or unimportant.

How are you with alone? Do you too feel you need to text, twitter or call someone just so you won't be too bored with yourself? Can you just sit still and enjoy your meal without multi-tasking? Moreover, are you avoiding doing things alone because it might make you look like a loser?

Take heart, you are in the majority. But also take care. We need our time alone to decompress, to think, to enjoy being with ourselves. When we lose touch with that, we lose something precious.

Topping Off Education

2008-03-30T04:12:00.000-07:00

A recent blog by Clay Burrell speaks about Using Alltop to Teach Social Networking If you don't know what Alltop is, you aren't a blogger. Alltop is an aggregator of the top bloggers, divided by topic, so that you can ask yourself a question like "What should I be reading if I want to learn about life?" and then you just go to "http://life.alltop.com/", and there you have a list of blogs about life.

Guy Kawasaki has managed to jaw-droppingly outdo himself for marketing brilliance on this one. Without making any predictions on the viability of the business itself, the built-in marketing aspect is a work of art.

Obviously, if you are a well-known and respected entrepreneur, and you are starting a blog aggregator, every blogger is going to want to be on your list. Guy is generous about adding you if you ask nicely. I'm assuming there is an engine in the back which tracks how popular your blog is, so that your placement on the page could change over time, depending on how many people click through. Once you are listed, then of course, you have an interest in Alltop's success yourself, meaning you will want to mention it in your blog.

Along with his generosity in adding bloggers and his characteristic gentlemanliness in personally answering all of his e-mail, Guy's marketeer gears are well-greased. Coincidentally, just a few days after announcing Alltop publicly, his blog magnanimously offers useful tips on kissing up. Now, I don't want to sound cynical here, especially because I am taking his magnanimous advice, but you can read into it whatever you want.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about Clay Burrel's blog, in which he talks about his failure to get his students excited enough to use RSS feeds, and his relative success in getting them to use Alltop. Mr. Burrel doesn't claim to be using Alltop to teach research; just to teach writing. However, it did get me thinking about where we get our information, and what information is considered reliable these days.

Increasingly, my reading list is made up of books, sites, and reports that I've heard about in blogs. Increasingly, I get my news from blogs rather than news sites. My RSS feeder has both, but I read the blogs a lot more. Blogs are more interesting, no more biased, and for the most part, better written and more insightful than most of the news. When I fill in forms asking "where did you hear about our product?" I don't know whether reading it on a blog is "word of mouth" or "from another Web site".

It's good to see this kind of innovation in teaching. On the other hand, how many of us, like myself, are getting lazy about fact-checking, and are relying increasingly on word of mouth for our news? I think we would all agree that there's a qualitative difference between a New York Times report and a blog about an event. On the other hand, increasingly, we don't care.

For work purposes, if you are in the high-tech industry, nothing but real-time blogs will do for industry intelligence. I know my kid uses Wikipedia as her main reference for school report, and so far the sky hasn't fallen. How long will it be before blogs become a legitimate reference too?

Reservations Notwithstanding

2008-03-30T01:01:00.000-07:00

Using the Internet, it's now amazingly easy to invite people to events and track RSVPs. Sites like Ning and Facebook allow this as a feature; MeetUp and Evite are specifically set up with the purpose of creating real world events. I also belong to a number of sites, such as groopy that are designed for specific groups, in this case cyclists, to meet for sports workouts. I suspect there are similar non-jock sites, but I wouldn't know. And plenty of people just use plain old e-mail. Just today I read an e-invitation from someone saying "Please regard this as a personal invitation to..." Real personal, thanks.

As the invitations have become less personal, so have the responses. If you've been to a groopy ride, a Pulver breakfast, high-tech meetup, or FB-organized party, you will quickly see that the number of RSVPs and the number of attendees have a loose relationship. People RSVP and don't show, or show without RSVP, and the number of attendees is invariably 50-70% of the RSVP-ers. Not having asked for RSVPs for my wedding, I don't know how this compares to real life events.

Someone raised the question of whether the RSVP-to-attendee rate varies per site. That would be an intersting study, but my gut feeling is that the rate is determined by (a) the size and type of the event (b) your relationship to the invitee (c) cultural factors.

Two extreme examles are signing up for a dance party on FB, where you have never meet the inviter, and signing up for a 7 am cycle ride in the desert with people you've ridden with before. In the first case, you have pretty much no obligation to come. In the second case, you would send an SMS to notify if you can't drag yourself out of bed, so your friends don't wait up for you.

In all honesty, virtual invitations are ineffective. If you really want people to come to something, you need to call them, ask them face-to-face when you see them, or send something that looks actually personal. After you do that, you also need to send a reminder by SMS on the day of the event. It sounds ridiculous, but I have found that I get reminders for courses that I've signed up and paid money to attend.

At first I wondered about that; If I am paying that much money, you can bet I will show up. On the other hand, your dentist's office also calls to confirm the appointment. Apparently, people who really make a living at this know the honest truth: people forget or skip out even on the important and expensive appointments in their life. If you want them to join your networking event, political rally, or celebration, only the personal touch works.

Yoo Hoo! Where are You?

2008-03-23T05:35:00.000-07:00

"Howcome you have so many friends?" asks my 9-year-old daughter, Maya.
"Like who?" I ask, "I don't have that many friends."
"I'll prove it," she declares, picking up my phone and scrolling down, "Adrienne, Alik, Allan, Alon, Alon, Alon, Alona, Amir... "

"Wait, read slower." We went down the list for a while and found it is composed of approximately 20% obsolete contacts, 10% semi-obsolete (I could imagine needing them some day), 50% business or community (school, synagogue, etc.), 8% friends I speak to occasionally, 2% friends I could call and tell my troubles to without a pretense for the call. Considering the number of contacts I have, that is a good number of friends, btw.

Speaking of troubles, the trouble is, my contacts are totally out of control. So are yours, I guarantee. How often do you look at your cell phone to find the number before calling from a land line? Look up someone's e-mail signature to find their number? Become frustrated when their sig doesn't include it? Google someone you actually know to find their e-mail? Cut-and-paste an e-mail address to/from Gmail to Outlook? From Facebook to Gmail? Download a LinkedIn vcard? Get email from someone you have known for years asking for your phone number?

More often than you care to admit? Me too. I remember the days when every, I mean, every, one of my contacts was found in my computer address book. Sheesh, I remember the days when every one of my contacts was in a dead-tree address book, but I didn't know that many people back then.

Or didn't I? How much of our perception of who we know has changed, as a result of technology, or just as a result of getting older?

Once upon a time, I went to an event, and I met people, and that was nice. Now, I go to an event, I meet people, and then I friend them online. Now I can get some information about them, since heaven knows I won't remember where I met them later on down the line. I can't wait until someone figures out that I want to tag them, too. If I had anonymous tags (or trusted any of those networks to keep them anonymous), I would use tags like "overpriced", "SOB", and "sponge-worthy" as well as tags like "attorney", "friend of Jane", and "met at VON".

That would be cool, but it wouldn't solve my fundamental problem, which is that my contacts are spread out over bunches of apps, formats, networks, and devices. Furthermore, most people have a preferred contact methodology. Some people like SMS, some e-mail, some IM, etc. A growing number of people rely on caller-ID and expect you to return a call even when they don't leave a message. My brain knows which of my contacts to find in which of my address lists, and the preferred contact preferences for each, but that information isn't stored anywhere other than my brain, which also stores the information on whose turn it is too call whom.

What we've got here is a huge mess. There are two organizations who address (groan) the problem, while the other organizations are busy trying to lock you in. The two organizations are Microsoft and Plaxo.

Despite whatever else it may have done oddly, Microsoft Outlook has always gotten this right. It is fairly easy to import contacts from almost any other device or format, whether it is a scanned business card, a list of comma-separated-values, or the address book from your telephone. The main limitation is that most synchronization programs on mobile devices seem to lose a bit of data each time you synchronize. So Outlook almost has it down perfect. Granted, everyone felt the need to accomodate Microsoft standards, but at least there are standards to adhere to. Furthermore, Outlook allows you to export into a wide range of formats that can be imported elsewhere.

Plaxo has taken this a step further, and allows you to align your addresses with other people's address books. That is, if you and I are in the Plaxo network, and you update your phone number, my Plaxo account will show that updated phone number. As far as I am concerned, that is the ultimate clincher feature. Plaxo Premium (which costs significantly less than Microsoft Outlook) synchronizes with a good chunk of the social networks and on-line services.

So what have I ended up doing? I export all of my different phone books into Outlook, then I export my Outlook into CSV, and then I import it into Plaxo. If I join as a premium member (free for the first few weeks), I can coordinate the duplicates I have in my address books, and I have lots.

Unfortunately, to use Plaxo, I now have to be online, which somewhat defeats the point of having telephony. If' I'm online, I might as well Skype you. Oh, wait. My Skype addresses. Dang.

Anarchy is Better

2008-03-19T13:41:00.000-07:00

Most of the time we don't like to acknowledge the real reason why democracy and law work fairly well. Truthfully, the reason government and law are reasonable systems is because most people intrinsically understand and live by the rules. If we really needed to force people to follow the rules of common decency, and we were depending on government to take care of us, we would be up you know where without a paddle.

I spent a good part of my evening at a City Council meeting here in Hod Hasharon. I mean "good" in the sense that it was a large part of my evening. It certainly could not be considered good in any other sense of the word. As the title of this column implies, it was a notch or two worse than anarchy. It was chaos.

My town is blessed with a charismatic and well-intentioned mayor who has done nothing of note in the 4 years he's been in office. I mean, unless you consider throwing money at expensive and impotent consultants to be "of note", and most of us would agree that for a government official, that is not worth noting.

Hod Hasharon is also blessed with 14 additional council members, none of whom seem to be able to work together for any significant amount of time. The ones who were elected on the same ticket are barely on speaking terms, and they almost never come up with anything they agree on, except for opposing the mayor. Most of the elected officials are there hoping to get some personal benefit in the form of a job for a family member, desirable zoning for family property, or a cash flow to a dubious non-profit organization. You'd think with such a group of people who can be easily paid off, the mayor would have no trouble forming a coalition, but even that is beyond his grasp.

Basically, going to a city council meeting is not terribly different from dinner with your in-laws. A bunch of people sit around a crowded table, complain about who is spending too much money on what, interrupt one another, try to show how smart they are, and when none of that succeeds, stand up and yell at one another. After about 4 hours of this, they and go home having achieved little more than getting on one another's nerves. The other significant difference between this and a holiday dinner with your in-laws is that the newspapers write about it.

People tell me that anarchy isn't better, but the more virtual I become, the harder it is to convince me of that. The Internet is a pretty good reflection of how anarchy would look. Yes, there are perverts, people who rob Second Life banks, and destroy one another's data. But by and large, most people behave fine, most of the time, and those who don't are labeled as such and avoided. And because of the transparency of everything on the Internet, it is easier than in real life to find out about someone's credibility.

I thought about this in the context of buying electronics the other day. A friend tried to prove to me that when I make a large purchase of an electronic item, I need to go and touch it and talk to the guy in the store, etc. After some thought, I realized that the opposite was true.

When I go to the bricks-and-mortar store to buy, for example, a refrigerator, I am fairly sure the guy there is trying to sell me the thing that will give him the highest cut, not the thing that will give me the highest satisfaction. I have a limited selection per store, a limited number of stores I can physically get to, and nobody to ask about that product or seller once I get there.

If I go online, the process is the opposite. First I go to a site that gives me ratings of a bunch of items in my category. I can compare a virtually unlimited number of options, and read what real people have to say about them. I can then look at the retailers offering the item, and the reliability and terms of the retailer. I can't do any of that in real life.

All of this works online because, fundamentally, anarchy is a decent system. The vast majority of people give their true opinions of things, probably because they feel anonymous. The vast majority of people want to warn you about the scammers, and the scammers are labeled and downrated. You even have tools to screen out the people you don't want to see. (Imagine if I could do that in the city council meeting. Just the thought brings my blood pressure down several notches.)

In short, anarchy is a better system than government. If you still doubt me, you simply haven't spent enough time in city council meetings.

Fake Flirts

2008-03-18T02:25:00.001-07:00

I was chatting with a friend I had met on a social network, and at some point, we realized we did not know who had initiated the friendship.

In fact, this happens quite a lot these days. Someone uploads their contact list to their social networking account, and voila. Since we have set our e-mail program to remember everyone we ever send mail to, most of us have a fair number of contacts who, for the life of us, we cannot remember. Perhaps we answered their question on a professional mailing list. Perhaps they recommended a plumber to us. Perhaps we did business with them a decade ago. Maybe we met them on a bicycle ride.

Personally, I have a lot of business contacts I can't recall, because I worked as a consultant for almost a decade, and have been a prominent contributer on a wide number of listservs, as well as a moderator for a few. Because I was a consultant, I made sure to upload most of the business cards I got, and use LinkedIn to connect to anyone I ever did work for or who did work for me. (If you are a marketing consultant and don't have many contacts on LinkedIn, you don't look like much of a marketeer.)

Also, as a marketing person, and just as a friendly type of person, I tend to "friend first, ditch later" rather than "ask first, friend later". I've ditched very few friends. As long as someone isn't sending me some new app twice a day, being lewd, or trying to sell me stuff, they are my friend. You are my friend if you are reading this, as far as I am concerned. I never complain about having too many friends.

But it did occur to me, as my newfound friend and I were both denying First Friending rights, that for some apps, false friending could be a feature rather than a bug. For example, a dating application could set up an algorithm that would take into account age and geography, and set you up with a match arbitrarily.

Obviously, if they did this too often or too blatently, it wouldn't work. But if 10% of the matches you got were faked by the system, you might never find out and it might increase your satisfaction with the app. At first, as a marketer, I thought: what a great idea! Forget the ethics of it, you can always justify giving people more friends as morally good. You can get people to use your system more by making them artificially popular!

In fact, none of us really know how Facebook apps work at the backend, and we are astonishingly nonchalant about adding them. The apps have access to our personal data, and we usually have no idea who the creator is. (I have one developed by my brother-in-law, but that's an exception.)

And for all we know, they are sending us fake flirts, fake greetings, etc., from our real or virtual friends. Did you really challenge my knowledge of '80s sitcoms? Because most of my aquaintances are aware that neither my current home nor my childhood home had a television set.

In short, we don't really know what any of the applications are doing. We don't really know if the notifications are real or fake. Marketers may think they are very clever by creating defaults that make it seem our friends are constantly sending us something, inviting us, or challenging us. Frankly, it's only clever for about a month. After that, it's just noise.

Slightly antisocial

2008-03-08T12:43:00.000-08:00

This post is to some degree a response to Robert Cringley's blog this week, in which he says that most of the social networks won't survive for lack of a business model. My two main reactions to that are (1) Duh, and (2) Social networking is a means, not an end.

Firstly, "Duh". In any industry, there are typically 2-3 winners, a few niche players and dozens of losers. When a new industry is born, you get a lot of players, and eventually the best, luckiest, or most aggressive win. It's that way with almost any type of software, service, or product. There's Salesforce.com, and there's ... um... There's Amazon and there's ... um... There's ebay and there's... um... So pointing out that very few social networks will survive is stating the obvious. Now, tell me which one will turn out the winner and you are making a risky prediction.

Secondly, what people don't seem to get about social networks is that social networks, primarily, are a means to an end. Participation in pure social networks like Facebook is declining, because they just aren't all that entertaining. Once you've established yourself on a social network, you check in only occasionally. For example, you might use LinkedIn when you are looking for a job, an employee, or a referral. You might use Plaxo to look up someone's current phone number. And then log out. Facebook and Twitter addicts are a special breed, but they are also quite virtually mobile, so it's hard to count on them.

However, where social networks get exciting are where they are a means to an end. So, if you are listening to pandora, emusic.com , and you start to form a network of friends, you can start to find out what your friends are listening to. In Second Life, or any multi-player online game, you form social networks. You can imagine how this could be useful in a variety of different contexts, where the basic business model is to sell something.

You'll notice that this blog doesn't have Adsense on it. Although I know that reduces my search engine placement (I've written about this in a past blog.), it reflects my basic philosophy that the advertising model is fundamentally hokey.

It simply seems untenable that people want to be bombarded with advertising. The whole scheme on Facebook these days is that you become a "fan" of something, and then something will advertise to you. I joined a fan club of one or two bands and I get their e-mails, which I regularly delete without reading. For a while I had an iLike on Facebook and I could find out where some of my select favorite bands were playing. But the novelty of that wore thin rapidly.

As a long-time emusic.com subscriber, I have 250 artists on my hard drive, and that doesn't include any of the physical CDs I own (though I haven't bought any since the word DRM entered my vocabulary). So if I took an app like last.fm, which detects all the legally purchased on my system (all of my music is), and started to feed me the concert schedule of all 250 artists (minus the deceased), well, no thanks. Come to think of it, no matter how much I love my tooth floss better than any other tooth floss I've tried, I don't want any promotional material from the manufacturer.

In short, I don't believe in the fan-club, advertising model in the long run. There's definitely some money to be made there, but not enough to sustain the social networks on an advertising-only model.

Let Me Know

2008-03-04T12:23:00.000-08:00

Not only are we now suffering from information overload, we are starting to suffer from "same information" overload.

Most of us are accustomed to being reminded of certain things, usually dates and tasks. Thus, when we are invited to an event, register on the web, get more email confirming our registration, an additional reminder to register, a reminder the day before and maybe even an SMS, we consider that to be just fine. If we are Israeli, despite our registration and the multitude of reminders, there's still only a 60% chance we'll show up.

However, even invitations are starting to get out of hand. Part of this has to do with our multiple contact locations. If I am part of your Facebook group, for example, and you send the notifications by Facebook-mail, which notifies me at my Gmail account, I'm now getting all those reminders twice. If you are someone whose blog I follow, and you mention the event a couple of times in your blog and in your online broadcast (not naming any names here), then you have managed to reach the level of per-event reminding typically associated with getting my kids to put on their pajamas.

The problem is it's becoming almost unavoidable. If I post this blog just here, well, maybe you are subscribed on your RSS feed. Chances are you aren't, so I have to let you know. I put it on my status message or twitter it, I post a link to Facebook. Maybe I even add this whole blog as a note to Facebook. Maybe I send out e-mail notification. I didn't mean to bombard you, but all of a sudden you know my every move. Twice. At least.

It gets worse. It's not just unavoidable, it's automated. My social networks send you a weekly update telling you I've been blogging again. If you are my Plaxo contact (and if you aren't, please add me), your Pulse not only notifies you, it duplicates most of this blog and allows you to comment in Pulse.

The good news is that I probably have more ways to reach difference audiences than I ever did before. The bad news is that the audiences can't be that different. I probably have 60-80% overlap on the main three social networks I use.

Another unfortunate side effect is that I have this blog or a link to it posted in 3 different places, with comments in 2 of the 3 places. As you can see, the place where I have no comments is at the actual blog itself. This is unfortunate because it means that my comments are happening in a closed network (Facebook or Plaxo) and that there is some level of interaction being missed.

Well, in theory anyway. I don't actually have *that* big a fan club. Just a bunch of little ones.

Geek on the Town

2008-02-25T11:49:00.000-08:00

Before Facebook, it had been many years since I had been invited to cool parties in Tel Aviv. But now, I just join the right group, and voila, I am "invited" to lots of "private" parties. Not only am I invited to them, but I can see which of my friends go to them, and according to Facebook, my friends party a lot more than I realized (or expected). Furthermore, people like Jeff Pulver and Chris Brogan are telling me that the more virtual you are, the more you need to get out and meet real people.

So, under all this newly-found peer pressure (mostly from people I didn't even know were my peers 6 months ago), I persuaded a friend to join me at an event called "Networking and Nightlife". With that kind of a name, potentially two things could happen. One is that I could meet business associates, and the other is that I could meet guys. Since the event was at a place called "Whisky-a-Gogo", I decided to go with the tight-fitting sweater rather than the shirt and jacket.

The first thing that I learned about human nature is that no matter how great you feel and look, when you see the bouncer at the door, you are automatically hit by a wave of doubt about whether you are cool enough to get in. I am positive this is a throwback from high school, when there were cool people and geek people. Suddenly, I found myself thinking "Uh-oh, I was invited by a Facebook friend who I couldn't even pick from a lineup." Thankfully, my wardrobe choice and mentioning Facebook were enough to get me in.

The place itself was fantastic, and the crowd was just my style. That is, there were more glasses on people's noses than on the bar. The over-30 geek-o-rama, now there's a crowed of guys to whom I can relate. After a while a fair number of us were dancing, too.

Freed from the shackles of my youth, I found that I no longer need to be drunk to dance, which is fortunate since I no longer drink. I figure my fellow partiers are either to drunk to notice I have no dancing talent, or assume I am too drunk to care. To anyone who knows me well enough to know I don't drink, being a poor yet enthusiastic dancer can only do good things for my reputation. Plus, I had an awesome time.

If you were at this party, and you weren't dancing, you do have to ask yourself, what were you doing there? It was not the kind of place where you could hold a conversation. There are better places in the port for chitchatting with your friends.

I can tell you what you weren't doing there. You weren't picking up a date. I am not complaining that I wasn't hit on, and neither were any of the (RL) friends I met there. I was looking around the room, and even the very eligible-looking guys and gals were not being hit upon, nor were they doing much hitting. I suspect there were some exceptions, but none of the ones I had my eye on had any major hitting going on. And although the place was absolutely packed by 11, by midnight it had thinned out again.

Needless to say, I woke up in the morning, hangoverless, next to my cat, Foo. I stumbled downstairs to find my floor looking like half a dozen 10-year-olds had been doing arts and crafts on my kitchen table. At least they cleared the countertops.

All of this finally brings me around to my point about the high-tech party scene. Especially the scene for middle-aged geeks like myself. A bunch of the people in my age group are coming around to the point where they are single again, so I think this observation may be helpful to some of you.

The whole culture of inviting "friends" to events through social networks is great fun, but has a twang of "Revenge of the Nerds". Now we've got our own parties, and if you don't have a blog, you are not invited! We are going to get back at all those people who snubbed us in high school, now that we have the bandwidth and the cash! And we are going to party it up, yes we are!!!

Psst, guys... listen, we aren't that kind of cool. We know how to enjoy a good party now and again, but we just aren't that kind of cool.

And who would want to be? Wouldn't you rather read a good scifi novel or play a MMOG? If you want to be in a loud and crowded room, what's wrong with VON or CeBit?

It is true that those places aren't prime for hook-ups. But, at least from the behavior I observed at this very hot pub, full of very hot geeks, if you are looking to poke someone, your chances are better on Facebook.

Nuff said.

Virtual Mobility

2008-02-20T02:07:00.000-08:00

My children are virtually mobile. What I mean by virtually mobile is that they can move from social network to social network without losing their friends.

I once read an article that said that kids have multiple e-mail addresses and/or messenger IDs, and I just couldn't imagine that. Changing e-mail addresses is so painful to me that I don't tell any of my actual friends what my work address is. I own a domain name, and that is where my main e-mail is.

I use a number of social networks. A large number. I wish they were coordinated, but they are not, so I have separate and overlapping sets of contacts/colleages/links/friends/younameits. At least 3 of those networks would be hard for me to abandon easily. Anyone who has played an online multi-player game knows the pain of having to tell your virtual friends you are leaving. That is virtual immobility.

My children, however, are virtually mobile. I thought I had solved some problems when I signed them both up for gmail, so they could correspond with their relatives overseas. Everyone was happy with that for about a week, until the kids saw me using Facebook.

So I set them up with a Facebook account. My mom and siblings duly got Facebook accounts to connect with my kids. (One of my sisters appears to use it also to communicate with her in-laws, a thought I find even more horrifying than using it to communicate with my mother.) My kids stopped looking at their gmail and started looking only at Facebook, because 7-year-olds apparently aren't into writing long letters, but sending a hatching dragon or throwing a plate of virtual spaghetti is appealing.

That was all good and fine, until kids in the class started getting webkinz, which is a kind of stuffed animal who lives in a virtual habitat at webkinz.com. In this virtual world, the animal has a job, a home, and apparently FRIENDS. When you come to think of this, what are you going to say to your friend about your day when you just spent the whole of it in school together, and then after school together? Nothing. But your pet walrus might have something to send to the friend's pet marabou.

One day, webkinz will not be the thing. Some other social network will be the thing. But for my kids, it doesn't matter. They see their friends every day. They'll immediately know the social network du jour. That makes them virtually mobile.

Apparently, being virtually mobile is in inverse proportion to how geographically mobile you are. My kids don't have many friends in other schools, much less other towns or countries. Most of my friends work and live in a different location from me, and that makes all the difference in my virtual mobility.

Which brings me back to nagging my kids to return letters in their Gmail and to check Facebook to see if Grandma sent a hatching dragon. I guess parenting hasn't changed that much since I was a kid.

Not Super Fun

2008-02-19T07:45:00.001-08:00

I hereby announce the removal of my FunWall and SuperWall. If the interface makes it so hard to send a birthday card that everyone EXCEPT the intended recipient gets the card, the application is functionally useless.

On the one hand, I can't actually be sure who I send anything to. On the other hand, I can't be sure anyone actually intended to send me something. As far as I am concerned, that basically means the product does not perform any function.

Frankly, most of the applications on Facebook don't do much of anything other than ask you to get your friends to join them. I've tried a lot of applications.

Most of the applications send something to your friend. Nice. I can send you text, pictures, sounds, or video. I can't really send you chocolate or a hug. I can send you a picture of chocolate. I can send you a picture of a kiss, or of something more lewd, but I can't send you a real anything. I can send you virtual good Karma. Can Karma actually be good if it is virtual? Can it be good if it is Viral Karma? Let me just give a hint to the people developing one more app to send one more thing... thanks but no thanks.

Causes, eh. I haven't seen anyone leverage them.
Comparing taste/knowledge in certain areas: has potential for strengthening friendships, but not much.
Games, now there is something I can, um, use. And I do mean use. I'm an addict.

The potentially useful applications are for meeting people. Honestly speaking, however, most people are only using these for dating. Nobody is using the "Meet New People" application to find professional colleagues or even like-minded friends to share with.

But the real problem and downfall of all the applications is that the developers render them completely useless by insisting you add 20 of your friends in order to use them. They don't just ask you to do that when you join the application, but at every possible juncture. You can't play a game without being asked to challenge your friends. You can't send Good Karma without being told your Karma is only as good as the number of people you spam with more Good Viral Karma. You can't see someone's profile picture without links to applications YOU added that you could force them to add too (yes, I have set those so I don't see them, but...)

The bottom line is that these applications don't understand about creating real value. Real value is knowing my friends' birthday. Real value is meeting new people. If you create real value, I will really want to invite my friends to use your application, or they'll see it on my profile and want it. If you aren't creating real value, you might want to ask yourself what you are doing.

The State of Networking in JewLand

2008-02-10T05:06:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday was a marathon networking day for me. I started out at the Herzelia Open Coffee Club , arranged by Tilly Kalisky of Greylock Partners. Later that afternoon I had coffee with some colleagues, and topped off the evening with the Digital Eve Israel speed networking event.

My main observation is , over the past few years, Israelis have come an extremely long way when it comes to networking. The country used to be much more dominated by closed networks, where being in something called "shmoneh matayim" made all the difference. (Sorry, even if I knew what it meant, I couldn't tell you.)

No longer. From the events I attended, it is overwhelmingly clear that getting into the club is no longer as hard as it once was, and the club members are openly and happily going out to networking events to meet the rest of the world.

Just a couple years ago, I used to get slightly off-kilter looks when I introduced myself to a stranger at a professional event. Now I get a firm handshake. Some people are still slightly shy about it, but no more shy than anywhere else in the world.

I wonder to myself how much social networking tools have contributed to this. LinkedIn and Plaxo have been popular here for several years, and that certainly started to get people to loosen up about collecting contacts. However, I think things really clicked into place with Facebook, when we all learned that it's easy to make new friends with people you don't know.

Whatever it was, professional networking has taken a big step up, to the benefit of all.

Over-Invited

2008-01-30T06:33:00.000-08:00

This blog is basically an addendum to Impersonal Greetings.

Today I got a greeting on Facebook through a new app. However, when I went to claim my greeting, I found I would not be able to get it unless I sent a greeting to 15 of my friends.

I was immediately filled with doubt regarding the greeting I got. Was it really a personal greeting for me? Or did my friend need to greet me in order to get the greeting from his friend? Frankly, the thought that someone was forced to greet me is even worse than getting a holiday card from someone who just sent it to his whole mailing list. At least it was intentional and not sent to me under duress.

Needless to say, I logged out of that app, so I don't know what greeting I got. Or didn't get.

BTW, if you are wondering how many of my colleagues contacted me after my last post regarding the meeting my company is attending this week, the answer is none. I hereby officially concede that I am ahead of the curve.

BTW

2008-01-22T14:05:00.000-08:00

If you are reading this blog because, like me, your company is attending the MEF forum next week, and you saw my name on the attendees list, and you are doing your homework before the meeting -- by all means, please drop me an e-mail. You have officially made my list of "people who get it." I'd be honored to make your acquaintance.

Google-ability

2008-01-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

In anticipation of an industry meeting my company is attending, I went through the list of attendees and googled the ones I was interested in finding out about. Several interesting findings are appearing from this exercise, one of which relates to the different social networks my colleagues use. More about that in my next blog.

The main finding of interest is how googlable people are, and how much information is available on people. About half of the people I am looking for are in marketing and about half are in technical fields. Most of them do not do well in search engines. So far, none of them have blogs. Almost none of them have any personal information available: not flickr accounts, not book reviews on Amazon, not even a resume.

In other words, the only way I am able to find out about my colleagues in the telecommunications industry is if they have written a feature article, are using LinkedIn or Spoke (the other social networks Google poorly), or have published a professional paper or contributed to a standards body.

On the one hand, I think, more power to them, they have managed to keep their personal lives to themselves, unlike yours truly. OTOH, I think, what losers: don't they have a life? What kind of marketing person are you if I can barely find your title online? Who are you if I can't find you online at all?

The other thing that strikes me is the huge advantage to having a relatively unique name. For those of my colleagues named John Smith, I had to search with their company name, which is fine for my purposes. However, if someone is searching for them after finding them on match.com or on their neighborhood watch committee, there is little chance that person can find out anything about them.

Thankfully, my last name is fairly unique, because my first name is not. If I had thought about online search 10 years ago, I probably would have thought twice before naming my daughter Maya, which is very popular these days. She could potentially marry someone with a common name and be virtually invisible, or at least virtually hard-to-find.

For all of you future parents, I am perfectly serious. If your family name is common, think hard about giving your child a fairly original first name. Phone books and local searches are a thing of the past; today reputations are global and your life-long unique identifier will have a significant value.

Impersonal Greetings

2008-01-06T02:20:00.000-08:00

With a new year inevitably come New Year's Greetings.

Nobody reading a blog remembers this, but once upon a time if you got a holiday greeting card (the kind made of dead trees), and the person hadn't scribbled some kind of personal message, you felt a tad insulted.

At least that was the case in the States, when I lived there. For almost two decades, I've lived in a culture where the only people who send holiday cards are salespeople. So, for years and years, I have not sent greeting cards. I feel guilty about the friends I didn't keep in touch with, but on the upside, I've saved a few trees.

Over the past few years, greeting cards come, by the dozen, through e-mail. There's something incredibly impersonal about not even getting your card with your name at the top of it. Despite being in charge of the design of the company greeting cards, I don't make a habit of sending cards out, but to the actual humans who send me cards, I tend to reply.

This year's innovation is cards through social networking. I get season's greetings through Facebook and Plaxo. Now these greeting cards are, in some ways, even less work and less personal than the e-mail greeting card. OTOH, they do have your name and picture on them, and they did come from your (semi-)closed network of declared "friends".

It is with great embarrassment that I admit to enjoying receipt of these impersonal social-network-generated greetings. I get that instant pleasure of believing that for a split second, a friend of mine was thinking of me. And they were, because they had to look at my picture for a second (Unless they chose "Select All", but none of my friends are dorks, so I am pretending that option doesn't exist.)

I still haven't been able to bring myself to return the greetings, because it seems too impersonal. But social networking has allowed me to send birthday cards at the appropriate dates, something I have never been capable of tracking previously. Despite the impersonal nature of an e-greeting, it's an upgrade from the mass-holiday-greeting-card. I hope you understand.

I still get the holiday greeting cards of the physical kind, always from my ex-roommates from college. They don't have anything personal scribbled at the bottom, but they always have a picture of their kids. I hang those up in the kitchen, where I can see them, for the whole year, until the next one comes.

Networking 101

2007-12-31T05:20:00.000-08:00

Successful networking has one hard and fast rule. If you know nothing about networking, if you can't remember all the ideas of how to meet people, if you are awkward in real life and can only network online, if you can never think of something clever to say -- whatever your handicap -- it doesn't matter. You need to remember only one thing:

Networking is about what you give, not what you get.

I was fortunate enough to that at one of the first pure networking events I attended, and it's the bottom-line truth. You can immediately identify the person who mingles at a networking event and is focused on the next person they will meet rather than the person they are talking to right now. Everyone knows someone who only calls when they need something. Those people aren't going to get much cooperation when they call on you for a favor.

Actually, I was just joking with a colleague about someone we know who only stays in touch if he thinks he can get something from the relationship. We agreed that we love the guy and we laughed it, rather than being annoyed. After some thought, I realized he can get away with it because he will always, but always, take your call if you need him. So he won't call just to gab; but he also doesn't expect you to, and he will always be on the lookout for how he can help you.

Actually, a few years back, someone told me about an interesting study which showed that women tended to focus their networking on higher-ups, rather than on peers or people lower on the ladder than they are, and this limited their ability to leverage the network. One reason is that a network is an investment, not a loan. The other reason is that you really don't know who will help you, and you don't know who will be promoted tomorrow. Everyone is worth investing in, regardless of their ability to help you.

I actually heard a talk-show host who, while interviewing Tom Hanks, told him he had started out as an assistant in the office, and he remembers bringing Tom some coffee. Tom Hank's immediate reaction was "Please tell me I was nice to you."

That's networking. Whenever you meet someone, whether it be F2F or virtually, the first thing in your mind should be "how could I help this person?". It could be on a personal or professional level, or just telling him where there's a good restaurant nearby. You have something to contribute; don't be stingy.

Intersections

2007-12-25T09:59:00.000-08:00

Often people tell me that social networking is a huge time-sink. Okay, so they use the phrase "waste of time". I explain to them that it's not a waste of time; it just isn't any more efficient than regular F2F networking. F2F networking involves being in the same physical space with an arbitrary collection of real people and introducting yourself.

However, I am beginning to think that is incorrect; that social networking is better at managing and strengthening ties.

Today I had a first-time meeting with Kfir Pravda. I ran into him at a networking event that was publicized on Facebook. IOW, I would not have met him if it weren't for Facebook. The funny thing about that is that over lunch, we discovered that not only do we both work in the same field, we basically know all the same people, live less than 5 kilometers apart, and have even worked at the same company. IOW, eventually, we would have met even with out FB.

So back to the topic. In a room filled with arbitrary people, you are attracted to those who are "like" you in some way (unless you are a very professional networker and force yourself to introduce yourself to people who are unattractive, which I admit to having done.).

In a social networking space, I believe you are even more attracted to people like you. Not that there's anything wrong with that. This means that our social groups are going have multiple ways to connect with one another. It will strengthen the ties within that social group, and we are going to have a better grasp of the group's size and scope.

I see that already with my synagogue. I opened up a Facebook group for us, and it creates a way to remember people's names, and it gives us topics of conversations when we meet up on Saturdays. Even if you don't look into the other person's interests or write on their walls, you at least can joke about their being your Facebook friend.

In theory, I could dramatically extend my network on FB, LinkedIn, Ning, Plaxo, etc., to people I wouldn't normally meet. In fact, that isn't what is happening. Instead, I find am casting the same size net, but getting more of the fish in the vicinity of the net.

Although I encounter people of a wide variety over the social networking sites, it turns out that in fact, I am not really connecting with them. It's pretty much the same as striking up a conversation with the person behind you in the supermarket. Most likely you won't get beyond smalltalk because you don't have much in common.

Where social networking is effective reflects an ongoing icebreaker game. Here is someone you know, or who is in the same social or professional circle, and here is a tool to keep the conversation rolling.

Touchy Feely

2007-12-23T08:35:00.001-08:00

This week, a longtime (male) colleague sent me a "KissMe" request on Facebook. I thought about it for a second -- should I return the kiss ("Yeah, Baby" is the button you need to click) or ignore, or reject? What does it mean if someone sends me a kiss? Are they hinting at something? And so on.

After a few seconds, I thought, what am I thinking about? It's not an actual real kiss. It's a couple of bits on the computer. How hung up am I? To what levels am I going to take frigidity? Yeah, Baby! Return the kiss!

Later on in the week, I saw the friend had updated his status message to say that if people had to ask what a New Year's Kiss was, they were risking not getting the kiss. Yes, he was just being friendly and sending a New Year's Greeting to all his buddies. I was quite thankful that I wasn't so hung up as to be afraid of sending a few bytes to a colleague. Phew.

OTOH, last week someone new friended me, and then started sending me dozens of requests for kisses, hugs, adding applications, etc. Forget the fact that this could be construed as a come-on and is a hassle to deal with. I mean, if you make new friends, sometimes people will come on to you. Nothing wrong with that. The bottom line is, hey, you are a loser if you are spending that much time trying to get non-real kisses and hugs. Get a life. I rapidly unfriended the guy, and lost nothing in the transaction.

Bottom line: if you are using Facebook for making friends, loosen up. And if you are using Facebook for networking, you also should loosen up. Nobody can really DO anything to you on Facebook. Loosen up. You can always rid your profile of people you don't want but first, reach out. It can't hurt. Really.

Facelift: Video on your wall

2007-12-13T03:14:00.000-08:00

Shared media creates a common language. If we've seen the same movies, read the same blogs and heard the same news, we have a common culture and frame of reference. In this context, the Facebook Wall features are great. You meet someone new, or someone old, and you know something about their frame of reference. I am quite happy to get all kinds of interesting videos, graffiti, etc. on my wall.

Unfortunately, some people use little discretion in what they post on their wall, or what they send to others' walls. For anyone who hasn't got perspective on this yet, one sentence should do: My boss is one of my Facebook contacts. If that sentence wasn't enough, consider that your boss is probably on Facebook too.

You know, I like nudity as much as the next person, and I have heard and laughed at many a dirty joke. But do I want them displayed where past, present and future business associates can take a look and see what level I will stoop to? I think not.

Long ago, I managed to train all my real friends not to forward junk to my inbox. Occasionally, friends send things they know I personally will like. The only people who send me "inappropriate" jokes are people who know me really, really well, and know just what kind of inappropriate is funny to me. And, of course, that is my private e-mail inbox that my boss and IT manager aren't looking at.

The other thing that absolutely amazes me is WHO sends me these posts. On Facebook, the people who send me the most inappropriate posts are people who I know briefly through networking. This amazes me most of all. Supposedly, they are connected to me for business networking purposes (otherwise they would have asked me to coffee by now). I assure you that posting a video called "Stripping" on a business associate's wall will not make a positive professional impression. Especially if the associate is a woman.

Also, chain letters. Why are you sending me a chain letter if we are barely friends? Is it too obnoxious to send your real friend a chain letter--but you are afraid to be cursed with 1000 years of bad luck for not forwarding it? I get it, you want to curse me with the bad luck and not one of your actual friends. That's something that is sure to make a good impression on me.

And that teddy bear who is travelling around the world? Hello people, he is not travelling anywhere. Absolutely nothing will be achieved by posting him on someone else's wall.

If you want to say hi, there is poking, hugging, waving, and sending messages. If you want to create a common language, do please post on my wall. But don't just forward me garbage to remind me of your existence or because it is easy. You will be defriended.

Physical Media Sucks

2007-12-09T12:04:00.000-08:00

My video consumption habits are embarrassing. Firstly, I don't own a television set. Secondly, I don't download illegal videos. I actually go down to the store and rent a video (which I see on my PowerBook, rendering my Mac un-cool at least for the duration of the movie).

I pay for my music, too. I am not embarrassed to admit that I have had an e-music subscription for something like 3 years. E-music is consistently ignored as a major music downloading site, but they are probably the closest competitor to iTunes in downloads -- only they charge a quarter of the price so in revenues they are much lower. Oh, yeah, and no DRM.

I pay for this stuff because, well, frankly, I've made a lot of money in the software business, and people in glass houses... At any rate, I do think that artists and writers should be fairly compensated, and I don't mind paying something reasonable for my entertainment. (After all, I have no cable or satellite charges.)

But I am close to giving up on renting DVDs. Forget that the price still is outrageous and the selection is limited. The real problem is that the physical media sucks. I rented 3 videos this weekend. All 3 were scratched, damaged or otherwise compromised.

Okay, so the video shop compensated me or gave me another copy; but there is no compensation for sitting on a cold, rainy night on the couch with your family only to have the DVD bug out an hour into the movie.

I wish there were an e-music for video content. If anyone knows of one, let me know. I would rather see movies with fewer special effects at affordable prices, downloadable without worrying about security risks to my computer. One way or another, though, I am done with physical media. I have a feeling I will be able to find a much wider selection outside the video store.

Advertising's diminishing returns

2007-12-06T09:36:00.000-08:00

"Did you get any good ones?" I asked my 7-year-old son as he opened his pack of sports player cards.
"I got one of the coaches," said Tevel.
"Hey, what's that on the back of the card?" I ask.
"Oh, it's just an ad," he answers. "Well, not really an ad, but like an ad."
Nothing impressive in that, except that my second-grader not only recognizes an ad, but he recognizes the difference between a third-party ad and a self-promotional ad. He doesn't know the terminology, but he knows the precise difference.

A friend of mine said he doesn't understand Facebook's business model. I said advertising, and he said "I don't see any advertising in Facebook." I am sure he doesn't. It is there, but he doesn't see it.

Advertising is becoming more pervasive. It is getting bigger, louder, more dynamic. It jumps around to get your attention.

We are getting better at tuning out. We will never perfect tuning out, but it is clear that getting our attention is more expensive than it used to be. For consumers, getting expert opinions and reviews is easier and cheaper than it used to be.

At what stage will advertising become pointless? It's hard to actually imagine, but it seems to me that the point of diminishing returns is approaching. At what point will advertising business models be less appealing?

I'm aware I am taking this idea to an extreme, but how extreme is it really? How much is advertising affecting your decisions in actuality?

I'll tell you about some reverse situations in my next entry. I was actually looking for a vendor who advertised and couldn't find anyone.

Beacon: even less appealing than Spam

2007-12-02T08:00:00.000-08:00

Considering the level of intrusiveness of Beacon, there is a high level of complacency regarding Beacon, and an unjustified level of faith that it will just go away because of its lack of popularity. The Facebook group protesting Beacon has only 55 users.

I've got news for you. If you know what Beacon is, you are in the minority of Facebook users. Most Facebook users don't know, will never know, and will never care. That is why it is ludicrous to suggest that there should be an "opt out" feature. It is even more ludicrous to suggest that Facebook will back down from the Beacon.

Despite initial reluctance, and taking some minor steps back from its original plans (and you can bet it will step back up in the future), Beacon will go ahead as planned. Over time, the few people who even noticed its existence will get used to it, or opt out of Facebook. And over time, the big brands will recognize that nobody cares anymore and they will all opt into Beacon.

It dismays me to see how the big social networking guys are dealing with this. They are blogging about it. They are setting up groups against it. They are telling anyone who will listen how to block it.

They aren't quitting Facebook. Gentlemen, and I respect and love you all, but you are behaving like crack addicts. You complain about the damage to your health but you ain't quitting.

Believe me, if Jeff Pulver sends a message to all 4000 of his friends that he is moving over to MySpace (or wherever), 90% of us will up and follow him. If he and Robert Scoble did it, all of us would move. Until they do, though, none of the rest of us can afford to.

Facebook is making some clear strategy statements in its developments. One, it is a closed system. You can't export your friends or applications. Two, your privacy will be eroded over time. No protest is going to change that, because those are the basic inherent features and architecture of the Facebook philosophy of How It's Going to Work.

Beacon will not go away. It will only get stronger and more invasive over time. The people who are complaining are fewer than 1% of users. They may think they are the "influential" users, but so far, well, let's just say I am not impressed by the influence on Facebook.

IMNVHO, the only solution is to leave Facebook, and only the thought leaders can do it. If they don't, I predict that within 3 months we will forget that Beacon ever existed, but the advertisers won't.

Iyt

2007-11-25T12:48:00.000-08:00

I have finally overcome my prejudice against non-people and am now able to carry on level-headed telephone conversations with machines. No matter how many times I have to be routed either by pressing a button or by making a voice command, I find myself fully at ease and competent in navigating the complexities of the interactive voice response systems I regularly encounter.

I am perfectly comfortable with the ones who call me too, in fact, I find it much easier to conveniently end the conversation with them than with the human telemarketers.

One thing still irks me, though. The machines have an identity crisis. They aren't sure if they should call themselves "I" or "the system" or the royal "we" or just always use the passive voice and avoid identity altogether.

I think it is time that we gave the speaking objects their own pronoun, and I would like to propose the pronoun "Iyt", a mix between "I" and "It". This would make everyone more comfortable. The machine could then just say "Iyt am transferring your call." I'm having more trouble with the direct object, though. Meet and mitt are taken, though "Please tell meet your name," does have a good ring to it.

Well, coining one word is just going to have to be good enough for me. You're welcome to make your own proposals.

Google Engine Optimization

2007-11-22T04:56:00.000-08:00

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of getting a better ranking for your web site when people search for it on the web. Of course, as we all know, when it comes to search, mostly you just care about your Google ranking.

Firstly, it is a bit sad to see the money being poured into SEO. When you think about it, the bottom line is that there is a whole industry built up around behind tricking the search engines not to give you the most useful results.

Some of that distortion is fine and legitimate. I mean, if you want to buy a stapler, and the stapler sellers are all investing on SEO so you buy staplers from them, that makes sense. But if you want to find out what a stapler does, then you aren't going to get particularly good results, with the exception of Wikipedia. Unfortunately, the fact that Wikipedia is going to end up being the only authoritative souce on (any idea/item) is another distortion of reality. If you are the world's absolute smartest stapler expert, and you have a web site devoted to staples, but you don't have an SEO budget, I'm afraid you probably won't end up with good ranking in the search engines and you had better get yourself listed in Wikipedia.

Back to topic: I accidentally found a good shortcut to doing SEO optimization. Just do a GoogleAds campaign. I did one for a couple of grand, but I would guess that even a couple of hundred would do. Google apparently knows where its bread and butter come from, so if you are running a GoogleAds campaign on your site, you can be sure to get better ranking for that product on regular Google search too. The best part is that it works not only for the product you are promoting; I found I got higher ranking for all my products for the appropriate keywords. Obviously, the keywords had to be in the text of the pages of my site.

BTW, the GoogleAds campaign sucked. There were too many fake content and link sites, proxies, etc. Most of what I got was garbage, and although Google has been polite and responsive about it, all indications are that they aren't willing to take financial responsibility for spoof site results. I ended the campaign quite quickly.

Although I didn't get one useful lead from the GoogleAds campaign itself, I did get quite a number of other leads, both for the target product and others, by improving my search engine rank as a side effect of the GoogleAds campaign.

So if you are running a site on a low budget, I would suggest trying a GoogleAds campaign for improving your Search Engine results. It is a tenth or less of the price of good SEO, and the results seem to be very good. Even on a corporate budget, I am considering replacing my SEO budget with half as much for GoogleAds. I wouldn't be surprised if I get even better results than traditional SEO.

Trust me

2007-11-11T22:24:00.000-08:00

The more I use Facebook, the less I trust it. The more I see the granularity of information I've got about my friends, the more I think that privacy is underrated.

For example, one of the popular apps is "Hot or Not" where you rate your friends' appeal. Let me tell you something: there is almost nobody in my life who I would like to know my honest opinion about his hotness. Not my neighbor's son, not my boss, not my cousin, not that guy who hit on me last week, not Jeremiah Owyang, nobody. You tell me: is your best friend's husband hot or not? Neither answer is going to cut it on that one.

I'm using Hot or Not as an example, but it's any application. I don't want all of my "friends" to know who I poked, bit, or hugged, that I joined the AlAnon group, or that I saw the movie Clueless.

Assuming you could answer anonymously -- do you trust Facebook to keep the secret? Do you even trust yourself to click the right button to make it secret? There are tons of privacy and notification settings, and I've played around with a bunch of them. It's not really clear exactly what they do, and obviously, whatever is private to others is still not private to the Facebook backend or to the application writer (who is not Facebook and is not your "friend").

And then there are the friends you don't want. Those people you meet in everyday life that you can't avoid and you are polite to, but you pray they will not "friend" you because there is no way you want anyone to make any connection between the two of you. There is no tactful way to let them know that although your friends include people you have never met, they do not make the grade.

The upside of relinquishing your privacy is that you will get personalized advertising, customized to show you things you really might be interested in buying, rather than random advertising. Glory days!

Assuming you could get excited about any kind of advertising, the level of privacy you are giving up on social networking sites is less than comfortable. Nicholas Carr recently said, basically, that he wished he didn't know, but I wish it didn't happen.

I also recommend reading the cited blog by Nate Weiner. The bottom line is that Facebook isn't only recording what you on Facebook, but also what you are doing outside of Facebook.

Frankly, all of this freaks me out quite a bit. If I take this to the natural extreme, that means everyone I know can know everything I do when I am on my computer. All I can say is F2F meetings are going to become an increasingly important part of my life.

The Sound of Your Voice

2007-11-08T21:53:00.000-08:00

Social networking enables a tremendous range of communications methods. But if you really want people to do something, there is no substitute for a phone call or in-person visit. A vast amount of my time these days is spent on the phone. And, where possible, on a fixed land line, where I can get good voice quality.

My main non-work-related endeavor these days, for anyone who hasn't caught on, is putting together a party to run for local elections (mayor & city council) in my town, Hod Hasharon. For those purposes, sending out e-mail really sucks. It simply is not possible to get people to physically show up if you send an e-invitation (unless you are really a rockstar). It is not possible to get people to volunteer their time, even for something in their own interest, such as their kids' school council, unless you pick up the phone and talk to them personally.

To get someone to do something, you need to understand their capabilities, their motivation, but moreover -- you need them to believe you understand them. You need them to believe this is going to be a success. You will never achieve this by e-mail. You can't listen to someone by e-mail. You can do it by chat, with certain people under certain circumstances. But for most people, it must be by voice.

E-mail is tempting. At this point, my group is too big for me to be able to call everyone every week. So I use e-mail to update people. But mostly, I have to talk to them. There is no other way to truly motivate.

Sick of Social Networking

2007-11-04T08:37:00.000-08:00

Only a few days after my recent post on how my moods have improved thanks to social networking, I had the great good fortune to post a definitively down-in-the-dumps status message, no pun intended, due to a stomach virus that's been bugging me for 3 days now. Yes, folks, for some 72 hours my Facebook status has shown the actual truth, which is that I am sick.

This was a good experiment in what happens in social networks when it isn't your birthday, when your life, in fact, sucks. This will be a short post.

Social networks have proven worthless in such situations. As it is, I think most of us generally don't know what to do when someone is distressed. If you are distressed, therefore, my advice to you is to ask people for specific help, and if they offer general help, think of something specific you need.

Though I managed to resist the temptation to ask my friend to clean my house for me, I was able to leverage my real life networks for rides for my kids, a place for them to hang out in the afternoons, and some soup. The best real life networks in my life for this purpose are, surprisingly, the community-oriented networks (neighborhood, school board, synagogue), rather than individual friends. Those networks seem designed for mutual help, rather than intimacy.

Special thanks to Saul, Natie, Rochelle and Sigal, only one of whom is also a facebook friend.

Happy Days

2007-10-29T12:52:00.000-07:00

As if my life weren't phony enough, with Facebook status and Twitter, we now can get constant updates on the minutiae of one another's lives, provided, of course, that the twitterer is willing to expose the minutiae to potentially everyone in the world.

Obviously, this has some implications for what we are going to say in our status. Since subscribing to their feeds, I have learned that my friends are never bummed out (unless their baseball team loses), never frustrated, are cheerful at their jobs, always enjoy their children, and they eat out a lot.

In fact, my own mood has significantly picked up since I have begun broadcasting it. I have never reported any negative feelings or emotions. The worst I've put on my Facebook status is "tired". And while I do think it is probably in the interest of my friends and co-workers to know when I have PMS, according to my Facebook status, I never do.

I've heard that there are many people who are struggling to keep more than one online identity: one professional and one personal. All I can say to those people is: good luck. Everything online is googlable and once googled, indelible. Other than private e-mails, which are also owned by Google at this point, assume that whatever is online is "out there" and findable for anyone who wants. In other words, you have to be careful what books and albums you review, too.

My basic assumption in going online is that this is my personal brand, wherever I am, and whomever I "friend". My status updates reflect some aspect of reality, but you can be sure that if I am down in the dumps, you won't know it from my Facebook status message, my blog or comments, or posts in any group I belong to. You won't find out who I think is an idiot or when my kids give me a hard time.

I have read in those self-help books that if I keep a positive outlook, I will begin to feel happier, so maybe social networking is contributing to everyone being a better person. Personally, though, I just feel phonier, and I'm a marketing guy, so I was full of it to begin with. Oh wait. Maybe I should not have admitted that I read self-help books. That would be like saying something is wrong with me, or used to be before I read the books.

And yes, if you are my Facebook friend, be assured that I do get the RSS feed and take a look at your newsfeed regularly. Twitter, btw, was just too much for me, so please don't be offended if I don't follow your micro-blog. I love you all and want to know what you are actually doing and feeling, not just the phony stuff, so just call, okay?

Making it Real

2007-10-23T23:05:00.000-07:00

Leveraging your social networking friends requires taking a larger risk than friending someone. If you've been on any of the social networks for any amount of time, you probably have accumulated a number of "friends" who you don't actually know. I'm not talking about people who you know online or know something about -- I mean friends you really know nothing about. You just got a friend request and accepted, and thought no more about it.

It's nice to have non-friend friends, but what is the use (other than to show off how many friends you have)? If you look at the rockstar social networking guys, you see they have various ways to encourage their thousands of "friends" (or "fans") to correspond with them. They ask questions, encourage poking, create causes and groups, and Chris Brogan (http://www.chrisbrogan.com/) even encourages people to just pick up the phone and call.

But for people like me, who aren't rockstars, we need to actually initiate contact a lot of the time, and in fact, it isn't necessarily a lot easier than initiating contact in the real world. To really leverage these contacts takes two elements: time and guts.

Guts first. I was sitting with a "friend" I'd met through traditional networking (someone introduced us at an event) and she was saying how she hated traditional networking because wherever she went, she discovered she was the weirdest person in the room. I didn't know what to say, because the person was successful, good-looking, considerate, a good conversationalist, and just basically, well, not weird. Either she went to events with really boring people, or it was just her perception.

All of us have that perception, in fact, that we are either weird, shy, obnoxious.... something that is going to make us bad at networking (either physical or non). For all of you people who think there is something "wrong with you" (that is 100% of us), please keep in mind this important fact. Statistically speaking, the more unusual you are, the higher the likelihood that you will say something interesting and memorable in a conversation. Hopefully it won't be something embarrassing, but frankly, I'd rather say something embarrassing (as long as it isn't offensive or hurtful) and be remembered, than to be forgotten. Another important statistic is that of people who have ever said anything, 100% have said the wrong thing at one time or another.

Back to the topic, so what happens when you try to actually make physical or verbal contact with one of your friends? I've been researching this by inviting some of my virtual friends for coffee, which in my country, is the default real world activity for a non-romantic social interaction.

The results have been mixed. So far, about a quarter of the people have accepted my invitation, which is actually a great result. I mean, I have met people in my industry, chatted socially with some new people who might become real friends, gotten voters for my party, etc.

On the other hand, some of the responses have been a bit pathetic. One of my non-friend friends I ran into at a physical event, and the friend recognized me from the social network we belonged to. We exchanged cards, and friended on all the other networks. This person had a very large number of "friends" and was someone in my industry, so I dropped a note saying that we had a lot in common, and we should have coffee. I can't say I was turned down, because the person didn't even grace me with a response. Another non-friend friend said they didn't want to speak by phone because he wasn't accustomed to meeting people he didn't know. I don't know about you, but with the exception of my mother, everyone I know used to be someone I didn't know.

So what do you think? What is the correct etiquette when someone you have friended, or who has friended you, wants to speak physically or meet? Do you initiate these contacts? What have you done when people initiate contact with you? Is it creepy or does it sound like a sales pitch when you get a real request from a non-friend friend? Or am I specifically just creepy or phony sounding?

Facebook is too narrow

2007-10-15T12:19:00.000-07:00

The more predominant Facebook becomes, the more we gripe about it. It doesn't export my address book. It doesn't allow more than 5000 friends. It doesn't have good capabilities for classifying my friends (we call this tagging these days). Etc, etc.

Facebook has gone further than anything else as a platform for creating and sharing applications. Well, almost. Facebook is just a small slice of the Web. And the Web has gone further than anything else as a platform for creating and sharing applications. Okay, it's not yet as easy as sharing on Facebook. Yet.

This morning, in an interview for PulverTV (http://www.blogtv.com/Shows/96), I said that the direction is consolidation, to allow us to manage our online identities, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my thinking was way too narrow.

What really has to happen is it needs to be easier to manage all of my online identities. I need one spot, one home page, where I can manage all of my identities. I don't want to enter the same details in every social networking site, but I definitely want to be part of a lot of them. I don't even want to log into them all on a regular basis -- and I don't want to have to add friends to each one separately. I don't want to have to announce to each network separately every time I update my blog.

What I want is a centralized personal portal, one that is:

Extremely easy to use
Allows me to use whatever applications I want to use, and
Gives me an easy way to configure different sets of friends.

I will expand on each of the above.

Extremely easy to use: Just like a blog site, MySpace, or Facebook, I want to be able to move information around, enter my own information, change colors, add my own fields, add applications, have private or public information, etc., on my personal home portal. This should not require any programming. Here Facebook has it approximately right.

Application friendly: Wouldn't it be cool if my Facebook friends could also be my SecondLife friends? Seamlessly? What if I could choose Pandora as my music app, not something Facebook provides me? I want all of that, and seeing my friends' various status messages from all the social networks/blogs/microblogs. I want to be able to cut and arrange that in various ways, sometimes by topic, sometimes by network, sometimes by application, and sometimes by an individual person.

Easy to configure: I want to be able to tag my different sets of friends in various ways, and give them access to different bits of information easily. At the very basic level, I have professional, personal, and intimate friends. My professional friends should not see my birthday cards or MMORPGs. I might have different blogs or tweets that go to all/personal/intimate circles. I might have different Amazon wishlists available to different groups of contacts. Once I define my own tags/categories, I can invite certain groups to particular events or to particular applications. I should be able to configure different look and feel for each group.

It goes without saying that all of this has to happen within one unified address book. I don't want separate address books and categories on each device and each social network. I don't want separate address books on Gmail, Outlook, Nokia, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I want one address book. I want each individual categorized with his/her tags, in the same way in each of those places.

If you add me to your network, I should be added to all the networks you and I are part of together, again, according to categories (I want to define that my professional contacts don't know I am a member of the Mud Wrestlers United network, even if they are there too.)

So that is where I think social networks are headed. I see the whole internet as one big social network. I think that the winner will be the platform that allows us to do that in one place. At this point, Google is the closest to creating that kind of experience, though Yahoo is a close second.

Because of its serious technical/design/support problems, I don't think Yahoo can gain the popularity for this leap. Google is still not a serious contender for corporate professional use, and they aren't fun enough for social networking. I envision this coming from a startup or from a platform that was designed for something else but evolves into this. I have doubt that Facebook is going to be able to scale up to this level, but if they are, they are also a serious contender.

Sadly, for me, this isn't going to happen for another 5-10 years, and I am stuck mired in management of my multiple personalities.

What are you using social media for?

2007-10-14T12:29:00.000-07:00

One of my friends posted a Facebook question: What are you using Facebook for? She didn't get many answers, but from my observation, today's mainstream users fall into a few categories:

Fun users: By far the majority, people are using social media to supplement their "real" contact with friends. They are poking, sending gifts, writing messages, and just generally interacting in new, fun ways, with people they already know in RL.
Supplementers: In this category, we have people who are using social media to supplement their real life groups in some way. Either they belong to a virtual group (such as an open-source project or chat room), and they can use social media to enhance it, or they belong to a real world group (such as a corporation or a party-going club), and they are using the social media to enhance that. I will devote a future post just to exploring some of the supplemental ways people are using the media.
Wait-and-see users: Plenty of my professional colleagues seem to be joining just to "see what happens". They aren't really part of the conversation. They've joined, and they are waiting for "something" to happen to them or for it to become suddenly obvious why they joined. Some of them are relatively serious about building up a good friend base, so that whenever "it" happens, they will be ready.
Tinkerers (myself included): Similar to the wait-and-see users in that they don't know what is going to happen. Unlike the wait-and-see users, the tinkerers are trying all kinds of stuff to see what "it" might be and how "it" might work.
Monetizers: Application developers who are really ahead of the curve and can already see ways to monetize the platforms. Some of them will succeed, some won't. The quickest monetizers seem to be in the adult industries, that is gambling and sex, not surprisingly. There are also quite a lot of monetizers in the consumer goods industries.
Pundits and prophets: The pundits and prophets are either being paid by their companies to figure out social media, or they are already making a living some way through social media. Some of the pundits don't need to make a living on a day-to-day basis, so they are really in the best positions to leverage this media.

The conclusion is that most of us are going to be reluctant to answer the question "What do you use Facebook for" because our answer is some variation of "just fooling around with it".

Nobody is going to answer the question "What is your social media strategy?" because the kind of people who know what social media is don't tend to be the kind of people who know what strategy is. And the few that do know what both mean are probably smart enough not to publicize their social media strategy to their competitors.

Why Facebook beats match-finding sites

2007-10-13T08:36:00.000-07:00

Today's post is dedicated to a friend of mine, who I won't identify, but who commented to me about how over the last few months, the dating sites haven't had the quality and quantity of useful leads they used to. As I pondered this, Facebook pitched me a new application available, called היכרויות בפייסבוק, or for the rest of you "Dating on Facebook (in Hebrew)".

And though my friend says that Facebook doesn't appeal to him, I fear he shall have no choice but to join, because everyone in his demographic with any cluefulness will be on Facebook and not on those sites. Having checked out the application myself, I have composed my top 10 list of reasons why Facebook rocks and the other match-making sites are doomed.

10. It's free.

9. You can immediately identify the losers who have no friends.

8. You can tell a lot about people by who their friends are. In Israel, there is even a fair chance that you have a mutual friend, who can give you a recommendation (or not).

7. You can identify the losers who are online all the time and don't know about privacy settings.

6. Instead of reading phony answers to phony questions, you can find out what the person is actually interested in and actually doing. (Unfortunately, in my case, that tends to be sending free gifts and bakery items to my offspring.)

5. With non-losers, (that is, people who know to update their status fairly often, but not often enough to make it seem they are twittering), you can learn something about their real lives.

4. You can meet people through doing actual stuff you are interested in, just like in real life, before people spent all their time online. Now not only don't you have to go to a real live protest to oppose your least favorite government, but you don't have to go to protests to meet similarly-minded members of the opposite sex, either.

3. 195 (as of today) different applications for meeting people, from the mundane (as the one above) to the bizarre (Human Pets) to the insulting (Hot or Not), and yes, even anonymous (Loop12), although how anonymous is if your friends see you added the application?

2. Let's face it, do any of us have time to add ourselves to ANOTHER site with ANOTHER login and fill in ANOTHER set of questions only to find out that the database on this site mostly overlaps the people we were introduced to in the one we've been using unsuccessfully for the last 3 months? Facebook even has members who are too busy to spend huge chunks of their time surfing for a mate (read: the non-desperate).

1. No men over 50! For women who aren't financially independent, perhaps men nearing heart-attack susceptible age/weight are attractive, but for those of us who are financially independent, dating someone with a decade of extra experience has limited appeal.

How do I know you?

2007-10-09T02:18:00.000-07:00

Walking along the beach a few years ago, I passed a college-age couple and overhead a bit of their conversation. "Wow," she was saying, "It didn't say on your profile that you like Foosball!" The first thought that came to my mind was "Why do two people who live in college dorms need to use a dating site?"

I spend a lot of time thinking about social networks, and what has happened to our communities. For great coverage of that topic, read Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, but for people who don't have time to read 1000 pages, the bottom line is that over the last few decades, people in advanced countries have become less social. We go out less, participate in community and religious groups less, invite friends less, vote less, have dinner with our own families less.

But people feel the loss. People need people.

So to what extent can we replace our physical social networks with virtual social networks? Screen time has moved to the computer, meaning interactive screen time rather than passive screen time. That means real potential for relationship and community building online.

But I can't help feeling that it's just a tad empty. My kids get excited when they get a new fish in their Facebook aquarium, or when someone from the family "friends" them. My daughter is at the age where it builds her confidence to see on the screen her list of "friends". But no matter how personalized the gifts, pumpkins, or pokes get on Facebook, they never actually feel personal.

On my birthday, "friends" wrote on my wall, but then, I realized, other than my cousin, none of the people who wrote me birthday greetings on my wall are people who I've met in person more than once. After the initial elation that "someone remembered" I wasn't emotionally touched that people wrote on my wall on my birthday. (No offense to any of you, it really was considerate of you.)

I don't blame online communication for this. I blame the hollowness of our lives. Our relationships have taken a back seat, and the online relationships that fill the gap are better than nothing. Most of us, as adults, have forgotten what it is to have dinner with a friend. And when we try, well, everyone is too busy. I wonder what they are busy with. I can't even get them to go exercise together, so I know that they aren't even exercising properly. They don't have time for themselves, so I don't feel offended that they don't have time for me.

And then comes along the convenience of having friends online. You can mass-send all of your holiday greetings in 10 minutes. You can have some kind of exchange with a dozen people in an hour, and still have time for TV or whatever it is they are all doing in the evening, so why waste your time with coffee with just one friend? You HAVE enough friends now. Or do you?

Why I'm a guy.

2007-10-02T03:40:00.001-07:00

This is another blog about my blog.

In my post today, I referred to myself as the marketing guy, which is something I do fairly frequently. Quite obviously, I'm not male, and I'm also quite painfully straight. So you might be wondering why I think I am a guy.

It's because "gal" sounds stupid. Lady is worse, and woman does not sound friendly.

It also is a reference to myself as the "marketing guy" as opposed to all the other functionality guys in my company/industry/peer group. As it would happen, all the other people in my company who are in charge of a business function are male. That is, I'm not the marketing gal vis-a-vis the marketing guy. I am the marketing guy, vis-a-vis the R&D guy, the finance guy, the professional services guy, etc. As it would happen, my online peer group is mostly made up of guys. I keep saying "as it would happen" to be nice, but we know it isn't nice and it isn't just "as it would happen." We won't cover gender issues in this blog, except in this posting. So let's just say it's a guy's world, and most of my peer communities are predominantly male.

The final reason why I refer to myself as a guy, or use the male generic pronouns, is just linguistic convenience. Even 10 years on, when I see someone say "she" to refer to the generic person, in order to be egalitarian, it's a distraction. It's like using a font other than Times New Roman because it's ergonomically more legible. Nothing is more legible than TNR for the simple reason that I have been reading TNR for more than 3 decades and nothing is more convenient than saying "him" when referring to a generic body, because I've been doing that for even longer.

I'm a language person, and I do believe that language forms our ideas and our culture, but in this particular area, I'm sticking with a male frame of reference. When my frame of reference changes, only then will I change my language. Or when someone comes up with a commonly-used better female version of "guy".

How does this pertain to me?

2007-10-02T01:09:00.001-07:00

Though I've been a slashdotter (http://slashdot.org) for half a decade, an active LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) user for several years, and a listserv moderator for longer than I can remember, it's only after seeing Robert Scoble's blog on Facebook vs Google ( http://scobleizer.com/2007/08/26/why-mahalo-techmeme-and-facebook-are-going-to-kick-googles-butt-in-four-years/) that I started giving some serious thought about how this pertains to me.

I'm the marketing guy at my company, which provides telecommunications infrastructure solutions to telecommunications vendors. (read: we have a dozen enormous customers and potential in the world). In addition to that, I am putting together a political party to run for the local municipal elections.

Over the last month or two, I have basically submerged myself in this online social media culture. There's a lot going on! But it's pretty self-focused. If you aren't in Silicon Valley, part of a Web 2.0 company or a startup, or involved in consumer marketing to under-30s, very few people in your circle of reference know what a blog, RSS feed, or online social network can do for them. I'm in high-tech in Israel, which is just about as close to Silicon Valley as you can get. While quite a lot of my colleagues are members of some of these social networks, an extremely small percentage of them are actually using them for anything. Case in point, I posted on the Digital Eve (women's high-tech networking, over 1000 members, many in marketing positions) listserv asking people how they manage their company's online presence, and only one person even got back to me.

So how does this pertain to me? How far ahead of the curve am I in this area? And how cool is that to the few other people who are also ahead of the curve? Is this going to allow me to be able to "friend" some high level executive at AlcaLu or Ericsson and follow his interests on his microblog? Can this supplement or substitute for going to those conferences and shaking people's hands?

What about in politics? Is it possible to leverage these social networks for my local community work? For my synagogue? For my kids' school? To run for mayor? That's going to have to happen in different networks, in a different language, with a different group of people.

I don't know. I suspect that the opportunity is now, when it is still possible to friend someone you barely know and have them accept your friend request. So bear with me, as I try, and we'll see how it goes.

Welcome

2007-10-01T13:39:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my blog. I'm open to any suggestions on a better title for the blog. I'll be posting here approximately once a week. I promise it will be well-written.

Feel free to follow my microblog on Twitter if you want to know insignificant details about my life. I won't be posting those here. In fact, I can't guarantee I'll be posting them on Twitter forever either. Sharing boring trivia with interesting people has limited appeal. My verdict isn't in on Twitter, but you can be sure I'll share it here once it is.

I actually know these people!

2007-09-28T01:42:00.000-07:00

I have to post this blog now, or at least soon, or the following sentence won't be true.

Most of my friends on Facebook and LinkedIn are people I have met or spoken to in the real world before I friended them in the virtual world. Because I have a couple of hundred connections, I am not overly embarrassed to make this admission. However, the more involved I get in social media, the more I feel that I should be humiliated not to have a greater following of virtual friends who have never met me and probably never will.

It's so simple these days to "meet" people. The nametags we wear online are so much more useful than the ones we wear when we go to events. The nametags show our faces, tell something about our education and profession, about our interests and our kids. Striking up a conversation is easy, but why bother? You already have a conversation going on your blog or mini-blog, so you can even find out if you like someone without ever having met them.

Fear of rejection is a faint memory in this online world. If someone you don't know doesn't accept your friend request, you just figure they are not into the whole social networking thing. It is not like asking for someone's phone number and being laughed at. The person getting the friend request may think you are off your rocker, not up to their standards, or pathetic, but, you never have to suffer the body language or verbalization that would let you know that.

Every geek's favorite thing about the online world is that your popularity typically is a result of your personality, insight and ability to communicate those insights. Good looks and ability to kiss up are of limited value. Likewise, moxie (guts/chutzpah) is becoming less important, because of the ease of friending and the limited impact of rejection.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the real world works differently, and in many ways, in completely the opposite way. What does this mean for how our society is developing? What does it mean about our contributions to our local as opposed to global communities? What does it mean we should teach our kids about getting along with others? How is it changing how we manage our real friendships? How is it going to affect those who don't have twitter accounts as opposed to those who do?

I'll think about all those things and keep blogging. I hope you'll join the conversation.