afordrunning

What’s your personality online? Is it the same as your actual personality? Are you a positive person like RevRun from Run-DMC, or more of a sky is falling type like (I won’t mention anyone specifically)? You could be neutral as well – like a news source. If you are a regular Twitterer and have any desire to understand how people might perceive you here is what you do. 

Go to your Twitter page, click on your Tweets and you have a history of how you are speaking in the social community. You can read your messages for yourself and try to objectively determine your tone – OR you could copy your Tweets URL and paste it into a program like Wordle or TagCrowd and generate a tag cloud of your most commonly used words.

It’ a quick way to get a snapshot of how you are utilizing words online.

You might have heard of LinkedIn.com the website that allows you to connect with professional people you know, have worked with, or want to work with. You can stay informed with contacts, reconnect with people, and maybe even learn something (although I find the last part lacking).

But, more importantly in the business world is not who you have worked with but who you have worked with that is a douche. How do you tell the desired contacts from the no-talent hacks who comprise many of the people you come into contact with everyday? I am proposing a site that let’s you know who’s been cut-off, excommunicated, and silently sent out to pasture.

The same way LinkedIn works, except for recommending people and adding friends you will only flame the losers and remove people from contact lists. It would be a spider-web of bad feelings and broken promises. Can you think of anything better? Even if you got listed you would get a kick out of who unfriended you. I’m gonna start working on it now….

thanks to larry d for the idea, even if i did bastardize it – he’s cut off anyway.

The State Department wants their employees to blog now. NOW? That’s so slow it’s almost pre-trend. But, their rules are many and anxiety is high that someone will say something that starts WW3. This is not a statement on the government in that most every company I know has similar tendencies in controlling the message about themselves and their people. News Flash, nobody cares about you like YOU DO.  

This isn’t a diss on social media and it’s exploration either. But a governor to the expectations that we have through the medium. Business in this environment is not the same as hanging a website that’s been copy-written, proofed, and analyzed prior to execution.

Yet we still want to control what the conversation like we have in all other aspects. Our contemporary business leaders are asking for ROI, buzz, and quantifiable metrics all rolled up into the cool new tools. Seriously? Nobody knows what this will end up like once it gels, but what I do know is that jumping in with a “business gloss” mentality means the original purpose of having a “conversation” shifts the terms of the engagement from real to pseudo. 

Are your employees going to say something you don’t like, most likely. Will they make new connections, gain a better understanding of their business environment, and learn to communicate with the marketplace more effectively? If done right and you let them. So if you want to keep the terms of conversation safe, controlled, and measured then send a fax. If you want to truly let your people discover their voices, bring in other perspectives, and maybe – just maybe enjoy two way communication then just let go.

Controlling conversation is like mandating religion…they both lead to revolution. So the question is which side of the gallows would you like to be on?

Bill Gates Releases Mosquitos @ TED

Bill Gates recently finished speaking at TED about Malaria and Education, and I loved his style of presenting the information from a statistical point of view. Test the educators to determine the best in class and why we’re at it, release some mosquitos in the room. He was right, “Poor people shouldn’t be the only people who get to live with them.”

I found it slightly ironic that he was standing in front of the 1984 Mac the whole time.

First Digital Footprints

Hosted a talk Friday with the company regarding how one could begin to develop their own Digital Footprint. We had several people speak and the topics were flowing and everyone seemed to enjoyed hearing other people’s perspectives. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it is five great places to start/ or continue your digital footprint.

1. Twitter - Twitter.com is the premier micro-blogging format available for free today. The best parts of Twitter are that you can build your community at your own pace, follow people who give information important to you, and even create relationships that can grow over time. Twitter asks the question, “What are you doing?” but think about the program more along the lines of whose brain would you like to get a peak into?

2. Flickr - Flickr.com is an online picture community that hosts more than 3 billion pictures. It is used widely by bloggers due to it’s wonderful scope, and organizational tools. Another free resource with a PRO account available for @$15. The free resource is plenty as it allows you to search for pictures, people, and collections that speak to your passions or needs. Another quick way to get into Web 2.0 without much trouble or pressure.

3. StumbleUpon - StumbleUpon.com is great resource for discovering and sharing web sites. Another free program that allows you to create a profile, search other people’s content, and tell the world about your favorites. This has been the preferred Bob Noble training wheels for training someone how to surf the net, not just look up something via Google.

4. Tumblr - Tumblr.com is a variation of a blog that features mixed media posts instead of longer text like you often find in weblogs. What Tumblr lacks in commentary it makes up for in visual presentation and low learning curve. It is a wonderful asset in gathering quick inspiration and developing a creative community online.

5. YouTube - Getting your own Youtube channel is easy and relatively simple. The reason to join a community on YouTube is wide and varied. From learning to building community. And you get to comment on video’s by Arcade Fire and destroy some 7th graders perception of crappy music. Another Joy!