Recently in Technology Category

The first search I try on any new search engine is my own name. I'm not narcissistic, just very familiar with the results. How did Cuil do? Cuil returns Linked In and Twitter on top which is good, but my blog didn't make it onto the first results page. Stranger than that, the images it returns with the results are of other people. I like the mix of site summaries and images, but I hope they do a better job of correlation.

A search of the Chicago Bites Podcast, returned more strange image pairings -- a Creative Commons logo and photos of restaurants we didn't review. I did like the "explore by category" sidebar, but again didn't feel the options were particularly well correlated.

Still waiting for a Google replacement.

On the Web, everyone upgrades at different rates.   You find a service that works, a site that's comforting, a go-to bookmark that you can lay hands on and you stick with it until you hear about something better, something that solves a problem you didn't know you had, something cool that your friends are trying and you want to be a part of it.  And then you move.

Sorta. 

You can't completely ditch the old stuff or embrace the new.  You hold on to evite because your contacts are all there and you know all your friends -- yes, even the ones who are waaaa-ay tech-phobic -- know how to use it.  You stay with bloglines because it's still meeting your needs and you'd have to pick up all your data, move it, and get comfortable again and that seems like too much trouble.  You keep the ancient hotmail account because a few friends still have it in their email address books and you don't want to miss a shout-out.  You don't insist that everyone you know start using plaxo because you're not sure it'll be there next week & you don't want to be the geek that made them sign up for yet another thing.

Maybe you're the one pushing the change or maybe you're the one being pushed.  It doesn't matter. On either side, you're still stuck with the service, the site, the reference until everyone you need who's also using it has moved.  Or not.

I write blog posts here that get tweetscanned to twitter that then end up on friendfeed where people comment.  The friendfeed feed gets pushed back to Bloglines where I can then read about what people thought about the original post.  The comments don't stay with the original post.  Some of the twitters are captured in direct messages to me, others are duplicated with the post in friendfeed, and other twitters aren't attached to the entry at all.  Only a few people find their way back to the blog to leave the comment because that's not where the conversation is. 

This circle of information is enough to make me dizzy and I'm the one who set it up.

I'm not the only one who's working like this.  My friends and contacts are trying these services -- some are signed up for everything, others only have an email address and a blog.  Me?  I track all this activity through readers and lifestream aggregators.  I thought my base of operations was my RSS reader, but now I see that's not good enough.  Entire conversations are happening outside of the blogs I follow and I'm missing a good portion of the value I found with these sources in the first place. Social media services are folding in on themselves, consolidating and re-syndicating the same information.   It's the echo chamber writ large.

I'm wrestling with how to follow people with the minimum amount of overlap.  In other words, I don't want to see the same post repeated on friendfeed, plaxo, twitter, et al, but I do want to see all the comments and responses.  I can ignore the duplicates, of course, but that's tiring.  I need a source filter -- one post, one view, distillation of the flow around a conversation. 

I'll muddle through it for a while.  How are others dealing with the information firehose?  Thanks!

I work in a heavily regulated industry, but that hasn't stopped me from being an active online citizen.  I have profiles on everything from Linked In to Twitter, Flickr to Facebook, Friendfeed to Meetup.  I am enthusiastic about the communications possibilities of the Internet and how easy it is for people to connect. 

Despite my evangelizing on the job, I haven't seen a significant uptake in social media and I find it frustrating.  Blogs, podcasts, wikis...these are all things that are researched, implemented, and suffered, but never embraced.  Social networks?  Most can't even describe what that means without talking about risks.  When I talk to my peers in the industry, I hear either fear about what's happening "out there" or a need to control the message.  Underpinning every conversation is the sentiment that social media isn't right for us.

Maybe it is and maybe it isn't.  I think one of best things to do is to get all the objections out in the open so we can talk about them.  So without further ado, here are 10 objections I've heard to social media in regulated industries:

1. Avoidance of anything that exposes the organization to reputational risk is culturally ingrained.  Therefore, employees won't use the medium to collaborate to solve problems.  There's a fear of exposing either the organization or themselves in a negative way.
   
2. Independent voices haven't been fostered or appreciated within these industries and people haven't been hired for these talents.  There's no one to do the job with finesse.
   
3. There's an emphasis on process instead of innovation.  No one seeks out unique ways to communicate with online constituents.
   
4. Organizations in regulated industries are used to speaking as authorities.  Because social media fosters relationships on an individual level and not an organizational level, the organization's sense of its own authority could be eroded.
5. Unwillingness of the organization to respond to comments or to further discussion/debate.  They don't want their positions debated because the organization perceives itself to be the authority and wants to foster that in all public-facing interactions.
6. In order to participate in a community, you have to be answerable to that community.  Regulated industries have never directly answered communities and are afraid of their legal standing if they do.
7. Social media requires a personal touch and individual voice.  Regulated industries don't like to trust individual employees with their reputation.
8. The industry dismisses social media as something kids do and will therefore not treat it with the respect or the sensitivity it requires. Lack of success will become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
9. Online communities have social mores/norms that must be followed in order to gain the trust of the community.  In an effort to control messaging, organizations will run a high risk of alienating the very people they try to reach.
10. Organizations don't want to appear foolish by using technologies or participating in communities that are less formal.  In the words of one of my co-workers, "we don't want to be like the grandpa that goes clubbing with the kids."  Indeed.
    

This is what I'm hearing in my industry.  Does it sound familiar to you?  Do all these considerations have merit? Let me hear your thoughts.

I set up Google Alerts on my own name because I feel it is important to know if what I create gets circulated and to learn about other mentions of me that may happen online.  You never know when it may pay off!  I do a couple of versions of these alerts: my name, my name and city, and close spellings. 

I cast a broad net so I get a lot of alerts on other people. As a time-strapped career woman, I had been ignoring the ones that were obviously not relevant. However, my friend Amy changed my mind about this approach.  She doesn't ignore the false positives.  Instead, she e-mails her namesakes to maintain a friendly relationship in case someone tries to contact her through them.  If there's ever a case of mistaken identity, she has opened the door to getting it corrected quickly.  Of course, she returns the favor and sends along e-mail that wasn't meant for her. It never occurred to me to ask my online namesakes for help or to form a relationship, and I think it's a fabulous idea!

The other tip she shared was to set up Google Alerts on work colleagues.  When she sees these folks get some online love, she sends an e-mail to congratulate them.  It's a great networking idea!

If you haven't already done it, setting up a Google Alert for yourself and the important people in your life.  It takes about 5 minutes.