There are six people you should avoid becoming ‘friends’ with on Facebook. Want to know who they are?

CBS News have just published a neat post ‘Facebook: 5 people never to friend from work‘ – a list of people who you should avoid linking to in Facebook. Perhaps, already, some of them are already there? You better check, quick!

And I just added a sixth.

The CBS post says you should avoid these people…

1) Your Boss

2) Your HR Rep

3) Your office ‘frenemy’

4) A previous Boss

5) Anyone you manage

and here’s an additional one I’ve thrown in:

6) Anyone who sells to you, or buys from you

Why? Well I don’t know about you, but I’d hate for a situation to occur where a person I was transacting with had more than the necessary leverage over me. Or, perhaps, claim some false affiliation or relatedness to break down some of my barriers. Agreeing a price through negotiation is all about leverage, and a game of wits, so it wouldn’t be helpful if I was compromised in some fashion. Or they might not choose to do business with me at all, based on some real (or misinterpreted) opinion I had written.

We really do have to be careful about our friends on Facebook. They should be real friends. People you trust and can share your world openly with, without fear of it being used against you or misinterpreted!

©2012 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

Only a few years ago, the gossip in the workplace centered around the water-cooler; a meeting place where the latest news about colleagues and management-decisions were discussed and often bitched about. More recently, the water-cooler is becoming lonely. Social media is taking over as the gathering point for gossip. Has it for you?

If you don’t Facebook, you probably know someone who does. (Why don’t you Facebook?) Or maybe you prefer something more high-brow like LinkedIn. Social networking platforms enable you, your friends and your colleagues to relate to each other, provide support , argue – whatever you feel like talking about. It’s a gossipers paradise. You don’t even need to be in the same country, let alone floor of an office.

And why not? It’s fun! It’s an easy way of sharing your news and taking a quick break. We all need a break. Because of that, more and more people are using Facebook in the workplace. Do you?

Why do you use social networking whilst at work?

Sarah Perez shares the results of research conducted by Nucleus Research on the blog ReadWriteWeb. Their study tells us that 87% of the 237 people who responded admitted that their use of Facebook has nothing to do with their work, which resulted in 1.5% drop in their productivity. If this research is read by your boss, what would the reaction be? I expect that FACEBOOK.COM would be blocked right away… or maybe you’d accept a 1.5% pay cut? (Err… nah! Don’t think so)

Do you agree with the conclusion of this research? Does your Facebooking time result in less work?

Personally, I don’t agree. For many people, taking a break from work – even a few minutes – gives us time to sort the clutter in our heads and allows us to get focus and clarity on the job in hand. If you’re like me, a short-term distraction gives your inner-brain an opportunity to solve the problems your working on without you becoming tired or frustrated. I’d say my productivity increases, significantly.

In 2008, the conclusion that Facebook reduced employee productivity was also being challenged by Goldsmith College in London, UK (as reported by the Telegraph newspaper). The research discovered that most of the 1,700 workers surveyed felt more productive after an ‘e-break’ (using the Internet) than they did following a traditional kind of break.

Sarah Perez also shares research performed by the University of Melbourne which confirms this view. The research concludes that people who take short breaks are, in fact, 9% more productive. Those are not just Facebook breaks, but any kind of break.

At least with a Facebook break, we remain at our desk and contactable…

Where it Went Wrong… (an example)

Did you see this story?

“Teenage office worker (Kimberley Swann) sacked for moaning on Facebook about her ‘totally boring’ job”.

To summarize the story: Kimberley Swann added comments to her Facebook profile that she was bored in her job. She didn’t mention her company name in the updates, but those who know her will guess who she is referring to. Her ‘mistake’ was that her boss was also one of her Facebook friends, so he read the comments, got pissed off, and gave her the boot.

Do you think this is fair?

If she had said that at the water cooler, would Kimberley have been treated the same way?

The two sides of this debate are a) employers don’t want their reputation damaged in the public eye, b) employees want to share views on their life (of which work is a significant aspect of) with friends in a private forum.

So doesn’t the debate center on what is ‘public’ and what is ‘private’? In the case of Facebook, you actually have to be a ‘friend’ of someone to see their updates, which requires mutual consent. In the case of other platforms like Twitter, you can follow the updates of anyone you like, providing they don’t block you or mark their updates as private. So is it reasonable to claim that anything you write as an update to your Facebook profile is ‘private’ and therefore confidential?

It’s a grey area. How does your employer know how selective you are about who you make friends with online? Employers are bound to take the side of caution. Still, does it make it fair to restrict what an employee says in a private forum, no matter who is a member of it? I think it is unfair – damned unfair – but I don’t make the rules.

Until social networking becomes accepted as the norm by employers (which is an inevitability), should we exercise some restraint if we want to avoid any kind of recrimination, regardless if we think this is right or not?

My advice – use common sense. If you must bitch, make sure there isn’t anyone connected to you who will be offended. Yeah this is really boring but if it’s my livelihood at stake I’d rather make sure that wasn’t under threat.

The other thing I suggest you do is to find out if your organization has policies that specifically govern your use of social media. You could simply ask your boss what the deal is with commenting on Facebook.

Organizations must begin to treat its staff like responsible adults.

Contribute to the Debate

Do you think Kimberley Swann faced rough justice? Or was she just being naive? And do you think that your use of Facebook at work is legitimate?

Share your view in two ways:

1) Take the Facebook at Work survey to see how you compare with your peers. Results will be posted on 15 October 2009. Subscribe to the RSS feed to see them.
2) Leave a comment below and tell us your opinion

©2012 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

We all want enjoyable, lucrative and progressive work, right? So how should we go about finding that kind of work?

You know, I admire people who take a job and then leave shortly afterwards because the job turns out to be way different from the one they applied for. It’s a huge risk, but if a job is going to make one miserable, or to a disadvantage, why continue with it? Journeymen can pay a huge penalty for this behaviour – if they repeatedly move from job to job until they find a sweet-spot then they ultimately find getting any job difficult. What’s needed is a tried and tested method of finding a great job before one even enters the workplace, without wasting the time and cost of enduring long recruitment processes. Both employees and employers welcome such a thing, right?

It’s the advent of Web2.0 tools that now makes such a thing possible.

Have you heard of the ‘hidden job market’? It’s exactly as it sounds – jobs that aren’t advertised. This is because they don’t exist yet, or are in the formative stages of being defined. It’s the people who can search this market who are in the position to influence the shape of jobs to their own needs and desires. In other words, they help create their dream jobs, rather than walk into a job that has been defined by someone else.

Web2.0 tools enable us to search this hidden job market by building relationships with potential employers and identifying job opportunities as they emerge. It’s a matter of getting yourself on their radar and building trust and credibility upfront. Business networking sites such as LinkedIn provides us all with the facilities to connect, engage and nurture a relationship with people within organizations that we want to work in, and it’s scalable and repeatable. Never before was such a thing possible at this magnitude.

Once relationships have been initiated, it’s now possible to provide demonstrable evidence of your potential by building authority in your subject area, using the Web2.0 tools. For example, LinkedIn Answers is a great platform for showing others your dominance of your subject, and be recognized for it.

The Hidden Job Market is there – if you look for it!

©2012 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

By combining your LinkedIn profile with Facebook ads, you’ll discover an effective way of getting yourself in front of potential employers who use Facebook (and let’s face it, who doesn’t?) It’s a guerrilla job-hunting tactic that enables you to search the hidden job market and find or even create the best jobs before they hit the job sites. 

How?  Here’s how – create an ad on Facebook that targets potential employers in specific countries, cities or organizations that leads them to your LinkedIn profile page.

Here’s how to do it:

1) Go to Facebook.com and make sure you’re logged in.

2) Click ‘Profile’

3) On the right-side of the page, select ‘Advertise’

4) Click the ‘Create an Advert’ button

5) You’re now going to create your advert: In the box labeled ‘What do you want to advertise?’ leave http:// selected and enter the URL of your LinkedIn profile – this will look something like ‘www.linkedin.com/in/<yourname>’ If you’re not sure of the exact URL, login to LinkedIn and choose ‘View My Profile’ and then note down the URL next to ‘Public Profile’

6) Then hit ‘Continue’

7) Now you’re going to create the text for your ad. This needs to stand out and grab the attention of your target audience. You’ll do this by entering a title for your ad and a brief summary.

I suggest for the title for your ad, you use a call to action. A call to action works best in the title for small ads, particularly as the title must stay within 25 characters. In the context of advertising yourself as available for work, I find that ‘Hire Me’ or something very similar works best (note: you cannot use an exclamation mark in the title of Facebook ads).

In the ‘body’ of your ad you have more room to play with – 135 characters in total. Here I recommend this mentions your desired role and provides a very brief synopsis about your  key strengths and characteristics. I’ve discovered that it is a great idea to use the summary statement you used on your LinkedIn profile if it will fit, as this preserves continuity between the ad and the target of your ad – your LinkedIn profile. Look on your LinkedIn profile in the summary information to cut and paste it in.

8 ) In my opinion, it’s vital that you add a photograph or yourself – if you don’t then recruiters will wonder what you’re hiding. It doesn’t need to be a studio-grade photograph but it should be a clear photograph of your face and make sure you’re smiling! Recruiters don’t want to hire miserable people. Regardless of the size of your original image, the photo will be resized to fit inside a 110×80 pixel box, so a standard size original image in landscape works best.

9) Ignore ‘Social Interactions’ unless you personally started a Facebook group that fits your professional image, and one where the ‘interactions’ (updates) are also professional. I don’t advise using this option.

10) Now, you’re coming onto targeting your ad. You can specify to target people in specific locations, either by country or specific cities. So if you’re looking for work in a particular city, then choose the ‘by city’ option and then enter the name of the city.

You can also specify other demographical information, such as gender, age, education and relationship goals – I wouldn’t bother for this purpose, unless you really need to. The two fields to consider are ‘Workplaces’ and ‘Keywords’. ‘Workplaces’ is a powerful option to specify as you can target your ad to people who work in specific organizations. Keywords is less useful for this purpose, but you can be specific about who to target the ad at based on personal interests. I can’t think of many real benefits of using this option unless you’re looking for a job based on stricter personal criteria.

11) So now you have targeted your ad, at the bottom of the page is a number – this tells you the approximate size of the audience who will see this ad, and this is relevant because a) a large number means your ad will be seen by many people, but also b) you’re likely to have to pay more for the ad to be displayed. A large number (over 5 figures) suggests you haven’t targeted your ad enough.

12) Now the next step is to set select your pricing option and your budget. You have two options; 1) pay per click – this means you only pay when people actually click you ad, or 2) pay for views – this means you pay a price for every 1,000 times your ad is displayed. My advice – use the pay per click model as you’ll really only want to pay when people take your call to action.

13) Next you need to set your budget – you can set an maximum amount you want to spend each day. The default is $25, but that’s a steep price unless you’re really pursuing work hard, whatever the cost. Then you need to set the maximum amount you’ll pay per click. This is a bidding war with other advertisers. If you’re targeting the ad at a large audience, chances are you’ll have to pay more. The ‘Suggested Bid’ Facebook uses the size of the audience and other factors to work out a range to bid within for your ad to stand a chance of being displayed. Bidding below the minimum suggested amount will mean your ad is very unlikely to be seen at all.

14) You’ve also got the option of specifying which dates your ad campaign is active. This is really a question of your target audience – you may want to limit your ad to weekdays only.

15) Once you’ve set the budget, then double-check everything on the form. Check all the details of the ad for accuracy. Hit continue once you’re happy.

16) On the next page, you’ll add your billing information such as your address and credit card information so Facebook can collect payment. Once you’re done, hit ‘Place Order’ and then your ad is live!

17) Now you need to track the results and make sure you’re getting your ad seen and clicked – at a price you can afford. Use ‘Ad Manager’ to review the stats of your ad.

• ‘Imp.’ shows the number of times your ad has been seen.
• ‘Clicks’ shows the number of times someone has actually taken your call to action and looked at your LinkedIn profile.
• ‘CTR’ is your Click-Through-Rate. It’s the percentage of views of your ad that turned into clicks.
• ‘Avg. CPC’ is the average cost to you of each click. It should always equal or be lower than the maximum bid you specified when you setup the ad.
• ‘Avg. CMP’ is the average cost to you for every thousand viewers of your ad. This figure isn’t so important as you’re only interested in clicks.
• ‘Spent’ is the total amount od money you have spent on the ad.

If your ‘Spent’ is ramping up to high, then I suggest you don’t lower your maximum bid first, but instead check that you’re not targeting too wide. If your targeting is just right, then consider lowering your maximum bid, but take note that this may reduce the number of people viewing your LinkedIn profile significantly. The trick is to continually assess and adapt the ad settings. Unfortunately for us, Facebook ad manager lets us change the maximum bid easily, but if we want to change the targeting, we have to setup another ad!

©2012 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

Social Networking has become the main game in town for upwardly mobile professionals. It’s standard to find most of your colleagues on LinkedIn, Facebook or Myspace and involve yourself in a social community – groups and activities you share an interest in. Let’s face it, they save you so much time and energy in tracking people down, why would you choose any other way? And it’s an easy way of telling people what your interests are and creating your ‘personal brand’.

Some organizations have even created Alumni societies on these platforms so you can keep in touch with old colleagues. I use these to see what’s happening with old friends from my days at Oracle and Microsoft. Not all of them, I add.

Peter Birley, a CIO for a law firm, has built his social profile to great success. See my interview with him here. Like Peter, many IT people are using a social profile to build credibility and authority in their niche; it’s much easier now to be recognized for your contribution to industry. This, in turn, can be used to tap into the ‘invisible job market’ and land the top jobs before they ever hit the clearing houses of job sites.

So as I’ve said a number of times before, your social profile and your social network are very valuable assets. What value would you put on it? What would it cost you if it was destroyed? It is easy to destroy your social profile. How? Here’s how:

• Joining groups that could be seen as politically incorrect or in bad taste – anything involving racism, cruelty to animals, etc.
• Uploading pictures in bad taste, such as porno (this might be to your taste, but not to other people)
• Using bad language Making comments that step ‘over the line’
• Bullying or aggression

But the list doesn’t end there. The above are obvious statements. There are other things you can do which are just as damaging:

• Discussing previous employers in anything but a good light
• Providing answers or advice on subjects you have no knowledge or experience in (and it showing as such!)
• Spreading rumors

Common-sense prevails! There are three main reasons why such a ‘bad’ profile is a big issue for your existing or potential employers. The first is that it creates the ‘first impression’. Put yourself in the shoes of a manager looking for your next bright recruit, would you look on someone with a questionable social profile as an appropriate candidate with strong moral fiber and a good corporate citizen? Despite the desire for diversity, there are levels of conformity that managers look for. The second is that such a person will become an ambassador and spokesperson for your organization in the public eye. I don’t mean on TV, but on the street, on the train and in the community. The third reason is that by employing this person, your organization and brand is associated with and diluted by their personal brand.

Michael Cruse also discusses this subject in his article ‘Social-networking can be rewarding and it can get you a pink slip’. Michael comments:

The greater position of authority, or likely hood of promotion, that someone is in, the greater the level of scrutiny that people will be under. If someone is going to be considered for promotion, management and HR will review not only the work ethic and achievements of the candidate, but may review public information to be sure that the person is truly ready for the position.

In a different article, (Could social-networking sites hurt or help you get your next job?) Michael tells us what employers look for:

Reviewers tend to go back through the last 5-10 posting and then view posts by topic cloud, categories or complete site searches. You do not want words like “Drunk”, “Partying”, “Cheating”, “Fired” or other negative words to be in your tag cloud, or categories, if it displays you in a negative light. Watch your language as well! This can be a huge turn off for potential employers.

We IT folks tend to be oriented towards using web technologies. We also tend to be wedded to our technologies and form factions against others. So we’re primed to engage in discussions in the public eye to the detriment of potential future employers. Beware!

©2012 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

I was recently invited to join the Silicon.com CIO Jury , and I’ve had my first opinion posted. In this article, I comment on whether Businesses are ready for Facebook generation.

Simon

©2012 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

Email is no more just another way of communication in this Web2.0 generation. Our dependence on robust email has increased significantly, and every time we open our Outlook, it can sometimes remind us how careless we have been in organizing our emails and contacts. When we deal with 100s of email every day, it often becomes an unrewarding experience to work with Outlook for searching emails, especially if they are buried inside fragmented conversations! It is not something we love to do.

A group of young and talented guys from California understood this pain and came up with a solution for MS Outlook and they called it as Xobni which is "inbox" spelled backwards. This solution came as a plug-in for MS Outlook. Though Xobni is in its early stage, but it’s such an intelligent piece of software that even Bill Gates has called Xobni "the next generation of social networking".

Xobni has further pushed social networking into the next generation by helping us identify the level and type of communication that we can have with a person or group, keeping in mind the need to communicate differently with different people. Both LinkedIn and Facebook , which probably, are among the top choices for professional and social networking, have integrated in Xobni.

Xobni sidebar LinkedIn module crawls to the LinkedIn website for the person’s profile information and returns with his photograph, if available, their current job title and employer name without we actually going to the LinkedIn site. This feature enables us to expand our professional network from within Outlook.
The technology used by Xobni helps us to identify the degree of relationship with our contacts, who we exchange most mails with. It provides us statistics like the time of the day the person is most active online, which surely helps us to identify the efficient way to reach out to a person in our network.

For any search keyword such as person’s name, the Xobni search box returns in less than a second, the facts about the person, such as how many emails you’ve sent or received from them, their Xobni rank, and what time of day you typically correspond with them. Xobni’s Outlook plug-in organizes emails into fully searchable threaded conversations linked back to those people.

Now you don’t have to compose a mail to request for a person’s phone number, Xobni has an inbuilt feature to send mail to request a person’s phone number. It also helps us to manage our meetings directly from the sidebar.

Another great feature of Xobni is that it automatically extracts a contact’s phone number from their signature, and if you have Skype installed then clicking on the phone number will place a voice call to that person through Skype. Web Search Integration feature inside the Xobni Search Bar will look for results using Yahoo’s web search in addition to your email. The first returned result is displayed at the top of the Search Results panel.

Adam Smith , the mastermind behind Xobni has been named one of MIT Tech Review’s 35 Young Innovators Under 35 .

With all of these productive tools and features embedded into Xobni, it’s hard to believe this program is free.
The team at Xobni hints that this may just be the beginning and they believe that Outlook is "the first platform they’ve integrated with." And in future they may come up with something more which may be worth waiting for.

©2012 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

Web2.0 and collaborative technologies promise a new world of integrated thought leadership. However they are not without their flaws.

There are three key weaknesses in the typical use of collaborative technologies. The weaknesses are in the way decisions are made that lead to action.

1. Decisions are made by committees. The larger the group of contributors to a discussion and the degree of diversity in the group has an exponential effect on the time needed to achieve a concensus, and even then decision tend to be the average point in cost/effectiveness. Innovation is rarely an attribute of committees as the status-quo is often upheld.
2. Discussions are open-ended. Discussion in groups, if not time-boxed, can last forever. There is a constant tug between closing the decision and new information presenting itself that will influence the decision. It becomes perpetually iterative and ends up with ‘analysis paralysis.’
3. Accountability for decisions. When collaborative technologies bring large numbers of people together, who is actually accountable for the decision? Contributors to a decision, unless they have sufficient vested interest in the outcome, have no real accountability.

Executives in organizations love action. Action means progress and delivery, and then bonuses. I can imagine them shuddering if they knew decisions were to be made without the above weaknesses being addressed. So how do we do that?

Well I don’t think it’s too difficult.

1. Decisions should be made by select groups, and not the whole population. Online tools such as LinkedIn and Facebooksupport this in fact. Group membership can be controlled by group moderators, and then invitation to specific tasks can restrict contributors further.
2. Decisions should have an end-date, and again the above technologies can support this. Facebook, for example, allows events to be scheduled. Events should be scheduled to initiate the decision process, review and checkpoint the process midway, and close the process. Subsequent events should share the decision made with any supporting information such as action lists and owners. LinkedIn has the feature of automatically closing questions.
3. With restricted membership of the group, accountability is clearer. Membership allows only invested people to contribute to the decision. When initiating the decision process, it is essential therefore to clarify the roles and responsibilities such as people with specific expertise, and also arbiters who resolve disputes.

An effective decision process that drives a decision towards a planned date will not only increase the quality of the decision, but allow action at the desired time. Using collaborative technologies gives action-owners the confidence that they have a supporting community behind them.

©2012 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.