Feb
11

Blockers

Your merging onto a highway ramp when the car in the next lane straddles the line so you, and others, cannot pass. 

A peer at work stalls your initiative or project.

People that impede our forward movement or efforts with no perceived reason or gain are blockers.

Blockers lose their control when they are overcome by the larger flow of activity which allows you to move forward.

Once on the highway you can pass them effortlessly.

Look for the open road.

Feb
25

All I need to know about Social Media I learned in kindergarten

  • Share everything – Share your twitter updates, your bookmarks, your netvibes, your flickr, share, share, and share more.
  • Play fair – Follow anyone who follows you, return the retweet, and comment honestly on other peoples work.
  • Don’t hit people – Disagree with the idea not the person*.  Comments should be civil not incendiary.
  • Put things back where you found them – Attribute your sources.
  • Clean up your own mess – If you make a mistake in a post or comment, fix it.  Update the post, annotate the post as updated, and give a brief reason.
  • Don’t take things that aren’t yours – Use and honor the Creative Commons license.
  • Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody – Need I say more.
  • When you go out into the world, Watch out for traffic – Stop, Look, Listen, and then walk don’t run.  Good guidance for anyone entering social media.
  • Hold hands and stick together – It’s the community, stupid.
  • Be aware of wonder – See different, think different, be different.*

*This post contains some phrases from Chris Heuer’s presentation – Making the Case: Selling Social Media Into and Within the Enterprise

Feb
18

Are you my friend or a ‘friend’? (Facebook)

UPDATED: Photo security is handled separately. Details are added to the bottom of the post.

During two recent presentations about social media both groups expressed their desire to keep personal and professional activity separate.  By the end of the session they all realized that those lines are quickly blurring as more and more organization setup Facebook pages and work associates request to be friends.

Although somewhat obscure there is a mechanism in Facebook that will allow you to have friends and ‘friends’.  Here is how you can ‘friend’ someone without sharing photos of your recent antics with friends and family.

Select the Friends menu item across the top bar to show your Friends Lists.  Initially there are two Friend Lists All Friends and Limited Profile.  I’ve change the name of my Limited Profile to ‘friends’.  You can do this by selecting Limited Profile and then using the edit link on the right.

friendsinterface

To add people to your ‘friends’ list you can either start typing their name like below or use the Select Multiple Friends link on the right.

addingfriends

Once selected your friends are now members of your ‘friends’ list. ** CAUTION** At this point the list has the same access as your All Friends list.  Don’t be fooled by the initial name of Limited Profile, they are not actually limited yet.

friendadded

Next mouse over Settings in the top bar and select Privacy Settings > Profile and you will see the default settings for your profile.

privacy_profile_default

Select the drop down for any item you want to limit access and choose customize.  Here you can either select a Friend List or an individual person to add then to the list.

addingprofiles

My ‘friends’ list is not allowed to see my Personal Info.

profileadded

As you can see from my updated profile page I have limited access to Personal Information, Photos, and Videos.  As an added precaution I have removed the right for any friend to post on my wall.

profiledone

UPDATED: Photo security is handled separately.

To restrict photo access select Profile > Photos Tab > Album Privacy

photopath

As before limit access to each album by adding Friend Lists or individual names.  As an added privacy measure I have unchecked the top boxes and removed access to Everyone on Facebook.

photosecure

When done you can review the access permission to all your albums.

photosdone

** CAUTION ** These credentials may not be honored by all Facebook Applications.  IAW you might limit access to photos but through a photo application your ‘friends’ might have access.

Here is a great video to put this all in perspective – FaceBook In Reality

Feb
17

Who Should I Follow? (Twitter)

More and more people are beginning to venture into social media and twitter is a great place to start.  Inevitably there is a need to figure out whom to follow.  Here are the methods I’ve used to create my twitter network.

First you should follow me!

Get recommendations from whoshouldifollow.com

Use Twitter Search to find people talking about topics that interest you.

Let MrTweet help you easily build meaningful relationships by looking through your network and tweets.

For Seattlelites you can find local organizations on Who’s on Twitter in Seattle? The big (working) index.

The Social Brand Index tracks organizations by category.

Look at the followers of someone you already follow.

See you on Twitter.

Feb
05

Visualize your Social Network

Now that I’ve established myself on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter I set out to find an application that could create a visual interpretation of my social networks.  To date I cannot find one single application capable of integrating connections across various social networks but I did find Nexus, Friend Wheel, and Twitter Browser.

Nexus is a Facebook application that creates a graph showing how you and your friends are connected.  As with most Facebook applications the setup is easy and once complete the fun begins.

RadialSpring

You can choose a radial or spring graph and either white or black background.

facebookconnections networkconnections

Mouse over a node and the individuals Facebook image and all shared contact are displayed.  The graph really makes it easy to analyze your network and identify where separate clusters merge.

Friend Wheel is another Facebook application.  It is not as dynamic but the colors are vibrant.

StaticFlash Mouse Over

It creates a static image of your network relationships and a flash version that shows connection with a mouse over.

twitterbrowser twitterbrowserexpanded

Twitter Browser is a web based application that uses your Twitter alias to create a very dynamic display that you can browse by selecting a node.  Each time you select a node their connections are displayed.  It only shows 16 connections which seem to be chosen at random since mine where not the newest or most active ones.

All good fun but I’m still looking for the application that can do it all.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States