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Where and
how do you keep your critical contacts? I have been thinking a lot about this recently,
as a result of almost losing my entire address book of several thousand
contacts that I had built up over the years. (It is a long story that I don't
want to get into now, but it has to do with the fact that I maintain it in
Notes. I know, bad idea.)
My
current boss keeps his critical contacts on paper, where he claims he can best
find them. He is no troglodyte, but he doesn't trust any electronic system and
the paper seems to work for him. That's probably the most extreme example. Many
of you (myself excluded) use Palms or Blackberries and carry around all your
contacts on your person. Most of us are somewhere in the middle, having some
people's data on paper, some electronic, and a huge pile of business cards from
our last trip that we need to enter into our system somehow.
Some of
you have tried to entice me to use Plaxo, which puts
your contacts online and will update them when someone makes a change to their
information. The service is a good idea if someone has both home and work
machines and wants to keep the same list of contacts maintained on both, and is
using Outlook or Outlook Express. I have resisted using Plaxo
because it looks like too much trouble, and doesn't work with Notes. And after
my last near-death experience, I prefer to synchronize my contacts the
old-fashioned way, by copying the files myself. Call me a troglodyte if you
will.
Ironically,
several years ago I had a better system that was completely electronic and
automated. It was home grown and worked with my Web Informant mailing list, my
WAP-enabled phone, and a simplified contact manager called Dynodex
that I ran on my Macintosh. Alas, that is just a distant memory. Now I have to
make do with Notes, which means if I don't have my laptop, I don't have all of
my contacts.
Plaxo
isn't the only online service to keep track of with whom you communicate. There
are numerous other services including Orkut.com, LinkedIn.com, and
Multiply.com, just to name a few that I have used over the past several months.
These typically go under the moniker of social networks, but what they are
really about is keeping in touch with people that you seldom see. The trouble
is, none of them are very useful unless you are
willing to devote a lot of time to keeping up with your contacts.
Now, it
is ironic that I, a professional communicator who writes to several thousand of
my contacts about once a week am complaining about these services. But they
just don't work for me. Sure, I got to renew a bunch of faded memories and
exchange some snappy emails with people that I haven't heard from in a while,
which is all well and good. But I do that every day without these services. As
one of my friends said, "I'm already in touch with people I know and need
to interact with for business anyway."
One of my
biggest issues is that these services assume that the lines between work and
play are disappearing. But while I may ask the same person out on a date and
send them a copy of my current business plan, it isn't likely. (And that is
especially true, given that I just got engaged to a wonderful woman.) That is
one of the downfalls of Orkut, which asks in your
profile questions about "what do you have in your bedroom" right next
to asking about your professional degrees and qualifications.
Let's
look at the two social networks that I have been a member of, LinkedIn and Multiply. LinkedIn
is more of a business contact-referral network, whereby you can try to track
someone down that is a friend of a friend and email
them through this pipeline with a particular request. Multiply is more of a
personal photo-posting site that also can be used to share family experiences
such as personal restaurant and movie reviews and the best place to get ice
cream in your local 'hood.
I came to
both from existing members, the former a business associate and the latter
through a friend. Overall, I think the whole concept is the next Internet sock
puppet: something that is mildly cute and annoying, depending on the time of
day and what else you have to deal with in your working life. On Multiply, a friend of my friend is definitely the queen of
the service: this person posts frequently, documenting everything about her
life and especially that of her infant daughter. The reporting is impressive,
but also oppressive, and you wonder if people would spend less time documenting
their lives and more time living them.
And while
Multiply is really great at posting your digital pictures, they only post
low-res copies so if you really want to share the photos and print them out you
still have to email the originals to your friends. Plus, I found it a bit
creepy that friends of my friend's family (whom I haven't met) were looking at
my snaps, let alone friends of friends of friends, too. Don't these people have
lives?
So what
about LinkedIn? When I started digging into the
system earlier in the week, I had 40 contacts that were organically grown from
friends emailing me to add them to my circle. Like many of my correspondents, I
just approved everyone that requested contact to me, whether I really knew them
or had just met them once at a conference many years ago.
But there
are other ways to augment your network. With LinkedIn,
you just upload a comma-separated file of email addresses; it then parses them
and sees if anyone is already signed up. Out of 2500 contacts that I uploaded,
over 500 were already using the LinkedIn
service. I sent about 150 of them a message asking to hook up. But the system
isn't perfect: I got several bounce messages, meaning that people have changed
their email address since signing up. So much for staying in
touch.
Within a
day, my network had doubled. A lot of people just approved my request to add
them to my network clearly these people are just as busy as I am and didn't
want to stand in my way of widening my circle of acquaintances.
And that
is one of the blessings and one of the curses of these services: they make it
real easy to expand your network, and soon you are two degrees of separation from
thousands of people that you barely know. They claim that is a good thing,
because now you have thousands of people to bother if you want to send their your resume, ask them for money, or a meeting to
discuss the state of the world. But that's the problem: there is no middle
ground. You either are a Friend of the World or a hermit crab. You can't dial
in anything in-between.
So how do
you deal with all of this humanity? Whom do you trust? What happens if you
recommend a creep and want to recall that link? (You can't, in most cases.)
All of
this is a long way at getting at the central issue. Who really owns your
contact information? When you parse your address list and upload it to the
server, who else gets to view these names? In my case, I had forgotten that
when I signed up for LinkedIn I had kept my
connections private. I don't remember why at the time. (About a fifth of my
contacts also keep their lists private too, and only four women out of that
group. So are men more private about their little black books? Got me.)
Tim O'Reilly, the Internet publisher and peer-to-peer
guru, had this to say about social networks at his conference this week:
"We have to Napsterize the address book and the
calendar so that we own the data about our social network but we are able to
query our friends about who they know. We also need to re-think email and
Instant Messages as social software." The trouble is, once we make all of
our address books peers, it becomes awfully hard to control the quality of the
information. Imagine someone uploading Madonna's contact information,
it could be the next Trojan.
I did get some value out of renewing my contacts through
the system, though. I started discussions with several friends about potential
freelance opportunities here at CMP, and found out a few people who are looking
for or who have new jobs. I managed to update my creaky Notes contacts list
with several people that I had fallen out of touch with. But was it worth all
the effort? I am not so sure.
Here are some of the comments that I got about LinkedIn when I sent my request around to my own contacts.
You'll have to trust me that these are all important, busy people, many of whom
are CEOs and CTOs of substantial businesses.
"I
think it's a complete waste of time and that this social-networking software is
mostly BS. On the other hand, people's feelings seem to be hurt if you
know them but don't want to play." Many people mentioned that they
just approve the requests without really giving it much thought. Again, this
gets at the lack of granularity of the service. You either hate everyone or
love 'em all. This is somewhat of the same issue:
"I have been asked to join people's networks who I wish hadn't found me.
The problem is that it is hard to protect yourself from broad exposure when you
participate in a community like this, so you have to be visible to all
comers."
"LinkedIn is a positive networking tool in keeping me up to
date with people I already know." I can attest to that after sending out
several hundred emails, I got to hear from people that I haven't corresponded
in a while. "I received several invitations from folks I haven't spoken
with in years. This has rekindled many old relationships," said another
person. "This service has been useless as a business tool, but it has been
great as a 'high school reunion.' People I have not heard from in ages
keep popping up and it has been great to hear from them and catch up."
"There
seem to be many people in our industry using it." Very
true. Of course, it is hard to figure out if there are people in OTHER
industries that are using it too. Sometimes you get the feeling that you are
living in your own small universe of IT-related nerdy types.
"A
linkage to Plaxo would be incredible." Now there is an idea: use the power of
the automatic updating of Plaxo with the networking
of LinkedIn.
"I
like the concept, but I want to control it more. I get to hear from people that
I haven't talked to in a long time, and it is great for that. But I had another
friend who listed herself on LinkedIn, only to find
that she was contacted by a stalker from her past." Oops! Too much
networking could be a bad thing.
"I
mostly get resumes from people. That is 90% of what I get through this
system." But even this has its drawbacks. "I used the service to try
to source new hires. Often times the person who you would connect to in
order to reach your target recruit may be at their present company and could
even be their manager. It's hard to know as the degrees of separation get larger."
"I
haven't found use for it yet. For me, it's like discussion groups. Some people
thrive in those kinds of community situations. They put a lot in and get a lot
out. I don't." Another friend said, "Overall, I find these services a
bit silly." And one comment was quite telling: "It may possibly
suffer from more sellers than buyers, but the idea is good
and I really hope it succeeds. LinkedIn has to get
the supply/demand, or buyer/seller, balance right. It needs to be seen to
be a good deal for both buyers and sellers, and attract them in equal
numbers."
I think
the jury is still out on social networks. But clearly something is happening
here: there are thousands of people who are using these networks (one of my
contacts has over 2300 people on his network) and growing. If we could become
more granular on the quality of the connection without offending someone these
things would really take off. One last word from another friend:
"LinkedIn, and a few other similar sites, strike me very
much as a throwback to the dot-com boom --- several companies simultaneously
come up with an idea that in theory sounds kind of interesting, but aren't
especially compelling, and manage to get a fair amount of hype around it. Of
course, in those earlier days, the company would be valued in the several
hundred million dollar range, but as for today, who
knows?"
Entire contents copyright 2004 by David Strom, Inc.
David Strom, dstrom@cmp.com, +1 (516) 562-7151
Port Washington NY 11050
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