Why can't I import contacts in delicious? Why isn't this standard for any social networking site??

I haven't figured this one out yet - if you are running a social networking site, why do you make it HARD for people to expand their network?

Why are any social networking sites still making people manually enter connections? Why are you making me search for my connections? Just let me upload my contact lists, and select people who I know. I don't get this.

Delicious says this is a "top priority", or it was back in September of 2008.

"Network effect" theory alone says this is as bass ackward as you can get.

There is some catchy phrase people use for things like this. What is it? Hmmmm. When a social networking site makes it hard for you to create your social network...

Oh yes - FAIL!!!



(Image by AJC1)

How do I know how *noisy* I am?

Not in person, online. Especially on Twitter and FriendFeed.

I've gotten three total responses to things I've posted on FriendFeed. Ever.

I rarely if ever get any replies on Twitter. And never have gotten a Direct Message.

Clearly I'm not a big and important person. My blog is lucky to get 50 hits in a day. My most popular post is a hack item on the most popular dog breeds. Though I was once referenced by Sports Illustrated, though I can't even find their linking to me.

I think the answer that Scoble would give is: Noisy.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/barelyfitz/ / CC BY 2.0

Do you do career planning?

I find that most people don’t, or if they do it is more off the top of their head loose planning.

But it is something almost any moderate sized organization will require. At my previous employer (a Fortune 100 company) it was absolutely mandated/required, and they provided an extensive web application to do the planning in. It also tied into our yearly performance planning and appraisal systems.


Now that I'm at a small company, that falls mostly to myself. We have those types of discussions, and as a consultant it does come into play with every new project assignment.

What types of things do you consider when considering your career plans? What are you looking for out of your career?

For one, I think a lot of people don't think of themselves as being able to even consider career planning factors. I think in this economy they are focused on keeping their current jobs. I would assume many of my friends fit this mold.

Second, I think a lot of people have NO CLUE that they should be doing this. They are more than willing to hop from job to job. I have several friends who seem to fit this mold, and I would bet a lot of co-workers as well.

For me? I consider these things, I try to plan out a loose map, but know I am not doing it well. Why? Because I don't have an end goal, and so far I have found that I am at least making progress. I have learned enough that I can stick with a small business, I could go back to a large one and execute, or could eventually start my own company if I felt that was the right way to go.



Picture by thecareersgroup

Nick Johnson for fins

A change in project scope, again

This is not the first time, more like the 8th, that I've been rescoped on my current project assignment.

It doesn't bother me per se, but makes me a bit worried about how my client is viewing my work and WHY they keep asking me to shift gears.

This time I'm doing what can loosely be titled as "operational analysis". What I'm truly doing is a survey of all the activities (non-minor work) within my client's organization, mapping all that work to their four strategic goals (and sub-goals), and doing a standard gap analysis to determine if there is any under/over-investment of time and resources.

This has the *potential* to be rather important. If the results determine that they are under-investing in their strategic goal to develop the skills of their workforce (fourth goal, but what the client leader described at their senior leadership offsite a week ago as priority #1) then they will need to re-scope their work and level of effort.

Last night on the lake

A great sunset:

How should a consulting company use Twitter?

We don't have constant feedback from customers, nor would they provide it publically online. We don't sell a product, so there aren't hundreds of reviews a day to keep tabs on.

As a consulting services company, what should we be worried about regarding competitive intelligence? What information could we publish that a competitor could use against us? Could they use it to "ghost" us in proposals?

Are there potential legal issues since we work with the government? Could we create some sort of "conflict of interest" or disclose information that can't be in the public domain?


Seems like it would end up being mostly one-directional: us pushing content out. Which can be useful, especially if there are actually people interested.

I think we can readily Tweet:

• When a new employee joins us, not their name though. And probably not a specific client, but maybe a skillset and experience
• When an employee wins an award or is recognized in some capacity by a client
• When an employee wins an award or is recognized in some capacity by our company
• When an employee completes training or certification
• Some level of information when we win a new contract
  

I don't expect the company having much interest in producing comments on stories in the trade press, though maybe we'd be willing to comment on various reports that are released.

It was covered here, there are a few good tidbits in it. I'm not sure we'd be looking to build the brand of partners/executives. If you are trying to portray them as industry "though leaders" then maybe so.

Pics by mfilej, and Matt Hamm, respectively.

People please, reply without attachments

For better or worse I have to use Lotus Notes on my client site.

As with all work environments, there are a lot of discussions that take place via email. Often times email attachments are involved.

What happens when 10 people continually send responses in an email thread, never removing previous attachments, while adding more? You get a 10MB file being emailed back and forth over forty times. It stinks. A lot.

It's not that hard to fix - "Reply without attachments". Now sure, sometimes an attachment previously sent is important, you may have to ask someone to refer to the attachment and feel you are making their life easier by including said attachment. I feel that is a rare occurence though, and people can quite easily just refer to the previously sent email.

If you are using Gmail, this is extremely easy. With Outlook, not that hard. With Lotus Notes it is actually fairly easy as they have their own version of threaded conversations.

Twitter full name is too long?

You give people 20 characters for their full name? I know you're doing this whole 140 characters thing, but 20 characters for a full name? I didn't even use a middle initial and my real name ran too long.

Boo.