Tag Archives: linkedin

A Room of One’s Own: do women need separate spaces to flourish?

15 Mar

Sometimes it’s tough to be both a professional and a person.

Virginia Woolf suggested every woman needed a room of her own to write. To do our best work, perhaps we need our own space.  Yeats said it was a choice between

…perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark

Last week was an interesting one in terms of the resurgence of feminist debate.  March 8th was International Women’s Day, a day of celebration for women’s achievements, yet containing the implicit assertion that the remaining 364 days belong to men.

I support the celebration of great achievements regardless of gender, and can’t help but feel that by setting separate awards, days and so on, we perpetuate the notion that women’s accomplishments can’t be ranked alongside those of their male counterparts.  How constructive is it to maintain the sense of women needing special or at least different treatment?

I have no argument with, for example, women and men entering separate sporting events; it’s obvious our physical capabilities are different (last I heard, there were no male entrants in the ‘giving birth’ sweepstakes).  But when it comes to the cerebral, I fail to see why women are obliged to compete in the intellectual equivalent of the Paralympics.

Unlike many of my peers, I’ve been proud to call myself the apparently now dirty word ‘feminist’ for as long as I’ve been aware of the concept.  I believe absolutely in feminism, as defined by the purity and clarity of thought of early feminists like Wollstonecraft, and uncluttered by the political infighting and schisms of later wave feminism. The most workable definition I can provide is:

the recognition that men and women do not receive fair or equal treatment as a result of their gender, and the desire to change that situation

Anyone wishing to quibble with the first clause need only refer to recent figures proving that salaries still differ hugely between women and their male counterparts.  Anyone wishing to quibble with the second is probably not someone I’m going to waste my time engaging with or trying to convert.

I’m a passionate supporter and member of Girl Geeks for the simple reason that women involved with technology are still in the minority. Anecdotally and from personal experience I know it can be tough to flourish and be recognised in an environment where you’re the odd (wo)man out.  But what’s really important to me is that both women and men are welcome at GGD functions and invited to contribute regardless of gender.

There’s something really wonderful about being in a group of like-minded women, and I’ve certainly found that such an environment can be more supportive than a mixed gender equivalent.  But that’s all the more reason not to cloister ourselves away, but to bring these ostensibly ‘female’ skills to bear on every environment, every interaction, to the point that sharing, listening respectfully and encouraging the more inhibited to contribute will simply be a part of everyone’s “how to be human” toolkit.

That’s why I can’t be fully supportive of Social Media Women, although I remain a huge fan of its creators, fabulous women all.  Hang out and talk shop with whomsoever you please, but I baulk at the association, through both my gender and profession, with an formalised organisation that actively discriminates, positively or not.

Digital Citizens (which I help to organise) held its first event last week - I’m obviously biased, but I think it went pretty well (and we scored a FourSquare Swarm badge – quite the high point for me..)

I wasn’t keeping score, but I think the number of participants and contributors was roughly equal in gender terms, and I certainly felt I could express my point of view and be heard doing so.

Rebekah Horne of MySpace said recently that

for women to succeed in this industry, they need to work fifteen times harder than their male counterparts.

If we want this situation to end within our lifetimes, the answer is to cease to recognise gender as a factor in our work and social lives.

Leave it at home; in your bedroom, your shower, your dungeon or wherever you like, but it doesn’t belong here.

Owing your soul to the company store: does your employer own your Twitter account?

29 Jan

As I’ve discussed in the past, new social spaces and interactions are changing so fast that they force us to adapt and develop new protocols on the fly. One issue that has been hotly contested, and which has yet to be satisfactorily resolved is how we clearly delineate  between our personal and professional online personas, particularly those of us who both live and work on the web.

We still don’t have this anywhere near to being sorted. A recent post by Malkuth Damkar about the way in which Twitter makes celebrities of us all makes the point that people who would otherwise escape notice are often judged and gossiped about on Twitter in a way that’s disproportionate; as though by conversing publically, we’ve abandoned our right to privacy and respect. Not to mention the recent furore concering hapless British Twitterer Paul Chambers who jokingly threatened to blow up an airport ,then found himself jobless and facing criminal charges, which is an entirely separate can of worms.

Media and marketing website Mumbrella recently covered an exchange on Twitter between a journalist (of sorts) and the personal account of someone working in PR, as evidence of a sometimes tricky relationship between the two disciplines.

While naturally journalists often choose to ignore context and nuance for the sake of a good headline, this seemed a particularly unfair conflation of public domain and public interest.  The journalist has a relatively large public profile and is employed by a media organisation, arguably making her tweets our business; the other person is not – and public or no, her personal Twitter account exists independently of her employer.

It served as an excellent example of this rather messy grey area. I’ve personally hired people because of their significant digital presence – people who came to my attention because of the way in which they communicated online and their degree of influence. And I’ve been more than happy for these people to use their talents for the good of the company, for example by sharing content to their personal networks, using data gathered from their accounts etc.

By creating a social media usage policy that, reasonably enough, prohibited any mention of confidential or sensitive information, I could, as a boss, be reasonably sure my team were clear about what would be appropriate to share via both the corporate and personal accounts and allowed common sense to guide their behaviour in the grey areas on an ad-hoc basis.

But I think with hindsight I sometimes got it wrong. On one occasion I effectively muzzled a team member who had a long standing online stoush with another public figure, arguing that as he linked to the company website from his Twitter bio, this feud would reflect poorly on the company.  I now think that I should have suggested he remove the link, and made clear he was operating under his own auspices and his views were not shared by his employer.

Non-celebrities with large Twitter followings and extensive personal networks have generally developed them through communicating interesting content in an expressive manner, with a distinct voice and point of view.  Crucially, this influence is built up over time, not on the company dime.

By allowing employees to use their personal influence to share content, engage communities and achieve corporate objectives while simultaneously restricting the individual’s right to express a contentious view or enter into critical discourse, the company is attempting to have its cake and eat it.   Not only is this problematic from an ethical standpoint, but it’s also ultimately illogical: a toothless tiger can only maintain its edge for so long before the social network begins to sense inauthenticity and drift away.  I for one choose not to follow people I feel to be little more than an RSS yes-machine.

Drawing the line is essential. My suggestions – and this is a work in progress, subject to review and evolution – is that professional and personal accounts need to be separate. If you refer to your employer in your bio, your account is going to be inextricably linked to their profile, at least in public perception.  So don’t risk it.  Unless there’s a scenario in which your boss will compensate you for allowing the company to bask in your reflected glory – which could mean attributing a dollar value to influence, or specifically stating in your contract that your network is an asset the company will be able to use during the life of your contract with them – then be very wary of using your own account as another channel for sharing corporate content – whether on Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else. A profile that’s specifically you @your company might be one way of resolving this, or by using shared corporate accounts.

Because nobody wants to end up like Tennessee Ernie…

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go;
I owe my soul to the company store…

Love is the Seventh Wave

26 Oct

I’ve been using Google Wave for a few weeks now and while I’m aware I’m still very much a novice, I’m confident that this is a fair appraisal of its potential and the limitations of the current iteration.

Attending #GWSUG gladdened my heart somewhat as it quickly became apparent that despite being possibly one of the least geeky of those present – and I lean heavily towards the pointy end of the bell curve in geek terms – I was by no means alone in my experience of the Wave.

Helpful and entertaining presentations by Brett Morgan and Pamela Fox certainly deepened my knowledge and understanding but it’s clear that this is a tool very much at the development stage.

My initial impressions haven’t altered substantially three weeks in: in short, it often feels as though one is drowning not waving.

I’ve seen a number of people make the comment that Wave feels very much like IRC: the format is such that it can be inchoate, messy and confusing. The ability to comment on replies, edit existing messages and delete posts at any point in the timeline means that without repeatedly re-playing the wave, it’s nigh on impossible to fathom what’s going on.

However, to dwell on this is to miss the actual purpose of Wave, which is – as Daniel Tenner suggests in his excellent review – for working, not shirking.

The real strength of Wave is all about collaboration in real time. Watching a document or piece of content come to life through a cooperative enables you to see the rationale behind changes as they’re made in an intuitive fashion, make notes, discuss alterations and agree on a final cut. Even for people who aren’t working together in the same time zone, playing back the wave gives a truer understanding and deeper insight into the process and decisions made to date.

Rather than the stilted to-ing and fro-ing of email – potentially dropping people and files along the way – or even the clever but structurally rigid Basecamp from 37 Signals, Wave gives users a fluid conversational tool that keeps everyone, from stakeholder to implementer, involved, clued-up and empowered. Being able to drag and drop files into a conversation feels smooth and logical.

The true hallmark of great design or innovation is when something feels so seamless and obvious that you can’t imagine why it didn’t already exist, and Wave has this in spades.
It won’t be long before we’ll be amazed we ever managed to work before Wave.

Photo by silverxraven

Key drawbacks

Of course Wave is buggy – it’s in a private test environment being battered around and monkey-tested by nerds for this reason. However, there are a few massive holes that will need to be addressed by the developers at the Googleplex fairly promptly.

Firstly, there are currently huge confidentiality and privacy issues: while you can branch off from a group into a private conversation, there’s no ability for users to approve or vet who is added to a Wave. Any user can invite anyone else. That’s great for transparency and accountability, but human nature being what it is, this could be the source of some of the most awkward office gaffes and breaches of commercial confidence ever to exist. Those awkward accidental ‘reply all’ emails pale into insignificance in comparison.

Without some radical re-thinking and added security settings, @ replying a DM on Twitter will come to seem like as quaint an act of indecorousness as using the wrong fork at a dinner party is to Gen KFC, when set against the risks of inappropriate Wave sharing.

Further massive usability failures include the monumental amount of RAM eaten by Wave, the fact the iPhone app is slow and creaky and Chrome is the preferred Wave browser as FireFox “doesn’t like waves with more than 100 blips in them…” more than a little irksome for Mac users.

Version control is also tricky: in order to find the original version, one has to replay the wave, pause when you reach the virgin document and paste it into a new Wave, meanwhile hoping someone else doesn’t alter it subsequently. Perhaps a ‘freeze edit’ function may assist here.

An invaluable – and presumably simple tool that I very much hope is in the pipeline is a desktop app to notify you of updates, new Wave invites and contacts. It would assist in streamlining the process and avoiding situations like the one I found myself in recently: IM-ing my team mate to ask why I still hadn’t received his email containing an urgently needed document, then discovering it had been sitting neglected in Wave for several hours*.

I’d estimate that we’re easily a year away from the release of a robust consumer-friendly version of Wave.

That said, it’s a pleasure and a privilege to be one of the lucky few getting to play in the sandpit and even at this stage the enormous potential of the tool is evident.

Catch you in the tubes….cathie.mcginn@googlewave.com.

Thanks to Warlach,  Commuter_Dirge, Fridley, mUmBRELLA and all on the GWSUG wave for your user experience input and help.

*Full disclosure: we were sitting next to each other at the time. IRL interaction is so passé.

Growing up online: why the days of our digital adolescence are numbered

29 Sep

The internet is still in its infancy, and our use of it is still developing.  It’s an exciting time to be alive; I’d argue that no single technological advance since the printing press has transformed our culture, normative behaviours and society as profoundly.  New possibilities and new ways of interacting are opening up every day.

However, this cuts both ways, and it’s depressing to see that one consequence of the new is a marked increase in the amount of genuinely awful behaviour performed by otherwise functional adults.  Seeing ill-advised tweets, oversharing via Facebook updates and emotive personal posts, I’m reminded of the giddy immediacy of my teenage years, in which I existed in a state of selfish isolation, immersed in the frenzy of the Now.

Nothing was more important than my feelings that very second; I had no sense of, or interest in a broader context or that my actions could have consequences of any significance.  And this seems to be the case for many people online; the fact one feels this way at this moment is justification enough for broadcasting that information to the planet.

I feel, therefore I post.

Hal Niedzviecki refers to this phenomenon as “Peep Culture,” suggesting that we’re witnessing the tabloidization of everyday life.

Perhaps the logical progression of our paparazzi-fuelled, celebrity-obsessed culture is to have us believing that revelations of a wincingly personal nature are everyone’s business.

There again, we’re not taking out one page ads in the Times or employing a town crier to announce our break-ups or our shitty days at work.  This behaviour is only occurring online.

I’d argue that it’s due to a combination of factors:

1) the false sense that these online spaces aren’t ‘serious’ and don’t have real life impact: the value of communication online is somehow seen as less than offline interaction

2) the ease, speed and accessibility with which one can post anything from anywhere. An emotion that probably would have dissipated by the time you’d put pen to paper and started looking for a stamp is shared, out there and un-retractable in three seconds flat.

3) an erroneous belief that these spaces are somehow lawless, frontier territory where all bets are off, crimes go unpunished and an outlaw-esque anonymity can be preserved

A post on the Social Media Law Student blog makes the point that

People will express themselves, albeit to their own detriment, through numerous mediums whether by electronic communication, acts of aggression, verbal comments, physical actions, written letters, and more.  Social media networks such as Facebook and MySpace are not to blame for sheer stupidity…

…but they do make stupid actions harder to retract and easier to prove.

Our actions have implications, consequences; the spaces may be virtual, but this is very real.

Thirty-five percent of employers reported finding content on social networking sites that caused them not to hire the candidate; Facebook evidence was used to convict gang members in Britain who posted photos of themselves posing with guns; Australian courts allow legal documents to be served via Facebook; lawyers have begun to use social profiles in divorce cases.  Four Awkward Moments on Facebook is hilarious, unless you’re one of the people involved: I can only imagine the lacerating sense of shame and hurt they must have experienced.

Part Two: Imagining the future ( a proto-post)

I’m confident that the next generation will view our bumbling online interactions with humour and, I hope, some pity, much in the way that I view photographs of my parents in their heyday; fondly and with affectionate mockery.  I can’t predict what these new models of behaviour will look like but I wonder whether our notions of public and private space will be fundamentally redefined; will a new set of boundaries be created or will these constructs simply have drifted into irrelevance?

Will the citizens of the future live in digital glass houses?
When everything is on display and there’s no separation between your inside voice and outside voice, will people’s personal (increasingly public lives) cease to have any interest or relevance – is the sense of intimacy we use to build social cohesion in part derived from the sense one is holding privileged information?  In this landscape, our perceptions of each other would be based on new criteria and new values not related to how much we earn or who we’re screwing.  Although I find this a faintly terrifying prospect, I can’t help but feel this re-imagining of our future is the most exciting, the most radical (and the least likely to occur).

Alternatively, will this new generation, kids who’ll take in the digital space with their mother’s milk become the New New Puritans? There is surely a possibility they will enact a backlash against the over-availability and over-sharing of information, images and personal data.  With public figures as influential as Obama warning schoolkids to think about the long term consequences of the stuff they share on Facebook, will we see a generation of locked down profiles, gated social spaces and private Twitter streams.  Will we become paranoiac data-hoarders, carefully considering every piece of information dispersed through the web?

Or – returning to Planet Reality – will we just have to grow up, embrace the new and reign in some of the worst excesses of overly disclosive behaviour in favour of a more reasoned approach?  Being a teenager is fun, but we can’t remain in a virtual NeverNeverland forever.
It may be more staid and a little less compelling than the ambulance-chasing, Schadenfreudian thrill of watching someone crash and burn online, but perhaps fewer hearts and reputations damaged beyond repair is worth losing out on a little second-hand salaciousness for….

taming the twitterstream: online etiquette

1 Sep

Last night was the fourth Social Media Club Sydney event; excellent presentations by David Meerman Scott and Steven Noble on understanding social personas were followed by a lively debate touching on the topical issues of fake personas, public relations versus media relations and that hoary old chestnut, authenticity.

I think it was certainly the best event yet, but one issue that arose – and has been cited time and again in conferences, panel discussions and social media events – is the practice and etiquette around using and displaying the Twitter backchannel.

The ability to post ‘as it happens’ reportage is one of the main reasons Twitter is so wonderful; it gives people who aren’t present at a conference insight into the discussion, content and a sense of the room, and adds a conversational dimension to a space which, if well managed, can only enrich it.

Fixing the Twittersteam for conferencing is not the knotty problem that some people seem to think – here are my thoughts on how to solve it simply and without bloodshed…

First, block the spammers.  Any trending topic is immediately leapt upon by the army of bots who seize upon the hashtag in question with alacrity in the (surely) forlorn hope that someone will accidentally click their link. It’s annoying, it’s disruptive and drowns out event coverage from humans. Use Tweetdeck to create a group that registrants must apply to join in advance – this immediately cuts out the spamtards and potentially adds a sense of responsibility, diminishing the ability of people to lurk and post anonymously.  Then assign all API calls to that group to enable real time streaming.

Preventing people giving real time feedback and thoughts on a debate as it unfolds is not the answer, but rather, simply creating a better set-up: having a Twitterstream displayed behind a panel would not be a problem, were the panel also involved in what’s going on.

Having tweets unfurl across a screen behind the subjects of those tweets is a little akin to slapping a ‘kick me’ sign on someone’s back; it encourages irreverence and perhaps a lack of respect, resulting in a schoolyard dynamic.  Placing a monitor in front of the panelists neatly removes the ‘us and them’  barrier, becomes conversational, informative and engaging, giving panelists a barometer for the room’s atmosphere to potentially shape the direction of the debate.  It’s ok to make jokes; it’s acceptable to engage in banter – we’re social creatures in a social space after all – but spraying a kind of disrespectful virtual graffiti at the expense of people who aren’t able to respond is obviously poor form.

The other issue, of course, is that if you can’t rely on your wifi connection to provide real time tweets, then perhaps you shouldn’t use it at all – scrolling tweets that refer to events that occurred even minutes ago is disruptive, irrelevant and creates a disconnect between audience and panel.

It’s not the medium, it’s the mode.

Steven Noble, David Meerman Scott and Tim Burrowes onstage at SMCSyd IV

Steven Noble, David Meerman Scott and Tim Burrowes onstage at SMCSyd IV in front of the offending screen

Social Media for Kicks: Photographic Memory

16 Aug

Embedded in this post is a short film called ‘Photographic Memory’ directed by my lovely friend Lara Leslie of Cut Both Ways, an independent film production company.

The film was a collaborative project involving 160 Londoners and 30 disposable cameras; each contributor took a self portrait and two photos of something representative of ‘their’ London, then passed the camera onto someone else.

The challenge is to get 50,000 hits on Youtube in the next month. Working on the premise that the more you do, the more you can do and because I adore the film, I have volunteered to devote my mad skillz to achieving this objective. So I’m putting my reputation, my somewhat overstretched schedule and possibly my sense of reason and proportion on the line to prove it can be done…

The film itself neatly represents the development of social spaces and communities so vital in social media, epitomising content distribution through viral or word of mouth tactics and demonstrating the way in which our social networks can enrich our understanding of the world, allowing us to view the familiar in new and transformative ways.
It’s that rare moment when art, life and work all align, and the opportunity to put professional practice into something one is personally so passionate about doesn’t come along every day. Carpe diem…

So if you like the film, tell someone about it. If you like it a lot, tell a lot of people.

Thank you.

Here’s the link for your retweeting, posting and sharing pleasure: http://bit.ly/filmhit

Photographic Memory

Update: the plug on this whole thing got pulled when life intruded. My grandmother died and so an emergency trip home meant I had neither time nor inclination to work on this.

I think the film got around 1000 views – a far cry from my intented goal, but I suppose every little helps.

SEO for n00bs: linking (part one of many)

9 May

My friend asked me this question recently, and because I am ridiculously lazy but with an inflated idea of my own worth, and because it made me realise that even very clever people can be dumb in the world of search, I thought I’d share my answer here.

SEO query: does it help to link to other sites? Or does it only help
when they link to you?

Essentially, it’s all all about having other sites link to you. Google et al view an incoming link (—> your site) as a vote of confidence, and the better the quality of that site, the more weight it carries. Google uses a metric called Page Rank, which is a value out of a maximum of ten, and denotes the authority and relevance of each site (you can view this by downloading the google toolbar, http://tools.google.com/ if you want to see this data for every site you visit, or by using a web tool like http://www.prchecker.info) and this is based on the number and calibre of incoming links (so a link from a site with PR [pagerank] of six is worth more than a link from a site with zero PR).

It is also the case that having outgoing links is the best way to generate incoming links; one of the reasons I love SEO is that it really promotes a sort of idealised online neighbourly-ness.
Generosity (giving a link to a site you like) is generally rewarded / reciprocated. It also makes a difference what link anchor text you use, and the relevance of the site you link to, but I wouldn’t worry too much about that.  Just be confident that linking directly to an relevant article is helpful – think about your user – and linking to some bullshit irrelevant site about viagra is not.
It’s all about keywords, so a web page about ‘three masted schooner’ (for example) linking to another page containing those words = good! Google knows that that relevancy in linking is more likely to improve user experience, ensure the user continues to trust Google’s search results and therefore keep bringing in Google’s revenue. WIN!
If a site links to you with keyword targeted anchor text – the text that shows up in the hyperlink – that’s even better. So linking to Steffan – Classic Boat will help you rank for the keywords ‘steffan classic boat’

Links are good not just for boosting your PageRank, but also getting indexed (encouraging the googlebot to ‘crawl’ your site and make sure it is added to the database) and getting traffic to your site.
Online property works similarly to real life real estate; so the more avenues you have leading to your house (a very big house in the country), the more easily people can visit it. If there’s only a shitty dirt track, no one will bother.

Love C x

Addendum.

My friend Steffan is bloody marvellous, and if you wanted to support his attempt to sail around London to raise money for cancer research, you should click here: Steffan: sailing towards a cure.

He’ll be utterly mortified about that link, but my blog, my rules. ha!

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