No Where to Hide

One of the side-affects of the transparency required when making meaningful social media connections is that when one makes a serious misstep, or faux pas, or fails to deliver in a very high profile way… it is now visible in a way that it never was in the past.

There are consequences of this new phenomena. In the past, if you made a serious career misstep, more likely than not you could pick up stakes, move to the next gig, and start anew without too many lasting emotional scars or after affects.

Now, a career misstep can follow one for a significantly long time. And everyone knows about it. Or can Google it.

Thankfully, people have short memories. Still, transparency on the web is going to have longer lasting implications than most people are realizing at the moment.

I came across a great example this morning on LinkedIn of just this very thing. A person had posted in their LinkedIn profile that they were “Unemployable because of career interference.”

Now, whether this is true or not, whether it was the wisest thing to expose your plight to the network of connections who were either the cause or the cure for your plight is not really the point.

The point is that this person perceives that their employability has been hindered, they are perpetuating some Google-Juice now with their negative perceptions of the new reality, and may even be contributing to a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it is all out there for everyone to see, each and every time that they do a background check for a new position.

This is of course just one example. The failed high profile project, the vocal disgruntled ex-employee / ex-customer, the unexpected change in market conditions that turned you into a buggy whip manufacturer in the new world of the automobile. All of these types of situations will be forced multiplied by social media and personal transparency.

Be warned – there is now no where to hide.

Reliable Services

One bane of the social web is the unreliability of services that we depend upon more and more to extend our brand, connect with friends (real or imaginary), or flat out do our work (work? what’s that?).

Twitter (at least for me) is more noticeable when it is down, as it is one of the more immediate and impactful of all the social web services. I update all of my sites that have statuses using Twitter integration in one form or another. I regularly use 3 twitter clients a day (two browser based, one mobile based) to check tweets and update my status.

When Twitter is working, it is the best thing since sliced bread. When it is not… ah, there’s the rub. It is down ALL the FREAKIN’ time.

On the one hand, how can one complain about the uptime of a “free” service? And yet, how can I delegate more trust and business function to a service that is as unconstant as the moon (nod to Will Shakespeare)?

I’m picking on Twitter in this regard, though there are plenty of other examples out there in Web 2.0 land (the Bloglines Plumber and the LinkedIn Wizard – who made an appearance last night, BTW – are just as recognizable as the Twitter Cat and Robot screen). Bebo had some ungawdly downtime number, measured in the double digit HOURS for a two month period, and that just ain’t gonna cut it ongoing.

The relative unreliability of social networking services, free though they are now, are real stumbling blocks to wider adoption by businesses that need reliable up-time “always there” access. Web services should STRIVE for the level of service and reliability that we expect from our phone service, water systems, and electrical grid.

Strive is the key word.

Think I am overhyping this? What if you were trying to alert a campus emergency ala Va Tech with Twitter or a service like it, and got the Cat and Robot screen? What happens when Skype goes down for a day?

Real world high availability systems are just as vulnerable as the virtual systems I’m ragging on. Just ask the people on the East Coast of Florida about their half-day blackout a couple of days ago.

Again, we must strive for a higher level of service from the online services to which we are devoting large chunks of our lives and intellectual capital.

Now, forgive me. I have to go interact with real people until Twitter allows me to chat with my imaginary friends.

Social Networking’s Big Disconnects

I am a relative latecomer to the Social Networking party, really jumping feet first into the fray last October with a flurry of activity releasing several Facebook applications to see what kind of traction actually existed in the marketplace and to see if there was any “There, there.”

Over the past five months or so I have uncovered several surprising (to me) truths about where Social Networking suffers significant disconnects:

• The vast majority of “the business world” is oblivious to social networks, either passively or actively ignorant of the potential reach and impact of these networks,
• Most of my colleagues / contemporaries (grew up in 70s, college in 80s) are absent from social and professional networking, and
• Businesses that do engage heavily in social networking are media, HR, or web-invested.

Editorial Note: These so called “truths” are of course my personal observations. Your truthiness will vary.

In short, while the numbers of people actively engaged in social networking activity are hyper-aware of the space and what’s going on, there is seemingly no middle ground of those businesses or persons passingly familiar with social networking; they either get it, or they don’t. A great deal of the people who don’t get it – in fact, I would argue they represent a VAST majority of businesses – are the decision makers for technology training, direction, and expenditures.

There are many times I would like to engage my contemporaries with something exciting that I have uncovered or discovered on the social web, only to to find that I don’t share their frame of reference and that I have a many hours, days, or weeks task of bringing them up to speed on the ecosystem before I can begin to discuss the relevancy of this world to what they are (or should be doing).

It’s like discovering that people under 30 really don’t use email like those of us over 30 do. Discovering that nobody gets your “Marsha! Marsha! Marsha!” rant (for me, this happened first in college when my landlord’s son asked me who “Yes” was while thumbing through my albums).

HR people definitely “get” social networking. LinkedIn is the SN equivalent of the Rolodex for these folks as they hungrily hoard their network connections and chum with the best of them. Media types (PR flaks, marketers, political activists, RSS geeks, news organizations, bloggers, conference goers, echo chamber yodelers, attention whores, and the like) “get” social networking for its ability to reach audiences. The web-invested (the Facebooks, MySpaces, Bebos, LinkedIn, Twitters, QIKs, Plaxos, web startups, VCs, etc.) “get” social networking as another fresh field to “flip and fly.”

Where does that leave the vast majority of the “real” business world? You know, the business world of retailers, bakers, butchers, car repairmen, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, firemen, policemen, government cogs, Walmart greeters, teachers, factory workers, engineers, dry cleaners, convenience store clerks, TSA screeners (TSA Gangstaz, holla), and the like? Disconnected and disenfranchised.

This is not an argument that for social networking to be successful, all of these (and more) need to be connected and engaged – I simply am pointing out that what the echo chamber of the social web deems to be important and all encompassing really only represents a small fraction of the “real” economy that the “knowledge based” economy willingly or unconsciously fails to consider any time we’re slapping each other on the back for Google Juice.

If social networks are about making connections, and meaningful connections, we will need to extend beyond the self-congratulatory echo chamber silos that we have built for ourselves and figure out how all this stuff we are building can be used for meaningful and long lasting purposes; raising our kids, feeding the poor, paying tuitions and mortgages, providing insight to the masses, leaving the world a better place than how we found it.