Just Because You Can... You Know the Rest

A video clip of the comedian Louis C.K. bemoaning social media and Twitter as being 'awful' made the rounds on the internet in the last few days, where the funnyman has a go at the service, and the kind of shallowness that underpins much of the activity on Twitter and many other social networks. Initially my reaction was that the routine was kind of funny, but that it also was a little narrow-minded; after all, for every silly and insipid update on Twitter one can also find examples of progressive, authentic, and meaningful applications of the service for business, community, civic, and other benefits.Why can't I have a Google Plus Page? Why?

Social networks are altogether a personal experience, and we all run the risk of gross oversimplification by assuming our experiences are somehow indicative or predictive of anyone else's experiences. So if Louis C.K. or your Mom, or your CEO tries Twitter and finds it 'stupid' or 'awful', well all that really proves is just that, and while their conclusions are perfectly rational and reasonable, they shouldn't matter to anyone else. 

Who cares if Louis C.K. thinks Twitter is stupid? No one should. Even if he is possibly right.

But one thing Louis did say in the video does have merit, the social media take on the old advice of 'Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should'. 

I was thinking about this late last night when I discovered that some friends and colleagues had opted in to the new capability Google had released for it's new social platform, and created new Google Plus pages for their businesses or blogs. It hit me, that I too should have a Google Plus page for my blog or for the HR Happy Hour Show.

So I raced over to Google Plus to stake another claim to a tiny portion of the internet, and much to my frustration and confusion, I was not able to create either of the new Google Plus pages I wanted. No real reason, just some unexplained 'Unable to create page. Try again later' message from the great Goog as soon as I clicked the 'Create Page' button.

I kept trying, maybe four of five more times, before giving up in a ticked-off huff. Never mind that I have no real idea or plan for a Google Plus page for the blog or for the show. Never mind that I hardly even go on to Google Plus right now. Never mind I have a million other things to do and don't really need to add 'Google Plus page administration' to the list.

Nope, forget all that. Google Plus pages are there. And darn it, I had to have mine too.

Finally I (sort of) snapped out of it and quit trying to create something I don't really need, don't have time for, won't help me write better posts or have better radio shows, and won't really accomplish much of anything except give Google Plus a little bit more of my time and attention.

The lesson in this little tale? None, really. My experience and conclusions are valid only for me. Just like it doesn't matter if Louis C.K. thinks Twitter is stupid, it doesn't matter that I felt like a doofus trying to set up Google Plus pages. It might make a ton of sense and hold a lot of value for you. Your mileage will vary.

But the ancient advice is still valid though - just because we can, doesn't mean we have to, or even that we should.

And Louis C.K. does use Twitter.

And I probably will try again to create those stupid Google Plus pages. 

Just because it is good advice, doesn't mean we know how to follow it.

Networking and Numbers - Does Size Really Matter?

Over the weekend I tipped a milestone of sorts - 1,000 first-level connections on LinkedIn -   . I know connection numbers and social network graphs are relative; 1,000 connections may seem paltry to some of the folks reading this post, (particularly the well-connected recruiters out there). To other folks, even ones that are really successful and accomplished, one thousand so-called 'professional' contacts may seem like a huge amount. We all know from personal experience executives that might not even have a LinkedIn profile, much less a large, cultvated online network spanning organizations, industries, and backgrounds. The last VP of Human Resources that I worked for reached her position, (at a Fortune 1000 company), without ever having a LinkedIn profile.

It seems clear that while 'networking' has always mattered, for some, at least up until very recently, online professional networking has not necessarily been a pre-requisite for career advancement and success. But most of us 'professionals' these days are on LinkedIn, might be doing at least some work or career related connecting on Facebook, (check my piece on BranchOut from last week), and many have even dived into the Twittersphere, (where at least for me, a tremendous amount of 'work' is going on). It is kind of hard to imagine a young professional today that would rise to the most senior level of a large organization in the next 20 years without having developed an effective online network and presence to supplement or complement their close, personal, and real-world connections.

But as to the idea about whether sheer size of one's professional network is really important or not, while many would reflexively respond that it doesn't matter that much, that quality, diversity, engagement, etc. is what matters; no one I know has completely stopped accepting connection requests on LinkedIn, or decided they have 'enough' online contacts. If you are someone that actually has done this, please drop a comment and let us know.

I was thinking about these ideas around importance of social network size in my incredibly shallow self-absorbed run-up to 1,000 LinkedIn connections because I knew I wanted to write about the topic. In doing some research, I found a recent piece in the July/August 2011 Harvard Business Review, titled 'A Smarter Way to Network', by Rob Cross and Robert Thomas. 

In the piece the authors recommend some practical network-building and cultivating strategies that they feel lead to the development of the most effective networks. Several of the recommendations, (culling redundancies, eliminating energy-sapping contacts), have at least the short-term effect of reducing absolute network size in favor of building a more balanced, strategic, and opportunistic kind of collection of 'trusted advisors', rather that a massive throng of online connections. In the entire piece, Cross and Thomas do not mention LinkedIn, (or any other online networking site), at all, and only very casually refer to online networking in a general sense. In fact, the article's focus on the 'network' as really consisting of those dozen or so close, personal, and trusted confidants, allies, and mentors makes one sense that for true benefit, chasing the next thousand LinkedIn connections at the expense of assessing and developing these personal relationships would be a colossal waste of time.

So I will end by simply asking the question. Or really a few questions.

Does 'size' of network really matter?

Is growing your online set of connections important to you? What benefits have you personally accrued?

How do you personally balance the need for rich, deep connections with trusted advisors with maintaining your thousands of friends in your social graph?

One last comment - that VP of HR I worked for? She is now on LinkedIn as well.

PageRank for People

Last night on the HR Happy Hour Show we had an interesting discussion with Megan Berry from Klout, Jennifer McClure, and Dawn Hrdlica-Burke about online or digital influence, and its potential effect and use in the recruiting and hiring process. We also talked about some of the implications that relying on these kinds of new algorithms might have in the future. It was a fascinating conversation, and I encourage you to check out the replay of the show here, (or drop it into your fancy iPad, just search the iTunes store for 'HR Happy Hour').

My favorite line of the night was from Megan, when she described one of Klout's goals is to have the Klout score be perceived as the 'PageRank for people', a comparison to the famous search breakthrough invented at Stanford by the founders of Google, which sorted and presented web search results not simply by the amount and location of keywords in web page content, but rather by an evaluation of the number and quality of other sites that linked to the site in question. More simply put, if lots of other sites on the web, that were judged to be of good quality linked back to a particular site, then that destination site was assessed at a higher relative quality, and thus its 'PageRank' would improve.  

It is a concept as simple and as fundamental to any evaluation we'd make of the quality, reliability, and trustworthiness of any person, business, or service - if enough (or even just one if it is the 'right' person), people that we respect and value their judgment indicate that Candidate 'X' would make a good hire for a specific role, or that Jimbo's Plumbing Service can be trusted not to rip you off, then we are far more likely to heed that advice than we would from simply doing a cursory analysis of online 'presence' or marketing material.

So when Megan from Klout told us on the show last night that Klout's new '+K' feature, where users can log in to Klout.com to 'award' other users a '+K' to indicate their explicit agreement to the Klout assessment of topical influence, did not directly factor into the person's actual score due to concerns about potential gaming of this process, I was a little surprised. Because to me, at least once Klout can sort out the correct way to control to remove the element of potential gaming the system, then the +K component would stand to be a fundamental aspect that would support the 'PageRank for People' idea. 

It's really not that not different from Angie's List, or Amazon book reviews, or the consumer product ratings that pop up on pretty much every electronics retailer website.  For some reason we don't seem to worry too much about Jimbo the plumber 'gaming' the system, but when we get to discussing Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, and such, the conversation about 'influence' starts to get a little funky.

Again, I am not sure Klout has the answer to all this yet, or if some one else will figure out a better way to come up with that just right blend of algorithm, evaluation, and personal touch that will result in a measurement or score that will become more universally accepted, but I am fairly confident someone will.

And I am also fairly confident that soon after some other disruptive technology will emerge that will make us reconsider 'influence' once again.

Anyway, I am done talking/writing about this for a while, unless my Klout score keeps tanking!

Have a great weekend!

Can you give a brother a +K?

Tonight on the HR Happy Hour Show (8PM ET/ 5PM PT, rest of the country you are on your own), we'll be talking about Klout, and other measures of online or digital influence in the context of sourcing, recruiting, and career management. Can tools like Klout accurately measure a concept to ambiguous as 'influence?'  Does the Klout score and others of its like, have any role at all in the recruiting process?  How about some +K action?

You can listen live at 8PM ET tonight on the show page here, or on the call in line at 646-378-1086.

Before you jump to the high and mighty ground and declare that Klout, and other lists of digital influence, whether created using proprietary algorithms or hand-curated by actual people, have no place in professional recruiting processes, you might want to ask yourself if you've ever researched a candidate on LinkedIn, and made some kind of subtle evaluation of said candidate simply on the number of connections they have.

Recently, none other than my friend Kris Dunn, on the HR Capitalist blog offered this observation, in the context of candidate evaluation for a sales position:

My client in that search forwarded me a profile of a Salesforce candidate from LinkedIn.  "Have you talked to this guy?".  I looked at the candidate, which remember, was for a hunting sales pro.  43 contacts in LinkedIn.

43 Contacts.  For a hunting sales pro.  I could hear "I need some leads if I'm going to close business" in the background.  Your cost of customer acquisition just tripled by hiring that guy."

For better or worse, the (lack of) LinkedIn contacts factored into an instant perception being formed about the guy. He could be carrying around a tattered, 25 year old Fil-o-fax (Gen Y'ers, Google it), stuffed with all the names and contact information of the key decision makers and influencers in his industry, but chances are the paltry 43 connections on LinkedIn were not going to let anyone find out.

And here's one more, from the marketing space taken from a post by Mark Schaefer on the Business Grow site:

Let me relate a few of my experiences this week …

• A very talented friend told me he was rejected for a job at a major ad agency because his Klout score was too low.
• A B2B marketing agency Managing Director told me he chose between two qualified candidates based on their Klout score.
• A friend in D.C is creating a Klout 50 Club exclusive to people with high Klout scores. Why? He wants to find good hires for social media marketing.
• A woman told me her boyfriend was accepted to a prestigious conference based on his Klout score alone.

These experiences occurred in the span of 72 hours

Sure, I know what you are thinking - those jobs are all in digital marketing and PR, and therefore using Klout as a screening tool might make some sense, but out here in the real world, where 99.3% of people don't even know what Klout is, it really does not matter. Possibly.

But on the show tonight, while talking about Klout, the discussion is really a bit more expansive than that, and I hope we can avoid getting caught up in the nuances of algorithms, and talk about online and digital influence at a more fundamental level. I think it will make for an interesting show.

Our guests will be Megan Berry from Klout, and Jennifer McClure, aka CincyRecruiter, and the feisty Dawn Hrdlica-Burke, aka DawnHrRocks will be along for the ride as well. 

I hope you can join us tonight at 8PM, and if you listen and enjoy the show can you share the love with a little +K action on Klout my way? My score has been tanking lately.

Don't quite 'get' Google+ yet? Fear not, you'll be ok

I am almost certain that if you are reading this blog that you have at least some passing awareness of Google+, the search behemoth's latest foray into the social networking space. By most accounts G+ is starting strong, coming out of a short but limited private beta period to grow to over 10 million users in just a couple of weeks. Plus seems to fit nicely into a gap that many users of more established social networks feel exists, making it easier and simpler to share status updates, contents, images, etc. with discrete 'circles' of friends and contacts, positioning Plus less of a broadcast medium like Twitter, while offering better (at least ostensibly), control over data privacy, and possessing more potential for meaningful engagement than on Facebook.

G+ is still very new, and while most folks (at least the majority of ones in my 'Circles') have not done much more on the network other than start re-building the social connections they had previously formed on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, that has not led to a myriad of chatter and blog posts attempting to decipher, explain, and help you, the neophyte G+ user make sense of it all. We have seen this before with other Google products like Wave and Buzz. The products launch to a (relatively) small set of users, and almost instantly a flood of content gets created (with a shockingly limited data set and experiences to draw from), that compete for some knid of position or authority in the space.

For more casual users of social networking services, (like your Grandma on Facebook), the hype and bluster surrounding G+ is likely lost, as they happily continue to to post pictures, check in on family members, and tend to their virtual crops on Farmville. By early reports, G+ is mostly male, and very geeky. Sort of like the old High School A/V clubs back in the day. 

And for more hard core social networking aficionados, G+ while intriguing and capable, will need to offer just enough reason to get people to divert at least some of their social networking energy away from the value networks they have spent the last few years building up on the liked of LinkedIn and Twitter. No doubt we will soon see a rapid uptake on 'productivity' tools that will automate bi-directional feeds and updates to and from G+ from the older social networks. And then soon after brands and organizations will begin to adopt G+, the game makers like Zynga and others will get on board, and finally the Google advertising engine will kick in - developments that will certainly change G+ from what it looks and feels like today. 

It can be pretty hard to keep up with all these developments in the social space, and one might feel frustrated or even behind the times if they are not one of the early adopters. But I know of at least one other pretty well-known and successful guy that also has only a passing understanding of G+, legendary investor Warren Buffett. Check out the (paraphrased) comments from Buffett about the technology and social networking space taken from a recent interview on Bloomberg TV:

Interviewer: Did you ever feel you missed the boat on these four companies? (Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook)

Buffett:  ‘Well I missed the boat on them, but I don’t mind missing boats that I don’t know enough to captain’. ‘I don’t have to understand everything. I am smart in spots and I stay around those spots', (emphasis mine).

Nice one. Now of course Buffett must have staff that stay informed about the latest and greatest in technology, social, mobile, and whatever other new things are coming. But he made it clear in the interview that he personally did not really deeply understand these newer technologies and developments, and consequently did not feel compelled to chase them, or to change his strategy or direction to compensate for that fact. Buffett stressed the importance (at least for him), of sticking to what he knew and felt like he could excel at, rather than being constantly on the make to re-invent himself.

I think the lesson here might be an important one, as new technologies and networks continue to multiple and proliferate, it can be really easy and dangerous to get caught up in the chase ourselves. Some new network gets hot, a new tech gadget hits the market, a major service starts offering a new solution - whatever, and we almost immediately change course, divert some of our time and attention to this new shiny thing, and feel compelled to figure it all out. And exploit it for some personal gain, I mean isn't that at least part of the game?

While some experimentation is great, and even fun at times, I also think it can put us in a situation where we never stop chasing, and spend enough time really focusing on that thing we are really good at, that we understand deeply, and that we can comfortably and reliably add whatever value it is we are trying to create. Warren Buffett might be one of the greatest investors that has ever lived, but he knows what he knows, and it seems that realization has served him pretty well. 

I kind of like Google Plus, but I also really don't know what if anything I'll ever do with it, and that any time I spend there is time I'm not doing something else. We make these kinds of tradeoffs all the time I know, but when the trade involves something so new and exciting as G+, I think we perhaps make them too easily.

What's your take - are we too caught up in the hype and the chase and not spending enough time at what we are really good at?