Outside Look

LinkedIn is a great networking tool, a really useful business and job hunting tool and a place to get real life expertise and something not unlike primary research. The LinkedIn Answers feature can be a really useful tool, both for people with question and people with answers - the real trick is using the features effectively.

Asking Questions

In ‘real life’ face-to-face communication, most people are effective at asking questions. We all know that we need to be clear, concise, provide enough detail to get meaningful information from an expert, and we know that we need to seek out the right person to ask. This seems to break down with online Q & A forums like LinkedIn. So, how do yo do this in a more general purpose forum when you don’t know who might be able to answer the question.

1. Select the correct category - they are there for a reason, and selecting the correct category increases your chances you will get a meaningful answer. In many cases, there are more targeted communities for questions, for example with software development there are usegroups for almost every aspect of development in almost every language. Those forums will generate more, faster answers. For example, the following type of question is more appropriate for an .NET development specific forum.

Need Help!!!

I’m looking to move into our technology group and need to answer these two questions. Can anyone help? 1. How is using () pattern useful? What is IDisposible? How does it support deterministic finalization? 2. At what point/event of the ASP.NET 2.0 page life cycle are master pages applied, what kind of error do you get if you try to apply them in a different point/event? How exactly are they applied? And can you switch them (master pages) out in run time?

2. Don’t be too technical - while there are technical categories, a question that could only be answered by a PhD in the field probably won’t get a meaningful response on LinkedIn. Find a forum, professor or researcher in the field and try to reach them through LinkedIn or email (many universities have professor’s emails published on the department’s web page). Questions like the one below probably won’t be worth your time.

What is the best way to build a quantum computer?

Questions that are on the edge of current research probably won’t have good responses.

3. Don’t expect something for nothing - while it is ‘free’ to post questions on LinkedIn, there is a cost in social capital. Your questions and answers are linked to your profile, poorly thought out questions reflect poorly on the asker. In a more literal sense, LinkedIn is not a charity shopping mart, take this question for example:

Pay-It-Forward: Please Help Me With My Blog & Forum Set-Up

Hello. I need your help setting up my Blog to be associated with my corporate brand. I also need help with my forum. I am too busy to learn how to do it myself - as someone suggested. And I have no one I trust to turn to for this help. The project has been stalled for quite a while and it is frustrating. So I have turned to LinkedIn to ask if there is someone who would pay-it-forward and help me, please?

While some people may be willing to work for free, there’s not many. Many people are willing to sacrifice a little bit of time to help people out (and increase their social capital, see below). Outright asking someone to do for free what you’re not willing to make time to do for yourself is silly.

4. Don’t post questions that are just begging for traffic to your blog/site - it looks pathetic, it’s transparent, it won’t lead to meaningful repeat traffic and certainly won’t help with click throughs. If you want to post questions asking for feedback on a site, be specific about where you want feedback - design, content, etc.

5. Be clear with the question, make sure people know what you are looking for - OK, not everyone is a native English speaker, that’s fine, more often than not, we know what you mean. I’m talking about questions that are so poorly formulated it is hard to come up with any sort of meaningful answer or are so broad as to be meaningless. Take a look at these examples of what not to do.

Does software in your company help or hinder your staff?

Huh? My answer would be “helps” and if I’m in a good mood, “helps, essential” - on the flip side, one could write a dissertation on the topic.

Someone could give me a hand with Google Analytics?

This is a free web page analytic tool given by Google. I am trying it out at my firm, but I’m having a hard time. Could anyone give any help or maybe guide me? Thanks!!!

Can you get more open ended? I don’t even know where to start helping you, but Google Analytics’ FAQ is probably a good place to start.

When a sound is made out of ear’s range does it create sound vibrations? How do you know?

Huh?

6. The final and most important rule: Google (or Yahoo!, Wikipedia, anything) . If I can find you an answer with a single quick Google search in the first 10 results, or in a Wikipedia entry, you are being la…zy. Question/answer forums of this type are not intended to replace research or pawn research off on others. No one knows what you’re looking for better than you, do some research and come back with a more targeted and novel question.

Answering Questions

So, after all that, why should you spend time answering questions?

1. Increase social capital - answering questions in your area of interest or expertise makes you a part of the community, showcases your expertise and willingness to help others. LinkedIn does a nice job of indicating when your answers have been selected as ‘good’ or ‘best’ and this shows up when asking or answering questions - makes it much more likely you will get thoughtful replies when you have a question.

2. Showcase knowledge and teamwork - As we move to an ‘open source’ future, what better way to show that you are a ‘team player’ than to help out strangers? It’s sort of lightweight mentoring.

3. Make new connections - you may find that you are deeply passionate about a topic and there is an opportunity to make a new, meaningful, connection.

4. Drive traffic - you can drive traffic to your profile, increasing interest in your personal brand and then possibly your web site or blog.

5. Teaching is the best way to learn - when you have to describe something clearly to someone less knowledgeable on the subject, you crystalize your own knowledge.

6. One person’s question is the next person’s idea - you just might get a new idea and start generating new business.

LinkedIn can be a really great resource, with many knowledgeable professionals willing to share their knowledge (in reasonably sized portions), and many great questions. You need to use it effectively, and hopefully this helps you do that. You will likely still need to wade through a number of pointless, low value questions and answers, but using the RSS feed for the categories of interest make this a pretty quick and rewarding experience.

Just a quick note on my experiences with the new iPhone firmware - had a few problems, and got things working.

First - I did have 3rd party apps installed. After reading initial updates at The Unofficial Apple Weblog and initial reports at Gizmodo I thought it best to do a factory restore the 1.0.2 firmware and then do the update, but for some reason iTunes didn’t want to do this - I’d suggest trying to disconnect from the network, doing the restore and then doing the update. iTunes downloaded the update and tried to restore and install the new firmware. There was a terrifying moment when I received a “iPhone unknown error (6)” message and a cycle of restore->error->restore.

I managed to get out of it by doing the two button reset twice and reconnecting to iTunes. The restore and firmware update then went through, but appeared to want an activation again. I had the option to restore from backup, and things went fine from there.

First new thing I’ve tried is the iTunes wireless store. No real good reason other than to see how it works. I’ve noticed the wireless seems a little weird on my home network - very inconsistent with time outs and connection issues. I bought Pearl Jam at Lollapalooza 2007, which I would have bought at some point anyway. The speed is generally good, and about the same as the wireless connection from my PC. The problem I’m seeing is that the download keeps hanging and I have to pause and restart to keep things going. This happens each time a song finishes and a new one starts, and multiple times within the currently downloading song. The “time remaining” estimate goes away and it just sits there. I’m not yet sure if this is my network or the phone. At one point it hung during the “finishing” stage and would not progress further - restarting the phone allowed the downloads to resume.

I think the wireless store is going to be a hit for situations where you hear a song and just want to download it quick (thus the partnership with Starbucks is a great one), but not so great for whole albums. I’ve read that the sync back to iTunes is really easy, so I’m looking forward to trying it.

According to the New York Times, IBM has indicated they are offering Symphony, an office suite based on the very solid OpenOffice. It looks like IBM will be devoting some development resources to the project as well. While the NYT focuses on the competition with Microsoft, there is much more to it.

This is great for users of all stripes, but I think small and medium sized businesses will win the most. This is the segment that will pay retail or buy small blocks of licenses. A free set of office applications that can open Office format files is really useful - but for smaller businesses I’m sure the support services that Sun (StarOffice), IBM and the web communities can offer will be hugely valuable. The other big will (hopefully) be the increased use of the OpenDocument format as opposed to proprietary formats that cannot inter-operate. Another cool feature - create a document in OpenOffice, load it up to Google Documents and access it anywhere, any time, collaborate with others, and save it back to an offline location for version control, backup, etc.

Over the next few years, I believe will see further separation of data formats and the software used to interact with them. The money making strategy can no longer be ‘vendor lock in’ based on formats and market dominance. The future will be providing better support, services, processes, consulting, accessibility and cross platform inter-interoperability.

Thanks IBM for pushing this exciting trend forward.

Through a friend, I found this article about negotiation. While many books and articles on negotiation focus on a ‘act like you have nothing to lose’ strategy, this focuses on what one can bring to the table, an offer providing a better situation for everyone involved.

Today Google made another announcement about the impending end of the Google Video’s download to rent/download to own program. This is an excellent example of a company (big, faceless company?) admitting a mistake, doing right by their customers, and being really honest and forthcoming:

When your friends and well-intentioned acquaintances tell you that you’ve made a mistake, it’s good to listen. So we’d like to say thank you to everyone who wrote to let us know that we had made a mistake in the case of Google Video’s Download to Own/Rent Refund Policy vs. Common Sense.

So, do you think Google’s legal team spent three days reviewing and approving this message, looking for potential liability and analyzing the potential risk of a class action lawsuit? I don’t really think so. I’m sure there was some level of review, but I’m willing to bet the business unit manager had the most influence. The key element here though is this: Google admitted it made a bad choice, explained why they thought it was good, and most importantly, made it right with the customers. And GOOG went up 1.75% today. Admitting to a mistake and announcing what amounts to a double refund did not have an immediately discernible impact on stock prices (there was bigger news there today).

So many businesses, large and small, are unwilling to outright admit a mistake - and that is a mistake in itself. Customers appreciate this honesty, it builds trust and loyalty, it makes a customer (and employees) feel as though the company is somehow almost human. It provides the start for a dialog, an opportunity to gain feedback, and turns a bad experience in to a good one.

Another example, I was recently on a Northwest Airlines flight that was delayed about 18 hours leaving Amsterdam, then there were problems with the in flight video system. The hotel in Amsterdam wasn’t too great, and there were a few other minor issues, not least was the paltry compensation of $10 airport food voucher and 2,000 frequent flyer miles they offered for the inconcevience. But today I came home to a letter informing me they were giving me 25,000 miles for the inconvenience - about one half of a free domestic flight. This went a long way toward making a bad situation better.

Finally, as a last example, I had lunch with a friend who asked for seasoned salt that comes on his salad to be on the side (there is usually too much). When the salad came it was covered in the seasoned salt. The server apologized and offered to have the salad made again, since this time there wasn’t an excessive amount of salt and he could eat it, my friend declined. But, the server went one better, told the manager, who apologized and took the cost off the bill. This is the third time I have seen a screwed up order at this restaurant, and the first time they went so far to correct the error. The server got a good tip, and the restaurant avoided losing some future business.

The lessons are pretty simple:

• Honesty is the best policy - Honesty is appreciated and respected by customers
• Goodwill is worth the cost - Goodwill isn’t always cheap, but it is usually cheaper than the bad reputation and bad press
• Ill-will is expensive - the corollary to the previous, it is hard to underestimate the negative impact to the business of trying to cover up or ignore mistakes
• Businesses are human - everyone makes mistakes, even the best managers, making a simple plea to customers at the human level can actually improve the relationship.

One of the most challenging aspects of day to day work for most of us is keeping up with the flood of tasks and communications that come our way. There is email, phone calls, voice mail, coworkers ‘popping by’ and for some the added streams of instant messaging, RSS feeds and so on. Merlin Mann of 43 Folders (among others) has a video of a presentation at Google about efficiently and effectively handling email:

The video is about an hour long, with the first 30 minutes or so of presentation and about 30 minutes of Q and A. I found it worth the time to listen audio only. The basic premise is that we need to manage our email more effectively, recognize that a lot of it can be handled quickly, and we need to just ‘process’ it. ‘Checking’ and ‘processing’ are different things, and Mann offers up some good suggestions on how to get through the email obligation and get more real work accomplished - key points: email in the inbox “means ‘this hasn’t blown up yet’” and “don’t use [email] as a to do list.” Who hasn’t just left an email in the inbox for a few hours (or days) because it is low priority? Mann suggests just getting it done - the situation isn’t going to go away, and will only become a fire. It is easier to prevent fires than put them out.

Much is being made of a new social media/nano-blogging/awareness application (for example, Wired, Scoble, half the net). I think some of the possibilities of this application are being missed.

One if the painful truths about the social networking types of applications is that businesses really need some of these features, and only consumers are getting them. For example, for employees to be able to ask questions of the organization (does anyone know why this customer has X configuration?) and make their knowledge available to others quickly is a powerful possibility. For smaller businesses, this may not seem as critical, if everyone is in the same office it is easy to go ask or call a meeting - but what happens when someone leaves? When the company grows and three years later no one remembers why a particular decision was made? These sorts of applications can help keep a diary of the tribal knowledge and help people get more done faster.

What I think is really neat about Pownce is the combination of features that are just dying to be used in the business context. First, what is Pownce? Well, it is a little of many things, a little bit like IM, a little bit like email chains with many people in the “To:” line, a little like FTP, a little like evite, and a little like a nano-blog like Twitter.

So what makes Pownce special and why is it useful for businesses? I think it comes down to the unique set of features that could make project work and communication so very much easier for any team with more than 1 person in it (and I bet we could find good reasons for a single person to use this sort of thing). Let’s start with the flexibility of making a post - it can go everyone (public), just friends, groups of friends or one person. You can imagine having groups for projects and instead of sending an email asking a question, post it to the Pownce group and get an answer quick from whoever is around.

The second huge feature is the fact that any message can be commented on. Some email clients will thread messages, which can work pretty good, but rarely works perfectly and email tends to miss the correct person at the worst possible time, or the right person gets the message without any context to handle it. Pownce provides an easy way for multiple people to have a conversation, in context, on a particular topic. There are so many projects I wish I had this functionality.

Next, the fact that files can be posted to the group is also huge - make it easy to get the proper version to everyone, have a discussion on the file. Basically, just like a text posting to Pownce (or an email for that matter) Pownce allows you to include a file (requirements document), a link (news story on competitor), or an event (meet at the bar after work) with the message. Couldn’t email do all this? Yep, it could - but with email it is easy to miss people, difficult to have a conversation that is coherent and is just to specific to the set of recipients, rather than a topic.

I don’t have an in at Pownce, so I don’t know if there is a business version planned. I can imagine companies would be OK with this type of thing if it were hosted withing the company’s data center and not accessible to the outside world. The next step would be selectively opening the groups to partners and even customers in some instances. I’m sure corporations will want to control access a little more carefully than the average bloke, and might want to modify some things to be more ‘professional’ but the concept certainly as legs in the business environment. There’s probably a fair bit of money in the business market for social applications.

IBM is making some moves in the professional social networking area with the Connections products. I think there is a chance this could work. Lotus really pushed the envelope (at least for businesses) with Notes, and Notes did a lot of the new things for the time. Notes isn’t leading the technology curve anymore, but the Connections line of products look promising in bringing the concepts in to the business.

You can friend me on Pownce, I go by bk127001. Pownce is currently invite only, I still have a few left, so please leave a comment if you are interested in one.