A buddy scans old pictures of you and a girl (friend) into his computer, then uploads them to Flickr and tags them with you name. Your current wife sees them and does the math back 22 years to find out that they were taken at the same time you were dating her. Trust issues can have a long half-life.

A working mother sees a Wall post on her daughters Facebook account about a young man she is smitten with. So the mother jumps into the discussion on this young man and razzes the daughter about being careful whom she chases. Three of the daughter’s friends then post an expletive filled rant about how much they hate the guy. Since the mother joined the conversation, the entire ugly discussion now shows up on her wall for all her clients to see.

In my case, my 27 year-old daughter runs her Facebook account as if only her friends have the ability to read it. So when our 12 year-old daughter reads it, we have the dreaded cross group bleed over problem. The older daughter believes she has the right to upload any photo, and use any language that is appropriate with her friends. This happens to be inappropriate for our younger daughter.

Of course there are lots of other stories where someone at work finds a nugget of information from an employees personal postings that can turn into a serious issue. For example, a person that told their boss they were taking the afternoon off to go to the doctor then posts pictures that afternoon of their trip to the amusement park. The boss happens to look at the page, and is not impressed.

This bleed over problem is difficult to control. Sure, people can make all their communications private, but that defeats the purpose of having a place where people can find you, learn about you and engage with you. Most business people would love to have some kind of automated way to separate their professional and personal lives so the two would never bleed over. The best we can do in some cases is dedicate a whole application to business relationships (LinkedIn) and reserve another for personal (Facebook) but this is easier said than done because in both cases someone from the other group may prefer to connect with the opposite structure.

For business people the solution is often to go straight shoptalk online and never engage in personal discussions. For young people, the answer is becoming that they will not use Facebook if there is a chance their parents, teachers, or Sunday school leaders will be able to see how they talk to friends. One thing is for sure, we either have to find a way to cure the bleed over issue, or we have to start accepting that various groups have different levels of formality or language.

The other possibility is that people (even young people) get a sense that everything they say, every picture they post, every video they star in, can be seen by millions – for a long time, and use more discretion.

The ultimate solution I would like to see is that everyone exhibits upstanding character. If no one had anything to hide because everything that came out of their computer was healthy, we would never have to fear bleed over. I hope we get there one day soon…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Here is my take on what we should all be doing… The umbrella term needs to be Social Technologies. This is a general enough term that it covers the various branches of the discipline. To use the term social networking or social media as the umbrella is a misnomer because these are simply branches that I will discuss in a minute. Since Social Technologies (or technology) is a little long, we could shorten it in most cases to Social Tech. With this as an general term, let’s look at what falls underneath it and why…

Social Networking is clearly the right name for the branch of this field that speaks to any application or platform that is used to connect people through live, or delayed written communication. This includes eCommunities, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc. Any service that seeks to connect people one to one, many to many, or one to many for the purposes of communication or community falls within this branch.

Social Media is the branch that refers to any application or platform that uses a form a media to allow people to share information one to many. Media in this case means video, documents, presentations, or pictures. Or said another way, YouTube, Scribd, SlideShare, and Flickr. The word media is a specific term that refers to a specific method for leveraging social communications or information sharing and the key thought here is that it is done through a media file.

Social Relevancy is the branch that speaks to online reputation, or online credentials. This includes all of the concepts and applications that help build, monitor and measure what your visibility is on the Internet. This includes all of the social networking and social media sites. Whether we are talking about an organization, a person, or a product, all are starting to have online reputations, and a measurable amount of social relevancy.

There is now a fourth branch I will call the catch all branch. This is for any activity that now has the word “social” pasted in front of it to denote the fact the social tools are now being used to improve performance. For example, Social CRM, and Social Recruiting. I suspect we will see many more examples of nomenclature like this over the next five years, then we will drop putting social in front of terms when everything has a social tech element within it.

If people cannot discern the difference between these terms, they will never be able to actually be good at using them. Vocabulary can be powerful in that way. So please help me get the popular press, and the various commenters to start using this paradigm. It makes much more sense to delineate these terms into branches that make sense, and to use an umbrella term that is intuitive. By the way, it starts with you using these terms correctly… My next stop is Webster’s Dictionary. I intend to put the full court press on for them to define things this way!!!

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

The other change is that I am going to broaden the content range just a little. I have long wanted to add some content on the topic of where leadership and technology crossover. So from now on, I will share some stories and observations about what leadership means in this new technology augmented world. I think this is a topic that is talked about in the halls of organizations, but rarely addressed with leaders themselves. We just seem to assume it is OK for the C-suite to be technology ignorant as long as they have IT people they can outsource their decisions to, and I think this is dead wrong.

As always, I will continue to comment on my thoughts about new announcements, technology trends, and useful processes. There was a lot that happened over the last 45 days that I have been away. A whole months worth if blogs could be written about Apple and AT&T. By the way, if you saw the press conference that Steve Jobs just did, can you figure out why they ran it like a product announcement with marketing slides and the lot? What would have been wrong with a direct press conference instead of the spin show it turned out to be. I love what Jobs has done, and Apple products, but I am getting tired of their style of delivery on such things.

And in case you did not notice, I Foursquared my office today so that I could be mayor of something! I also offered to give away a free book to anyone that checks in five times. Mostly, I just want to be the mayor of my own office. As luck would have it, the people that work with me are here more than I am and will probably beat me to it. My second option is being the mayor of the OKC airport, I figure I have a good shot at that one!

So in the end, this is a warning of sorts… I am back blogging, and bursting with things to say!

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I remembered carbon paper this morning.  I am not sure why, but the distinct memory of the days when we actually stacked up sheets of clean paper, with sheets of carbon impregnated wisps and then hit the keys extra hard to make sure that our words actually were copied onto all pages.  Of course this also made me think of white out, and the big step forward when we got NCR paper, which had that magical ability to copy words through without the actual carbon paper being in between.

I have often recalled those cute little pink “While You Were Out” tablets that my admin used to fill out with the 50 or so calls I would get a day on the telephone.  That was back in the day when I received that kind of volume of calls.  Today a busy phone day might be 5 to 8 calls, and they come on my cell phone, which has a system that recognizes most callers by checking the number against my contact list.  That means the caller is greeted by name, their message is taken, converted to text and sent to my email and texted to me.  No admin involved at this point.

I remember going to library and using the Dewey Decimal System to look up a book so I could find the piece of information I was searching for in that large institution of knowledge.  I remember having to be quiet, having to check out the books, which meant having a library card, and being forced to have a deadline for the return of their property.  Oh, and I remember the fines.

Of course I remember vinyl records, 8 tracks, cassettes, and CD’s.  That means I remember having to clean the needle on the record player, and buying a new one every once in a while.  I remember my kid brother scratching the needle across my favorite Elton John record, and I remember chasing him around the house after it started skipping – never to be repaired.  And I recall the tape players eating the tape on occasion.  I also remember sitting by the radio with my cassette recorder ready to go so I could tape a song I liked that I just could not get on a piece of media, then being the only one of my friends with the recording – even though is started 10 words into the song.

OK, let’s go to bullet points from here!

• When my news came from TV and paper
• When I lost touch with friends and co-workers never to be found again
• When I had to memorize addresses, birthdays and phone numbers
• When I could be by myself and no one could find me and make me work
• When my kids communicated with the person in the room, and not ten people on their mobile device
• When my Rolodex was the most important contact tool I had
• And finally, when I read books that were made with real paper, and I carried one at a time.

The truth is, life has changed a lot and I am not just talking about the tools we use.  The pace is changing – It moves much faster.  The input has changed; it is now a fire hose of information, not just bits and pieces.  The ways we communicate and get entertained are completely different now.  The ways we have meals, and what we think is appropriate has changed.  So how does all this looking back, help us look forward?

The strange thing about we humans is that we most often get what we want.  That is to say that when we seek advancement, we always seem to find a way to make it happen.  We believe in a world of possibilities and for this reason it is safe to say that the tools we use today will continue to evolve to help us get what we want.  That concept is always hard for most people to wrap their heads around because they can only see what is right in front of them and they believe we are SOOOO advanced that we simply could not invent yet another way to improve things.  This of course is not true…

Here is a list of what we seek by the way:

More convenience – Life in general and work specifically should be simpler to handle.

More connection – We like to connect with others that think like us, are related to us, or have some other connection to us.  At times we just want to connect with famous people because it makes us feel important.

Easier communications – The simplest form of connection is simply being able to “talk” to others.  We crave easier, faster, and simpler ways to get in touch with whomever we want, whenever we want.

Better entertainment – Need I say more?  We like to be entertained.

More productivity – Our bosses demand it, and we have found that our pocket book gets enhanced when we can get more work done in a 24-hour period.  Anything that helps us get more work done faster is a winner for most of us.

With this list as a touchstone, and given the changes we have already seen from the past, what can we look for in the future?  And maybe the bigger question is will our lives be better when we get it?  Is everything we want actually good for us?

The answers to these questions could take up five more posts, but let me make a few observations…. There are lots of things that are still broken with how we communicate, connect, and get work done.  Without even thinking hard, think about how inefficient the keyboard and mouse are as interface devices.  It takes me way longer to document these thoughts than just to think them.  I need them to get stored in digital as fast as I can think of them.  When I want to send them to my friends, I have to just pick one method, or work really hard to guess what each of you would prefer.  Wouldn’t it be great if I could just tell my computer the people I want to receive this and my system would reconcile with your systems the best way to get the information to you!

Productivity is still in the dark ages for the most part.  We do not have automatic system to update those around us when we complete a task, or even what the status might be.  We still must do lots of tasks by hand, and do the same things over and over.  We still gather information through long painful meetings and discussions… You get the idea.

The point I want to drive home is that we are making an escalating amount of progress in applying technology to improve our lives.  We are not done.  Because we have a driving need to improve on the ways I mentioned, we are only halfway there if that.  So the change from carbon paper to Microsoft Word is only a partial improvement.  Get ready for much more to come.  And when you have some free time, think about the really big question concerning whether we will ultimately be happy when we get there.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

As the title suggests, I have had my iPad for a week, and am testing out Steve Jobs comments that it is going to change everything. Let me put into context that my interest is in the iPad as a business tool – more than an entertainment device. If you want something to help you kill time with video, audio, and ebooks, it is a great option over a Kindle. And I love my Kindle. If you are trying to make a decision on buying one, and you have a Kindle, you will love this because it will give you eReader capability and lots more. From a business viewpoint, and this is a business blog after all, I will stick with discussion the iPad as something that can actually help with productivity in some way.

My general comment is that it seems to be a combination of an iPhone and a computer. It is more than an iPhone, and less than a laptop – maybe that is more succinct. Out of the box, you really must buy a non-glare screen. It fingerprints horribly without one. You also need a case or binder with it because it is just not safe to be carrying it around naked. Drop it once, and you will be heartbroken. Apple really should have included both of these with the device in my opinion. I found it interesting that iTunes synced my iPhone apps over to my iPad. That caused me to delete a bunch of them that were not relevant to an iPad. Other than that, the setup is pretty easy. The applications that you normally use, Safari, iMail, and iTunes, etc, work in different ways than on the laptop or iPhone. That took me a bit to get used to.

I carried it around with me at a client’s office for a couple of days just to see if I could use it instead of my laptop. For many things yes, but those are the same things I would have done on my iPhone, just with a smaller screen. Without having MS Office, or my files in the device, its value in meetings was limited somewhat. It is great for looking things up on the Web, and doing email while in a meeting. I downloaded the Wall Street Journal and USA Today apps and like the way those work on the iPad. I used Fring to make a phone call to my office on the iPad. That was kind of fun. Then I tried keeping it in the living room with me at night so I could check things, and kill time during boring parts of my evening with it. For me, that means checking Tweetdeck or the like. I guess I would have to say that it does replace the laptop in about 50% of the cases that I might have that device in my lap. Now, let’s talk about what it does not have that it needs to have…

In no particular order… It needs a front facing camera so we can do video calls with it. Clearly needs Microsoft Office. It needs a better way to move files on and off it from your laptop. A clever version of the Magic Mouse that would let you keep your fingers off the device and be more concise with pointing would be nice. This one may sound a little fuzzy, but we need some applications that are built specifically for the strengths of the devices – areas where it is unique to an iPhone or laptop. I want to see these apps in the area of productivity. How can it help me be more efficient or informed.

I guess I need to give my “buy or wait” decision now… I am glad I have one – although I did get it for my birthday. I suspect that I will make it a useful part of my life over the next month or so. The decision probably has less to do with is it valuable, and more to do with is there a return on investment for the price. The reality you cannot escape is that you can do just about everything on your iPhone and laptop. So maybe you should just ask for one for your birthday, Mothers Day, or Fathers Day so you don’t have to wrestle with the decision.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Healthcare? Yes, and the game is an interesting one. People that cannot afford healthcare will steal your identity and use it to get medical care at a hospital. Once the care is given, they disappear and leave you with a hospital calling wanting to know when you will pay. This crime makes sense in today’s environment, not that I am impressed that it is happening. This crime is growing at a rate of 375% year over year, and it is in second place.

The winner at a 500% growth is online account theft. When you think about it, this makes sense because it is so darn easy to just pretend like you are someone else online. It is also not that difficult for bad guys to hijack your actual account evidently because they are getting it done on platforms like Facebook. If Facebook cannot stop people from stealing accounts, then who can! Of course it is not all their fault because people tend to be sloppy with their passwords and indiscrete with clicking on links they should leave alone. The problem with Social Technology and services like Paypal is that in the never-ending quest for ease of use, we also get easy access to someone pretending to be us. While I am sure we will find some clever solution to this in the future, I suspect it is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Let’s take a look at some of the things we may start seeing on a regular basis in the future…

In a virtual world, we trust that there is a human being behind an avatar because a name we recognize might be attached to that avatar. Maybe a live person told us the description of their avatar, and from that point on we impute that anytime we see that avatar, it is that person. But what if someone steals that identity? If we were talking about a simple matter of them spending the money that is attached to your avatar, that is one level of theft. Imagine that someone steals your avatar and then attends business meetings on you behalf so they can steal corporate data from a virtual meeting. What if they perpetuate some online crime while wearing your avatar? I can imagine a whole cottage industry growing up around verifying that the right human being is controlling a specific avatar.

What about people stealing online identities in order to do damage to companies online reputations, or to enhance the reputation of a company you do not support. Think about how strange it will be to search on your name and find out that you trashed a company that you really know nothing about. This will happen when the bad guys figure out they might be able to extort money from companies in order to not mount negative online reputation campaigns against them. If you think I am crazy, you might recall that two companies sued Yelp a few weeks ago for extortion for threatening to put negative ratings on their restaurant sites unless they advertised with Yelp.

I have lots of pictures in my head as to where online crime might go, and if I am even half right, we are in for a bumpy road for the next few years…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I have noticed that many of our clients start off in a place where they think the Web strategy is a separate thing from the social tech strategy.  This is clearly not the case.  These are two pieces of a puzzle and they snap together perfectly.  When we help people design Websites, we use the Constituent Based Design model, which focuses the entire Web strategy on identifying your main constituents and then building your Web properties to serve each one, and drive each one down a unique path to taking an action.   Once this is accomplished, we have created a DESTINATION for customers to come to.

Switch over to social tech and we can use the same constituent based model to identify what the methods are that we can create a CONVERSATION with each constituent type.   These conversations have to be seen as high value to the customer, prospect, partner, or whoever the constituent is.  In other words, the stream of communication we are providing on Twitter, Facebook, our blog, etc, needs to be something that primarily serves the person on the other end.  If that conversation is filled with marketing and sales chatter, it will be seen as a form of water torture spam and they will stop listening to our conversation.  Let’s assume you get this and you have created valuable streams of communications with your constituents, you are ready to go to the next step.

With a well-designed DESTINATION, you have a place to send the people that you are having the CONVERSATION with so they can take action.  We often do this by providing links back to the Web properties within our posts.  So we use the conversation to drive people to our destination.  This is all well and good unless you get greedy and start the water torture spam thing going and try too hard to drive people to taking action.  You have to EARN THE RIGHT to use the conversation to market to people.  That means giving them 10 parts value for every one part advertising/marketing.  In other words, you have to earn the right to sell to them.  You would think this would be obvious to marketers, but in their zeal to drive revenue, they seem to think that people really want to volunteer to receive your communication just so they can become sold to – and that is not the way of the world.

So back to the question I mentioned at the beginning…  How do you drive revenue from social tech?  You bolt together your Web strategy with your social tech strategy and use the conversation to drive people to your destination.  And, you make sure to earn the right to lob in that link, that coupon, that discount so they value the conversation enough to stay with it and every once in a while, take you up on the offer.  Maybe an analogy would help here…  If you are/were single, and wanted to get a date with a person, would you sidle up and say, “Hello, how are you? I want a date.  Can I have a date?  How about a date tonight, or maybe tomorrow night?  I will give you $100 if you date me.  I will give you a free ride to the movie.  It was a beautiful day outside today wasn’t it?  How about we go to the museum of art?  Would you like to go on a date? Can we go on a date?  What is your favorite food?

That is what some of you do with your social tech conversations.  Lighten up and earn the right to sell – you might be amazed at what you could accomplish…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I remember how private my Grandma Baker was.  She taught us in many ways that it was safer in life the less people knew about you.  People had no reason to know anything about your family, about your job, about your life in general, and if they knew anything, it should be an opinion about life that you shared with them.  To have information shared about you was to put yourself in danger of theft, abuse, or gossip.  I suspect that there are valid reasons that she felt that way.  For hundreds of years, I suspect that when personal information was shared, it was often used against you in some way.  In other words, I understand the righteous fear of personal information being shared that people have had.  What we now need to recognize is that the society has changed in some ways.

It has become much safer for people to know SOME information about our personal lives.  It is still dangerous to tell the world that you are going on vacation for two weeks overseas of course, and sharing too much information about your sex life is just plain creepy and unnecessary.   Where the line gets fuzzy is sharing your personal feelings about politics, religion, or your co-employees.  There is a difficult double-edged sword aspect of sharing this kind of information.  On the plus side, you are able to better connect with some people that do not know you that well.  They will see areas where they can share thoughts and information with you., on the negative side, you risk alienating people that could be critical to your career.  The kids that are heavy into social networking purposely fill out tons of information online because they want people to self select OUT of being friends with them when they see there is no connection.  In other words, the more information they post in a profile, the better chance that someone that friends them will have shared interests.

For businesspeople this all gets even tougher when you consider that our online reputations are becoming more and more important as our credentials.   It is becoming very normal for someone that I am meeting with that has never met me, to look online.  What they see forms an early opinion and I would rather they hear from me than others.  This means I must put information about me online.  Ergo, our desire for privacy is running smack dab into our need to culture an online reputation.  I love the concept that we are creating digital shadows online.  The question for the next five years is going to be, what is the appropriate level of exposure of me online in order to facilitate a positive online reputation, without stepping over the line and having too much information about me available to the world.

Privacy vs. online credentials.  This will be interesting to watch for a while…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I will give you a quick primer in this blog as to how you can improve your river of information, and note that I said improve because we all have a river today – it might just be a small little creek. The outcome of building a powerful river of information is that you will have a much better command of the thoughts, ideas, and events circulating in your areas of interest. You will have a better idea of what the competition might be doing, and you will have real time information instead of learning things weeks after they might happen. There are two kinds of knowledge that are valuable – one is a robust inventory of knowledge on any one topic. The other is a timely set of knowledge about the events that have happened in the last 36 hours as it were.

The goal is to be able to invest no more than 45 minutes a day in studying this river of information, and passing on the interesting bits to the people around you. This does not need to be done all in one sitting either. I tend to send some information to my iPhone, and the rest to my laptop. I might grab this 45 minutes in pieces all day while I am killing time waiting on people, in the airport, or waiting in the car.

STEP ONE – Invest some time identifying Web based streams of information. This should include information on competitors, industry news, thought leaders, and mind-expanding influences. They can be found in blogs, newsletters, twitter streams and news feeds. You can also look to resources like Scribd.com, Youtube.com, and Slideshare.com for media uploaded on subjects you want to follow.

STEP TWO – Install and learn to use tools that will help you aggregate and filter these streams of information. There are no right or wrong ways to do this. I tend to have lots of resources sent to my email, but friends of mine love to use Google Reader. You can use tools like Netvibes.com or Tweetdeck.com to consolidate social tech streams of information. The goal is to have a system that allows you to quickly scan your river and find the important elements that you need to revue further.

STEP THREE – Once you have identified the interesting elements in your river, you have a choice. You can consume them on the spot and make a decision to save them, or you can put them in the bullpen to read later when you have more time. For me, this means putting them in tabs on my browser for the most part so I can look at them when I have time. Since you cannot always consume the elements in the river at the moment, you have to have a way to scan as a first step, and cache the interesting things for further review later.

STEP FOUR – Once you have consumed the content, there will be some pieces that you want to save for later use, or that you want to pass on to others. I have my own system for storing and you can develop something that is unique to you. There are tools like Evernote and Twine that can help with this, or you can go old school and just save things in Powerpoint, Word and in files. I tend to go old school, but that is just me.

A couple of final comments… This is something you need to get into the habit of doing every day. If you get days behind, you will never catch up and will simply miss pieces of information that might have been useful. If you are a leader within an organization, I strongly urge you to document a list of 20 or 30 streams of information that would be valuable to the people in your area. Then help them build their rivers. When you hire new people, give them this document and you will be surprised how fast they will come up to speed on what they need to know to do their job well.

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, I am shocked that organizations are not being more formal at documenting and implementing these rivers of information. It is a simple and inexpensive thing to do and will have tremendous results over time.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Photo: Reuters

OK, I have had some time to think about how the iPad might be more important than the iPhone as some people at Apple have mentioned.  I am in Mumbai India at a conference where educators from around the world have gathered to discuss best practices for utilizing laptops in the classroom.  Yesterday, we started talking about the fact that the iPad is the perfect replacement for a laptop in that setting.  It is lighter, smaller, and less expensive, so easier to purchase for kids, and easier for them to carry. Because they have a fast start time, you don’t have to worry about slow booting issues and because the operating system is simpler, you won’t have to worry about the support issues that would come with lots of kids using Windows machines in various states of setup.

Then start thinking about how many problems we could fix with replacing textbooks!  No more 30lb book bag filled with five-year-old beaten up textbooks to carry.  Actually, no more five-year-old text books because no you can update the textbooks daily on a subscription service.  And the textbooks would not look like anything from my youth because they can have links to extended information built right in.  They can have video and pictures integrated so that one could just click on an icon and see a math problem worked out in front of your eyes with an animation, or an animal run across the Serengeti.   Test could be incorporated as webforms so the teacher does not have to print out documents to be handed in separately, because the test would be filled out on the iPad within the “textbook” and graded on the fly by a grading software program already connected to the electronic textbook so the teacher simply receives grades sent through email or posted online.  You think that will win favor with teachers?

I actually get kind of excited when I think about what the iPad could do for students and learning.  But, I am a businessman, and this is a business blog so let’s get down to why this is important from a business standpoint.  If I owned Apple, I would figure out a way to price the iPad on a monthly fee so it can be sold through school book stores for $15 a month or so.  I would get millions of kids to use this as their standardized tool in school – of course this is a longtime Apple strategy – and then you know what happens next…  All of these kids come out of school dependent on this piece of hardware to get their work done.  Bingo, you have millions of evangelists carrying it into the workplace and convincing the older people around them to give it a try.  Well, at least the people that did not jump on the bandwagon before that.

Although I like this strategy, it still does not answer why some people at Apple say the iPad is bigger than the iPhone.  I can only surmise that they see the iPad as replacing the laptop for a large chunk of the population and this is not as crazy as it might sound.  You really have to see how Apple has rebuilt some of the applications like mail and calendaring for the iPad, then you will understand why some people that are light users might just chuck their laptop or desktop for the ease of use of a simple iPad.  Add to that an easy ability to watch TV, or handle music in improved ways and you might have a device that really could become a must have for many people.  Long and short, I am starting to understand why it might make sense to bet heavy on the iPad winning…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I am experiencing more and more people using Twitter (direct tweets), LinkedIn, and Facebook to send me direct messages.  While I appreciated anyone connecting with me to talk, I am getting really annoyed at having to open a new application from my email just to answer what used to be sent to me through POP3 mail.  I might get ten or twelve contacts a day now through these three services and that requires me to jump out of my email client to get to them.  Just imagine if this trend continues?  What if there are a few other social networking sites that get hot and I am forced to open six different clients just to respond to people?  What is really broken is that I can post to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook all from Tweetdeck in one click, but when people answer or comment, I have to open three different clients to respond back.  That is sick and twisted.

Why don’t these companies just allow someone to post a message from within their services, but deliver to the recipients email?  Is it really that they are trying to force people to stay in their environments?  Could they be that petty?  Clearly they have to know that it is a drag to have to open their sites just to respond to a communication that hits my email, but has a noreply address on the contact.  I really think that we, the user base, need to stand up and call for some sanity from these platform providers.  Email is a universal tool that really works pretty darn well.  Let’s keep that standard for text-based communication that does not have to be instant.  Let’s not try to create ten different standards for how we contact each other electronically.

While I am on the email subject, I have to say this… Why the heck is there not a Xobni like product for the Mac?  And why has it taken email providers so long to build in analytics into the email platform?  Wouldn’t it be nice to know who the top ten people are that you receive emails from?  And how long you spend typing emails a day?  What about analytics like the average time to return emails, or the average time it takes people to return mine?  What about alerts that if flagged, could tell me if an email I sent was ever returned?  I could go on with the basic functionality that would be nice from email providers.  You know, we think the software we run is pretty handy, but in truth, it has a long way to go to be really as functional as it should be.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

This is causing me to think about what the best practices might be for migrating an entire IT department to the cloud. Set aside fears about controlling data, security, bandwidth, and the IT people standing in the way of a transition for a second and let’s just assume that cloud based computing gets 100% dependable. Then take an even bigger leap and assume that your IT people would actually disintermediate their own jobs. If all that could come true, you are then free to dream about what the best practices for the transition might look like. How fast might it be done? What systems go first, and which go last? How do you measure the ROI? How might you modify contracts with cloud providers to protect yourself?

I have been working on a long process document that would be used to dictate an orderly step-by-step, and find that there are really pretty simple answers to these questions. The first hurdle to really get over is just getting your hands around the fact that cloud providers can actually do IT services better than you in most cases, and that you can dual home your bandwidth so that you do not have to worry about access to your data and applications being cut off by the random cable cut. Yes, your data will be secure, and in fact, the cloud providers IT people are better at security than yours and probably have more to lose. Yes, it is possible for the applications to run just as fast over the wire as over your internal network, and the added bonus is they will run great anywhere in the world instead of forcing people to VPN to the network. Let’s be honest, having to VPN into a network is a bit like trying to get an appointment to see your doctor – sometimes you get in, and sometimes you don’t.

Once you get past the mental blocks and years of hosting your own servers, you can think rationally about what to do first, what to do last, and how fast to move your whole software infrastructure. The steps could really be reduced to the following: Study your usage patterns and identify all software applications in the organization. Rank then in order of their unique importance to the organization. Then make a decision as to whether you can replace the application with an existing SaaS option, or whether you will just need to move the current application into the cloud. Find a general cloud vendor that might fit your profile for services, and calculate the costs of renting their services. Examine the costs of the SaaS systems you might be able to trade over to, and the general cloud services where you cannot go SaaS. You now have a projected budget number you can play with to see what kind of ROI you might get (if you also are able to lower your staff count.) If you like what you see, you can then form a plan as to which applications go first and I would suggest start with the smallest and easiest and work up to the hard ones. Then measure performance differences after the moves in order to gauge if you have taken a step forward or backward. Oh, of course it is a bit harder than this, but I only have a page or so to make the point. And that is that every organization needs to have a solid transition plan and some goals in place. Also, that it is not that hard to think through. The problem in most cases is that the business side of the house does not know enough about the cloud to demand a move, and the IT people have a vested interest in keeping things in house in most cases so the only time you see an aggressive plan to move is when the budget gets slashed and there is no other choice. It is just sad if it always takes a financial tsunami before organizations figure out a cloud plan.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

The logical choice would be the Kindle, and that actually seems pretty likely to me and I can only hope that Amazon is smart enough to cut a deal with Apple and others to provide their Kindle software and store as on online service just like iTunes.  Woe be to them if they let Apple iTune the book market and build their own store to do distribution.  If the tablet makers could get Kindle like functionality native on the tablet, then add smart periodicals, and television capabilities, we would have a thin simple device for all media delivery.  Well, only if you add iTunes and music, which I am sure they will do.

So what else could they add to make this device really interesting?  How about a camera so we could use the tablet to do videoconferencing through Skype?  How about building in a browser natively so we could use the tablet as an access device to the cloud?  If they build a nice medium sized touch keyboard that slides up and down on the surface ala an iPhone, we could then access any hosted piece of software, and with as much out there these days, I could almost carry the tablet instead of my laptop in many cases.  When I really stop and think about it, if I were to use Google Docs for my office productivity, I could do 80% of the work I normally do on the tablet.  Which leads me to my next thought…

I think the impact the tablet/slate might make that no one seems t be talking about is to be a killer of installed software.  I have long known that the concept of cloud computing would drive us to invest portable computers that were configured very differently because we would not need hard drives and local storage at the point we could run our applications Web-based, and store our files remotely.  I suspect that the tablet may be the device that kills off locally installed software because we will want to carry that tablet in many cases and it will be built from the ground up to be a cloud based device.

A few other things I would like to see…  Please put an SD card or the like in the device so we have an easy ability to add storage and have it be portable and standard with other devices.  Please add some new touch controls.  People have quickly adopted the use of two and three fingers on a glide pad, and the squeeze and shrink paradigms.  Give us about ten more ways we can interface with applications so we can speed up the interaction.  Give us an easy way to send files to other tablets by just setting them next to each other and doing some type of special signal to identify and send any file or piece of data.  Please give us a seamless way to sync the tablet with our phone and laptop.  Above all, please give it lots of battery time so we do not have to be charging it three times a day to keep it up and running.

Do all of this, and we will buy it.  Do less than this, and we will have to wait for the second or third version when you do…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I am interested to see that Google created its own store to sell the Nexus One, and this surely indicates that they intend to sell more devices over time to the public.  I can only imagine what a group of people that clever will come up with when they spend 20% of their work time doing pet projects.

I am encouraged to see Google continuing to push using voice as an input device.  They have given the Nexus One the ability to fill any text field in by voice.  Although this is not practical in all situations, there are a few that come in really handy, like answering email in the car driving down the road.  Voice control has been on the verge of really becoming a well-used interface tool and maybe a mobile device that elegantly integrates a voice option could be the tipping point.

I am also glad to see that they are offering an unlocked version of the phone so that people are not locked into on specific telecom provider.  Apple may have benefitted financially from the exclusive deal with AT&T, but they have suffered from an image standpoint by going out of their way to block people from using the phone on other services.   By selling the phone direct, Google may also be separating costs in a way that will force cell providers to lower their costs.  I would wager this, if the rumor is true that AT&T wants to charge a high amount for the ability to tether the iPhone, you will see Google trump them by providing tethering for a very low cost.  Google specializes in keeping costs down and finding other ways to drive revenues, and as a consumer, I love that they will force others – including Apple – to lower prices.

Google has such a command of the advertising supported model of revenue that it is logical to think that we may see them splice that capability into the phone and the phone service.  How long before they offer a deal for a phone with free service as long as you listen to and ad before you make a call?  Or, have a scrolling set of ads that take up the screen space on your phone while idle?
Apple has a great command of design and user experience.  Google has a great command of search and advertising models.  They also have an awesome ability to quickly spin up new capabilities out of their labs.  Two very different companies, both competing in the mobile device market.  This bodes really well for us in that the competition will drive costs down, and raise the level of features quickly.  I am really looking forward to seeing what we get over then next few years.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

The emergence of microblogging (Twitter, Facebook, and others) – The  concept of connecting to streams of information provided by others came into its own.

The iPhone basically trumped the phone market with the concept of a mobile computing device that can download $1.00 applications at will.  Android will follow, and Apple will try to stay ahead.  In the end, everyone will carry smartphones.

Augmented Reality emerged.  From nothing, to a slate of applications, AR is now more than just a concept.  It will grow to be one of the common ways for delivering location-based information

Social Technologies go corporate.  Maybe the largest blossoming of a technology was the realization by organizations that social tech is more than just the tool of teenagers.

Online Reputation Management emerged as new field that must be learned by executives and organizations.  From now on, our online relevancy will be key to prospering in the marketplace

Crowdsourcing becomes a commonly used tool.  At least a hundred websites have come to the market that harness the internet herd in order to do everything from creative to R&D.

Applications continue to move into the cloud.  It looks like 2009 will be the year that cloud based computing began to be viewed as a logical step for IT departments to take.

On the business models changing front, over 100 newspapers went out of business, Blockbuster is suffering, the post office is losing billions, people are  dropping land lines quickly, pay phones are gone, and magazines are suffering.

On the human front, we are inundated with unfiltered information and people contacting us 18 hours a day.  Kids are addicted to text messaging and seem to think they need an iPhone at single digit ages now.

On the productivity front, we steadily gain the ability to do more work and at higher quality every year.

I guess I could go on and on with this list because I am barely scratching the surface of what happened in tech last year.  It also shows no sign of slowing down for 2010.  That leads me to make this one observation for the future.  As we are worrying about the shrinking middle class in the US, we better start thinking about the technology have and have-nots.   This does not even concern who can afford tech because even the poorest people seem to have iPhone’s these days.  This concerns who can leverage all the new technologies coming out.  Those that cannot are losing value in the marketplace quickly, and those that can use the tools are gaining in power and influence.  That goes from the lowest rungs of the ladders to the C-Suite.   It is time to wake up and smell the velocity…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

There are two interesting lessons to learn from this move by Facebook. The first is that no matter what you do as a servicer of over 300 million people, someone is going to complain. In comparison, there are about that many people in the U.S. and we cannot agree on anything in this country so it should be expected that Facebook will have critics from now on. The only difference is that they have a few people making decisions at the top, whereas the U.S. has hundreds that have to agree on even the smallest changes. I suspect that Mark Z is finding it an interesting experience/responsibility to be at the helm of Facebook at this point.

The second thing to learn from this privacy update is the concept in general of allowing users to have complete discretion by service or media type as to what goes public and what goes private. This caught my eye because I had an immediate picture in my head of what I would like to see the technology industry move toward, and frankly, what I think they will do over time. The simplest way I can explain it is that we should get an ability to right click on any file, program, or media type and select from a scale of privacy ratings. Think of it this way, I right click a picture on my computer and set it for private, friends and family only, specific users access, or open access. Once I have set that privacy rating, it carries through anywhere I send or upload this document, picture or video. I would have to have an ability to administrate my privacy groups and ratings on my operating system as well so I could specify friends and family and such.

Other options I would love to have are things like an automatic obfuscation capability on the private files so that once I tag them as such, they are scrambled on my computer so they cannot be accessed even at a low level. I would like to be able to change my privacy ratings by application so I could have files that might be private on Facebook, but available to friends and family on Flickr. I would like to be able to bulk change privacy ratings by folder, or drive so I can manage them all at once. Actually the list goes on and hopefully you have the idea.

I guess my point is that this move by Facebook is just a baby step towards what we need to have as users in order to be more sophisticated about the security of our content. I am sure we will look back ten years from now and realize we were in the dark ages with privacy in 2009…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

The other powerful use for Social Tech tools is the ability to now assemble a broad, dense, and powerful flow of filtered information that is uniquely assembled for each of us. Never before in history could a person construct such a flow of real time information for free. Never before in history could this flow of information be so broad and deep. Sure, twenty years ago, you could have twelve subscriptions to magazines and read two books at a time – then spend the rest of the day watching the news on TV. But, you would only be scratching the surface of information that today can be pushed to you through RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc. Even if you want to debate with me on the volume of information in this comparison, you cannot debate that we have an awesome ability to reach into very specialized data and to filter it down to the things that are critical in much better ways today.

The best example I can give you of this philosophy is myself – or maybe that is just the easiest for me! I have carefully crafted a stream of information, and have carefully chosen how I want it delivered. I have specific things sent to my iPhone, others sent to specific applications on my laptop. I download specific books and periodicals to my Kindle, and finally still read a few magazines and newspapers on paper. In each case, I have made the decision about what I read, and where I read it very consciously. I still read a few things on paper because it fills a void for me when I simply cannot use electronics. Those two times being when I am taking off and landing in the planes, or when I am home waiting on my family for something and do not want to access my laptop or phone for fear of being distracted by work. I have specific V-logs, and Twitter sent to my phone so I can access these things when not using my laptop. Then I have various feeds sent to my email, or other applications depending on the sources. I follow many thought leaders in my industry, some of my competitors, my clients, and a few inspirational innovation sources just to keep my thinking fresh. I follow a few associations newsletter for industries I care about, and constantly correspond with people that care about the same thing I do so we can share valuable thoughts. In sort, I have carefully crafted my river if information so that I maximize powerful content, and minimize the time needed to access it.

Why is this concept so important? For a few reasons… One is that it makes me smarter. Noticeably and dramatically smarter and that translates into making me enjoy my career more, and getting paid more for the knowledge I now own. Another is that we are all getting buried under information – as in information overload. So learning to filter and direct this flood is important because a flood can drown you, or you can learn to harness the waves and do something useful with it. Finally, this is the knowledge economy after all, and that should tell you that there is a lot of knowledge flying around, and that learning to harness your share is will ultimately make the difference between achieving your goals, or losing.

By the way, add up the ability to build these rivers of information for each employee in an organization, and you now have a huge differentiators in the market. So if you have an HR department that is looking for something meaningful to do, consider having them spend 2010 teaching people how to build these rivers of information.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

So one answer to the question of why Twitter matters is that it has a nearly real time ability to deliver information. In addition, if one uses some of the filtering tools that are available, a user can also filter what real time information is really important to them so they do not get swamped in real time news that might not be important. It should mean something to people that in just a few short years of existence, Twitter has become a staple for many people in how they get news and information from not only their friends (trivial news) or their business associates (more pertinent news) but also the world in general. Oh, by the way, the news you get is nearly real time – in other words, you get it in a flash directly to your phone if you choose to.

Real Time as a concept is getting more and more press these days. TechCrunch recently held a whole conference devoted to real time software applications that are being delivered to facilitate people getting information very quickly after it happens. This will lead people to the next question, which will be, “why do I need to get information in real time?” The answers to that can range from the excitement of being the first in the know, to the very real business advantage of having information sooner than your competitors. My observation is that we have concentrated more on the ability to just get information, versus getting it in real time. As we get more sophisticated with business intelligence tools, and social technologies, we will start to see that being able to receive critical information faster is a huge advantage. To get there, we will have to get better at using filtering tools in order to instruct the gigantic flow of information we can tap into as to what is specifically important to us.

Reason number three is now explained as to why Twitter matters, so that you can have access to important news faster than your competitors. If you missed reasons one and two, they are that you can use Twitter to create a river of information into your brain (through who you follow) and you can become an industry expert (based on getting people to follow you.)

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

p.s. If you are not following me on Twitter, then why not? Do so now here: @sklososky.

1. The Technology Trigger – The genesis of the technology, this where only extremely geeky people have any idea what it is.
2. The Peak of Inflated Expectations – This is where our “next big thing” is suggested as the cure to all ills and the next “disruptive technology.” I guess we could also call this the buzzword stage.
3. The Trough of Disillusionment – Our technology now almost disappears from the press. It will be written off by many non-tech people because they are not seeing it, or hearing about it as much at this point. It have now become not-cool. We will accuse it of just being a meme.
4. The Slope of Enlightenment – Far from dead, the technology is now being applied to real world situations and actually is starting to generate a return on investment. In other words, it is working.
5. The Plateau of Productivity – We have now completed the cycle and the technology is now a standard tool that we will soon take for granted. We will forget we ever lived without it and will ruminate on the old days before we had it.

It is easy to plot where we are with many of the technologies in front of us. For example, virtual worlds are clearly in the trough of disillusionment at the moment. However, I am seeing a number of companies developing virtual meeting rooms that look very practical for helping to support virtual teams across organizations. This is a typical variation of the something like Second Life that made a huge splash, and has not fallen down the slope to being viewed as not cool. Augmented reality is climbing quickly up the hype curve at the moment. Lots of people are predicting it will simply change the way we interact with data from now on (I am one of them by the way.) Location aware applications were something I talked about five years ago and painted lots of pictures as to what a device knowing where I was standing at a given moment could do for me. No we have hand-helds like the iPhone and Android and lots of location aware software and we are not really that impressed already.

I have been building technology companies long enough now to understand how important timing is to leveraging a specific technology. Whether building a company, or investing in applying some new idea, we all face the same dangers. Do it too early and you might waste all the investment, as the adoption rate you need from the herd will not be there. Do it too late and you will risk being just one of the herd and a “me too” player that must compete in a red ocean with all the other sharks. Having a good understanding of this technology cycle can really provide a strategic advantage to leaders.

So for some homework, go to a whiteboard and draw a typical bell curve that slopes back up slowly at the right hand side. Plot the stages I shared above and then see if you can identify three to five technologies in each stage and where they might fall graphically along the curves. The insight gained may vary well help you develop an eye for timing technology implementation in winning ways.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I am old enough to remember when the decision between phones was wall mount or desktop, and black or beige. Then it became a Motorola, or Nokia, and those were not that different. Now a “phone” is really handheld computer and the answers are getting complicated. Actually, if all you want is a cell phone, the answer is simple because you have no business having an iPhone or Android device. Just get whatever the providers offer for free and get on down the road. If you really are asking what handheld device should I have in order to be more effective and productive, then my answer is iPhone or Android based device. Don’t make me choose between these two because I do not like that Apple is locked to AT&T at the moment, and am equally nervous about Android because it is young as an operating system.

Anyway, he then says to me, “my wife has a Palm Pre.” And he raises his eyebrows as if to ask if that might be OK because she seems to like it. I comment that it is a nice phone, will work for many people, but it does not have the adoption rate of Apple or Google, and nowhere near the applications available. That did not mean much to my Blackberry toting friend. Thank god he did not ask me about a Windows platform phone. That always sends me into a tailspin of mystification as to how a company that big and with that much of a lead in the operating system market could possibly blow the opportunity to own the hand-held market.

After having to explain my Palm Pre answer to him for 15 minutes, I came back to his original two questions and told him this… Get the iPhone if you are choosing between that and a Blackberry, and the reason your IT people keep telling you that you have to use a Blackberry is because they bought a Blackberry server last year and now have to force everyone to use it in order to justify the expense. Sorry about that. I suggested he break from the herd, defy IT, and go Apple. He frowned at that, and I thought I was done with my duty. However…

I got on the elevator the next day to head on to the next event and he stops me and says, “but I hate AT&T’s service!” I struggled with what to say next because I could tell him to jailbreak his iPhone and run it with anyone, but he did not appear to me to be a jailbreak kind of guy. So I offered that the rumor is that Apple is going to allow the iPhone to be sold by some other providers soon, and AT&T was not really that bad. He frowned again. As he walked off into the sunset (actually the shade and traffic of downtown Chicago) I could see he was muttering to himself. I think he just wanted me to tell him the Blackberry was the way to go…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

For this reason, I propose we rename intelligent software with a name like “augmented intelligence.” This would let it fit nicely with the hot field of augmented reality and better describes what we are really doing in my opinion. For example, a calculator is just augmented intelligence because humans programmed it and stored all the math calculations in it. It is not an artificially thinking device. It is just a device that augments our ability to do math. It is the same with any so called expert system, it is in reality just an application that augments our intelligence by allowing us to test a series of variables through the piece of code.

As the Web moves to a more semantic Web format, it arguably can become good enough to be called an augmented intelligence because I will be able to ask it a plain language question and get an answer. If you have not checked on the WolframAlpha website, you might take a look. This is a knowledge engine as oppose to a search engine and you will quickly see the difference. It is clear that we are moving in this direction in the construction of the Web and all the tools that are being assembled upon it.

And no, it will not become sentient. It will not become the Matrix and suddenly develop an awareness of self and want to “live.” It will just become more and more able to augment our intelligence by gathering the knowledge of millions of people and storing it in a configuration that allows anyone to access the accumulated wisdom. We will learn how to write self learning systems that will study the results of decisions the system made and will self audit rules and change what needs to be changed in order to meet quality guidelines we build in. Ergo, the applications will be able to get “smarter” on their own. What this will do is unleash a new era for humanity like we have never seen. It will give us the ability to stand on the shoulders of those that have gone before us in whole new ways. In fact, it will allow us to stand on the shoulders of software systems that will have spent years improving through repetition and observation.

In the past, we had to accumulate knowledge in books so that if could be passed down to the next generations. This sped up knowledge acquisition because at least it was all on 600 pages in one place and we did not have to redo the experiments. Now imagine a world where accumulated knowledge and wisdom is built into an application so that I do not need to even understand the underlying rules. For example, I could ask the calculator a word problem and it would do the math without me ever understanding how the math worked or even how it would have been structured to answer the word problem. I recently had an argument at an event when I said this and a teacher did not agree because she thought one had to understand the underlying “math” in order to be creative and move on. I just do not agree. I suspect the coming generations will live in a world where a piece of software augments their intelligence and they really have no idea how that software got built or what the rules are inside it.

So in order for this to become a meme, I will need all of you to start using the phrase “augmented intelligence” to describe smart systems so I can get credit for this

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I was visiting with a franchisor that I had given a speech for a month ago. At that speech, I told the audience about using addictomatic.com as a search engine to see what people are saying about an organization. One of the franchisees when back and ran a search on the franchisors name and found a blog from an employee of the franchisor that was speaking very negatively about the annual event the company had put on. He forwarded the blog to the home office and the employee was terminated. There were a few lessons learned on this one. The employee learned that blogs that are only followed by your friends are still public to search engines. The company learned that they need to monitor their name more closely. And I learned that when I teach people about new tools there could be unintended consequences.

I met with a CEO of a banking company last week and he shared the following. He was interested in learning how to use Facebook as a business tools so he started a profile and connected with friends and family as a starting point. This included his 20-year-old son. After learning the ropes, he accepted a few friend invitations from some of his good clients. Within a week of being proud of himself for connecting to business associates in this way, his son posts an expletive laden screed on his dad’s Facebook wall. As he read what his son wrote, he was disappointed that his son used that kind of language with his friends, and then he panicked when he realized that all his new business contacts would see the same screed. The lessons learned here would be that it might be a good idea not to mix your personal and professional contacts under the same profile. The son learned that what he writes needs to be filtered against a true understanding of everyone who will see it. Oh, by the way, everyone can see it.

So what did I learn from these stories? Only that technology can do magic things to solve problems we would not have solved without the tech. And that we have a long way to go before we are proficient with social media. You do have to give people points for trying…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Technology is just a tool as I always say, and to be sure, it is becoming a more and more influential tool at our disposal. In some cases, the excellent application of technology to a traditional business process is causing the organization taking the risk to reap a reward that is dramatic. At the same time, I have seen technology dollars spent on the wrong things, or vastly overspent to get little yield. The point here is that too many people worry about WHAT technology to build instead of HOW MUCH it might cost. I look at every technology purchase –personally or organizationally – in terms of when the return on investment is going to be. I love to spend a low amount of money to get a really fast and large return. That is a no-brainer. But how do we make decisions when we are talking about large amounts of money and a return that has some unknowns, risk, and length of time drama involved? I suspect that in the future, the real art of implementing technology will be less and less in trying to figure out what to buy, but how much to pay and when to implement it. There is a continuum that I will call the Risk/ROI continuum that we will all have to decide on our strategy as to where we line up.

Let me explain… At one end of the spectrum is a technology that has a clear ROI. We absolutely know that if we invest a dollar, we will get two dollars back quickly. At the other end of the spectrum is a buying decision where there is risk either because the technology is new and unproven, or there is a question as to whether the organization can really leverage the technology. I have seen both negatives in my career. Companies that invest in a new technology that ends up not playing out, or technology that is solid but the organization just simply will not use it in a way that will provide benefits. As a leader, we have to make Solomon decisions along this curve and the impacts of these decisions are having more and more impact on the organization. In truth, a good or bad decision along this Risk/ROI continuum can make the difference between life and death for some orgs. So back to my two personal examples…

As a consultant, I have clients that depend on me to help them make decisions on millions of dollars in technology investments that will either help their companies soar, or will be a serious drain on cash flow. I sometimes think about how much responsibility this puts on my ability to help them make the Solomon call. I actually do not find myself sweating these decisions because it is normally have a pretty clear idea if the purchase will be of value. What cannot control is how well the organization will use the new tool. Things get tougher with more leading edge technologies like social media. In this case, the ROI is much harder to depend on, or measure. I have to just be visionary and faithful in having people invest resources in this new field. What I do that many leaders are afraid to do is to just make a decision, then fight hard to make sure the investment pays off. I try to look at tech buying decisions from the viewpoint of an architect trying to build valuable plumbing that will have value in the long term. Leaders just have to have courage and vision and make their calls.

At the personal level, I have to make a decision on my new laptop. Should I fill it with RAM? Get a huge hard drive? Maybe even the fastest processor they have? This would be the difference between a $2000, or a $3000 Mac. Will the extra $1000 really make a difference in my life? I really don’t know. So I will sit here and sweat that decision while being easily able to make million dollar decisions for clients. Uh, maybe that has something to do with it being my money and not someone else’s. I would like to think it is just a tougher intellectual decision because the difference cost will really not help my career – I think.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

First, I need the facial recognition tie in so I can just look at an individual and have the AR system go out and check that face against all social media profiles and bring back all the profile information immediately. This would help solve the problem of me forgetting names, or of strangers knowing my name as I walk off the stage, and me not knowing theirs. Throw in an automatic search to show me anyone we might both know and I could actually network like some of my friends who seem to always be able to find someone they know in common with some new contact.

Next, I want the ability to have the GPS system just overlay a map on what I am looking at so instead of talking to me, the nice lady on the NeverLost could just point which way to go, and which sign I need to pay attention to. (Imagine seeing a sign on the interstate and it has a soft luminescence that tells you to take this exit.) Add a flashing icon at the top of my view that shows me the general direction of my destination so I can see if I am actually headed the right direction, and we are in business.

For the next need I have, let’s broaden AR to not only the visual, but also the auditory. I need the system to listen to every question someone asks me, or every statement they make and do a couple of things. If it is not in English, translate it on the fly. That would be really be handy in most cabs these days. Set that aside, imagine if someone asks me from the audience what I think of Google Wave, and a stream of data on Wave comes on the screen to aid me on the answer. How about if I had the ability to add my own rules based system that gave me preset warnings to remind me how to respond to certain phrases. I could then create a set of warnings so that if my wife asked me what I think about…. A preset would come up that would say “WARNING, Think carefully about this answer.”

Just for fun, my last AR application idea is back to the visual. I would like to have the ability to augment retail stores with all kinds of visuals that are specifically tied to my profile. For example, I could walk into a Walmart, and it would be decorated (virtually through visual augmentation” with a theme like a Colorado mountain scene. As I walked down the aisles, specials would flash when I looked at specific products. Health information could be turned on and would be color-coded so green would be products I really should buy, and red would be products that are outside my predefined health parameters. As I looked at the check out people, they would all look like healthy mountain hikers (to stay in theme) and best of all, the greeter would look like a park ranger – green outfit and all. Then on Tuesday, with a flick of an icon, I could change the whole Walmart scene into Italian flavored theme.

Don’t laugh, we are not that far away from making this happen, The concept of augmented reality is going to cause a dramatic shift in how we relate to the world, and once mainstream, will make the times we are living now seem like the dark ages.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I have a great friend whose name is Vaughn Rachal, and I bring him up because he is a sales guru, and has worked for a number of tech companies in his career. This has given him the ability to merge his deep sales philosophies with the modern influences of areas like websites, social media, CRM systems, etc. We have been putting together a presentation that describes how the traditional sales process is now being changed by tech influences, so I thought I would share a few of the main bullet points. The first is that the word “sales” probably needs to be replaced with the concept of facilitated buying. Meaning that instead of our trying to concisely guide a prospect through a process we have built in advance that is a rigid step by step, we must now be able to facilitate the prospect getting to a buying decision without being able dictate the steps.

Which brings me to the second concept that needs to be understood, and that is that there is not a set process that a buyer goes through at this point, and we cannot control the flow of information to them. In the past, if a buyer wanted to know information about our products or what customers think of us, they had to get that data from the seller. In fact, they had to contact us and then we knew they were a prospect and we could force them into a sales process that could be rigidly guided. Today, a prospect uses the Web to start their buying process and they will find a list of possible vendors, review their Websites, and study what other people have said about the vendor before even making the first contact. This fact alone changes the sales process tremendously. Now add to this that the prospect might choose to do most of their communication through email and text messaging so that the sales person has little chance to use all the selling psychology tools we were once taught.

The third concept to consider is that buyers are not going through a traditional process of identifying needs, looking for vendors, creating an RFP, evaluating responses, etc. They are using a more socially directed buying approach. While even beginning the process of identifying needs, they are already using social networking tools to get help and advice from constituents and contacts. Then they will move on to using social networking to help identify possible vendors. Before the sale is completed, they will have used social tools to do deep research on not only the possible vendor, but also the employees they are working with. Vendors are starting to wake up to this reality as they are finding that where they could once control the delivery of information and timing, they now have no control. This brings up the crux of the issue, and that is that sellers no longer have the control they once enjoyed when they had a controllable sales process. Those days are just gone, and will not be coming back. So what should an organization do that would really like to be able influence the success of their “selling?”

The first thing is to really get the concept of facilitating buying and what your role can be. Start paying attention to your online reputation and actually invest energy into having the best online reputation possible. Make sure people are talking about you online and that what they say is positive. Work with your sales people to turn them into social networking professionals that clearly understand how to use the social tools to communicate, inform, and build relationships. Use social media tools to communicate to the Web that you are industry experts. Learn to use technology to facilitate your ability to be more human. What I mean is use the tech to better facilitate video, audio and text conversations with potential buyers on a regular basis. One last thing… We are in the middle of a model change so there are buyers that do not like tech, or use it in the course of their day, and those buyers will still be influenced by the traditional methods. I know you don’t want to hear that because it means that sales people have to have skills in both the traditional and the future sales methods. I wish I could tell you there is a one-size fits all answer, but alas, there is not. For the next ten years, we will slowly change over from the classic sales models to the new, facilitated buying model.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

1 – The Platform Providers – Nothing happens in SocMed land until someone builds a platform that we can use to communicate. Examples are MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, YouTube, etc. All of these sites are essentially platforms that not only allow us to communicate with each other; they let us extend their platforms functionality in some ways. They love getting millions of people to use their platforms. That is the single thing that gives them leverage and the ability to monetize what they have built. Of course they want users to love them, but at the end of the day, you can even be as basic as Craigslist and as long as people use your platform by the millions, you have won. What they hate? When competitors take users away and their growth reverses into a free fall of active users. They also hate any bad publicity that might stop user growth.

2 – The Sponsors – In order to offer these wonderful platforms for free, The Sponsors have jumped in to pay the Platform Providers a pretty penny to get access to our eyeballs (and wallets.) The Sponsors can range from a large advertiser like Nike, to the smallest company doing a pay per click campaign. What do they love? Behavioral targeting is the key. In no other form of marketing/advertising can an organization specifically target users like on the Web. Social media just provides an even deeper level of behavioral targeting. Want to sell something to females with an age of 25 to 30, who buy Madonna tickets online, and shoes from Zappos? We have an app for that. And, they can control the money they invest to a more finite degree and vary it on the fly. Not exactly like having to run a television commercial campaign is it. What they hate? That they cannot fully measure the branding value of their sponsorship, that Web companies can do click fraud and waste their money, and humans that for some strange reason have not gotten into a SocMed site so they can be targeted.

3 – The UGC Elite – In case you missed that memo, this stands for User Generated Content. Statistics tell us that about 80% of the content uploaded to SocMed sites is created by less than 5% of the users. Sorry Perado, but your rule does not apply here. Thank God for these people because they are the ones that have primed the pump and created the UGC movement that has become YouTube, Scribd, SlideShare, Blogger, etc. They love any new tool that makes it easier for them to upload content fast. They also love when their content is redistributed in some way to a new group of users. They love “views” and the more the better. Get five million views of your YouTube clip of people catching laptops with their back ends, and you are an instant star. (Look that one up if you want.) They hate being blocked from uploading, people ripping off their content and not attributing it, and user’s that write childish and crude comments that attach forever to their work of art.

4 – The Average User – This includes millions of normal people that use SocMed sites for work, to stay in touch with family, to find old friends, or to just communicate with like-minded people. The users have a huge amount of power in the SocMed game because they can make a Platform Provider rich, or break their heart. They can identify themselves electronically to a Sponsor so they can be “sold.” They can view UGC so many times that they elevate an unknown content provider into a media star. They love new tools, new capabilities, and everything for free. They love simplicity and getting results with less than 30 seconds of investment. They love knowing their friends all use the same platforms and that they can now entertain themselves, or be productive at any moment, on any device they have. They hate sites to be down. Once they come to depend on a platform, they expect it to be like the electricity in the wall. It should always be on. They hate having their privacy invaded – oops, don’t tell the Sponsors because if the users really knew how deeply they are tracked, they might run and hide from SocMed. They also hate spam, malware, and rude brutish users.

5 – The Newbie – Everyone is new to pieces of SocMed. We all had to start somewhere. So we all were (are) Newbies at some point. The only real question is how long we stay Newbies. For some people, it is forever. They never really learn how to use SocMed tools. They perpetually sign up for accounts, but never really learn how to use the Platforms. They might be signer uppers that never use the systems, or they might actually connect with two ore three people just to test things out, and then abandon actually using the system beyond that. Essentially they will buy a hammer, drive a couple of nails, hang it on the wall and stare at it for ten years now that they know how it works. They love to tell their friends that they Twitter, even though they only did one tweet and connected to two people. They love to ask questions about how you use the Platforms, but then they rarely go try it on their own. Thankfully, sometimes they love to learn more and they move into being Average Users. They hate having to remember all the passwords. They hate the fact that they have to invest time in actually learning how to use these Platforms. They hate when something new gets hot and they have to go learn something else now.

6 – The Luddites – We all know a few of these. They refuse to have anything to do with SocMed. So why list them at all? Because they will be the outcasts. They will be the people that will one day either be forced to play, or will go to the grave believing that the effort for them to learn a new way is to great. That something hundreds of millions of other people have found valuable, is simply not valuable to them. The only reason I list them is because they will waste lots of our time trying to convert us to their way of thinking so they do not have to be lonely in their cocoons…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

The United Destroys Guitars song on YouTube, which has been viewed over 5.5 million times in a few weeks, is a great example of this trend. When people want to know what the eWord of mouth is about you or your organization, all they need do is an addictomatic.com search to see what people are saying in the social sphere. Then they can run a socialmention.com search to see what your relevancy is on the Web. When you step back and think about it, we were able to live pretty anonymous lives ten years ago. Now we are torn between wishing we could be invisible from bad guys, but knowing we have to be visible in order to prosper in the business world. In the end, our reputations will be formed on-line whether we agree or not. People will talk about us, upload pictures and video of us, and generally post comments about us, and our performance in life. ORM is here to stay so we might as well figure out how to manage it.

Lots of people ask me when they hear about the concept of ORM, how they can get bad press off the Internet. As if there is some magic electronic Mr. Clean Eraser that can be wiped over the screen and a negative mention in a blog will simply vanish. I, of course, give them an answer they do not want to hear, which is to make sure it does not get on the Web in the first place. When people talk about social media being one of the most democratic devices known to man, I agree. In a democracy, there is freedom of speech. In a democracy, you can try and outvote the other side by working hard to gather people to your message. Will there be the occasional negative person that attacks you or your organization for no apparent reason? Sure there will be. These really are not the problem because they will be drowned out by the good in most cases. The problem comes when you do something to deserve the negative press. Like when you break a guys guitar, and then refuse to fix it. Or when you break up with your girlfriend through texting while on a date with the next girl. You will be flamed publicly, and you will deserve it.

ORM might be manageable in some ways, but it will not be controllable, and this is a great thing. In a world where one person can “talk” to 1.5 billion other people for free, it would be wise to treat people very well. Although that sounds simple, anyone that has had to call an AT&T help line could tell you, we still get shafted daily. Just as a person could be anonymous in years past, protected from public scrutiny by the lack of a technology to post and store feedback from the rest of humanity, organizations could also get away with horrible service. ORM will prove to be their undoing because it will be impossible to “manage” what you cannot stop from hitting the websphere. Social media will now cause people and organizations to reap what they sow – at the speed of light.

Story Links:

• United Destroys Guitars song on YouTube
• addictomatic.com
• socialmention.com

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

First, they have paid me nothing for this exposure. I just thought it was worth writing about for our readers in that it is the first I have seen a virtual world tool used in this way, and with the cleverness they have included. They have built an inventory of rooms that you can assemble to meet in. Each one with a different type of usage, a few for just visiting between avatars, a few more for meetings, and some for idea sharing with presentation spaces on the wall. If you have your video turned on, you can either see a video window with other participants, or you can have the video delivered as the head of your avatar. So if you space things right, you real head fits nicely on the Gumby like avatar. Or, you can just create an avatar like any other virtual space.

The sound is spatially accurate so as someone moves around, the sound changes locations in your headphone. This is a bit freaky at times as an avatar will move away from you while talking and you actually hear them change to a different side of your head, and then the sound becomes more distant as they move further away. You can set the avatars to walk together in case you are moving through the office and want to walk with a co-worker. When you want to show someone a video or graphic, you can just throw it on the wall or floor and view it. If you want to collaborate on a document, you just drag the document onto a workspace on the wall and you can take turns editing things.

If you cannot be at the meeting online, someone can record the entire meeting as a video file and you can view it later. Just to get an idea of the visual, take a look at the graphic below. As I mentioned earlier, it is immediately apparent that this type of application improves on both Second Life, and video conferencing as a method for allowing virtual teams to get together online. Now, just so you know I am not doing an infomercial, there are still a number of areas where they can improve the system. The bandwidth constraints make it difficult to work with some video files, and the more people that attend a meeting, the more strain you will put on the bandwidth and processing capabilities of the application. The standard Gumby avatars could be dramatically improved in the graphical look. And they could provide some improved capabilities around facilitating the actual meeting process. With all of that said, take a look at a demo if you get a chance and see what you think.

By the way, the cool social media Website of the week is www.namechk.com. Use it to see if your username is available on all the top Web 2.0 sites.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Things that need to go away in education:

• The summer vacation – this was caused by farming needs, and does nothing but help people get out of the habit of learning. Give a few more breaks during the year and go all year long
• The Jug and Mug philosophy of teaching. The teacher is the jug of wisdom, and they pour out that knowledge into the mug of the student. We need to move more to a style that teaches through lots of other methods like self discovery and observation
• Not allowing Wikipedia as a reference source. Please explain to me how Wikipedia is any less of a resource than other sources that have less people giving expertise. Wikipedia now attributes authors so give it up and step into this century
• The ban on laptops in classrooms. I don’t care what age you are, if you have a laptop, you should be able to use it to take notes, and do searches – at the appropriate time! So they cannot be open all day, but can be opened during work times.
• We have to get rid of tenure. Teaching needs to be performance based as to rewards. Don’t even try to debate this because it does not work today and no one can show that it does.
• Memorization and regurgitation as a model for learning. With every fact available in a nanosecond, it makes no sense to just stuff facts temporarily into people minds. All this tests is a students ability memorize for a few days, then dump the information to memorize more.
• Teacher parent meetings as the only communication between us. There are a ton of tools for communicating over the Web and this can make a more robust flow of information so parents are not blind until the report card comes out. By the way, it is not a report card anymore…

Things we need more of in education:

• Collaborative learning by using the Internet as a tool for students to work with other students around the world
• Problem solving skills – this is the number one skill that will help kids prosper when they get out of school – because there are always problems
• More life skills, less subject facts that will not be used by the majority of kids. For example, everyone will need financial literacy. Very few will need advanced algebra. Yet, what do we spend time teaching?
• Creative thinking is going to be more and more valuable as computers take over left-brain tasks. So let’s teach processes and build skills around creativity as a life skill
• Worldwide communication skills. Now that we have the technology to talk to people anywhere in the world, we should build deep skills on students with how to use social networking to enhance your career and quality of life.
• Self-discovery skills. With the Internet now providing a huge resource of help and information, we need to teach students how to have critical thinking and to use the Web as a tool to help learn how to do anything you have not been taught to do as of this point.

In the end, the story from the Bible of teaching a man to fish instead of giving him a fish applies with this new model of education. The education system has said for years that they are teaching kids how to learn – not just teaching them facts. The truth is, technology changes the game entirely as to what that means. We are still stuck with old teaching methods for the most part – and need radical change.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I did not have a great experience in my K thru 12 years in school. I found the whole process to by mind numbing in many ways. I did have a few good teachers along the way, and realize now that it was not so much the method they used as the force of personality I was attracted to. Luckily, I absorbed enough from them, while sporting a solid 2.5 GPA that I had the skills to go on and be successful in life. I have never forgotten how much I hated the process of school, and how freed I felt the day they let me out. I also recognize that some people loved school and it was the best time of their life. I suspect that had more to do with things other than getting an A however. Long and short, I have become less and less of a fan of how we educate. This is a technology content source so allow me to segue to the technology part of this diatribe.

Technology has afforded us large set of tools that can radically change how we teach, what we teach, and why we teach. I am mystified as to why as taxpayers and parents, we are not rising up to put more pressure on schools to modernize their approach. Only in a system without profit motive, and outdated measurements could you allow for such inertia to exist as we have today at schools. Allow me to present a list of ways that technology should be impacting education:

We have now created a massive “library” called the Internet, on a scale that is hard to fathom – and is instantly accessible from anywhere, for free. With a structure like this that will only grow and improve, why do we make people memorize facts as a measurement of IQ? Facts that anyone can get in a nanosecond with a search.

We have created a communications system that is now free, has many various modes of communication, and the ability to scale to deliver to millions at a time. With a system like this, why would we not use this system to deliver the best of breed education to people and not create more buildings, more local content, and more local delivery?

We now have knowledge engines like WolframAlpha that can do much of the heavy lifting in doing math based calculations, and analytics. With tools like this, why would we not teach kids how to use the tools, instead of the underlying engineering? They could simply stand on the shoulders of others instead of making every generation start at zero. I don’t even know how to do math longhand any more because I use a calculator. Am I stupid because of this fact?

With the ability to tap into Internet based communities of interest that contain thousands of people, why does it make sense to have kids only get input, or build relationships with a handful of students in their building? Why not have Italian students in Italy teach U.S kids how to speak Italian? And vice versa…

The sad part is, human beings get shaken up by revolutionary change. We are more comfortable by evolutionary changes that come at a slow pace so we can accept the changes slowly. The sad part of this is, we could easily paint a picture that is completely different as to how we could educate our youth – using technology – that they will use anyway as they grow up. It is not the students that will hold us back from completely re-engineering schools, it is the educational machine, and the parents behind them. More to come in Part 2…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

1 – By allowing these sites, people will waste time contacting their friends instead of working… I guess the logic here is that since you can’t trust your people to do their jobs, and your leadership is not motivating enough to give people passion for performing, you will block them from the few respites they might have to stay sane. Sorry, this makes no sense. Reason one is that they have iPhones and can use any of these tools on their mobile devices anyway. Reason two is that they still have other devices like a telephone you provide, and they can sit on that all day with their family an friends if they really do not want to work. Reason three is that people are either going to do their job or not. The presence of technology tools is not going to change that. Reason four is that young people especially are using these tools FOR BUSINESS in some cases and what you gain by taking them away, you lose by stopping people from connecting with customers, partners, and vendors in says that would have built relationships.

2 – We can’t control what our people would do or say on these sites about our business so let’s block them in order to be safe… Really…. REALLY? Grab the cluetrain. You cannot control what they say on their iPhones, or their home computers, or verbally, or just about any way! How is blocking Twitter going to keep someone that is going to talk smack from talking smack? So you are willing to trade the benefits of social media as a communication tool, for the misbelief that blocking them will stop a malcontent from posting something? Really?

3 – We don’t want our people using these sites if they are going to mix business with pleasure. In other words, friend people that are clients, and mix them with high school friends. – See bullet 2 above. You cannot control who the next generation friends on their devices. Another take on this is we will have to live in a world going forward where all of us create two profiles – a personal and professional and keep everyone in the appropriate bucket, or we will have to accept that people are human beings and have lives out of their careers. And then people will have to have the discretion to not upload drunken high school Spring Break pictures onto a friends Facebook site if they are over 20 years old.

4 – Some of these sites use up too much bandwidth so we block them to keep our access speeds up – I am sure this is aimed at the dreaded video sites – Hulu, Youtube, Vimeo, etc. Yes, video takes up a lot of bandwidth, especially if you are downloading a full length movie off a pirate site. I am fine blocking sites that break copyright laws. I am not fine blocking youtube for example. Some people actually need to access videos for various reasons. Plus, bandwidth is not that expensive at this point. Better to provide enough than to block sites that will make you appear to be old school.

5 – Our employees do not even use computers that much, and when they do, we have specific applications for them. Open access to the Web provides no value in our world – People that make this judgment are always over 50 years old. Get mad at me if you like, but I have never seen a 30 year old leader block access. But, just to provide real reason why I do not agree: When you hire young people and they show up to work and see that you block things they have been using for years, the clock is ticking until your A players will leave. They will see you as stodgy and behind culturally, and will move on. The C players will stick with you – so enjoy them! You assumption is that your people will not find valuable things to do with social media, and I promise you that is wrong. No matter what business you are in, people will find clever ways to leverage these new tools. And finally, the Web is becoming a huge river of information and if you want ANY worker to stay up on the latest information in their field, or to grow as a team member, it might be nice to let them connect to others in their field.

Conclusion – People fear what they do not understand. History is littered with examples of people that saw a new technology, and blocked it just because it was new and they did not understand it. Heck, I was banned from using a calculator for much of my school life!!! Sure, it might seem like I have been a little harsh on this subject, and yes, there will be people that will waste hours a day on Facebook if you are not careful. But barring a tool from the masses because of the bad behavior of a few is not the solution. Disciplining the few is the answer. Here is the reality… If you block social media sites today, you will unblock them in the future. It is simply a matter of time until the pressure will build too high.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

The Amazon Kindle has finally started a revolution that had many seeds planted, but none that sprouted. The eBook era has been kicked off by early adopters. If you have not used a Kindle yet, then the prior statement might be hard for you to really understand. I have books and magazines loaded on my Kindle and will very shortly cease to buy paper ever again. I am just waiting for my inventory and subscriptions to run out. Whether the final winners are the Kindle, an Apple tablet, or a future version of the iPhone, the ship has already sailed on paper content. Paper based content will always exist – in the same way that a hand mixer exists in a world of electronic mixers. Grandma has one, but not I.

Cloud computing has also sprouted from the seeds that were long time ago planted in service bureaus. We did this back in the mainframe world – this renting of computing resources. It worked back then, and it will work now in an Internet and PC based world. Small company data racks in closets will go away. Medium sized companies in house data centers will go away. Hard drives in laptops will go away. Loading lots of applications on a hard drive will go away. Problems with backing up data will go away. Computing costs will continue to drop. IT departments will reconfigure. Cloud computing makes sense, we need it, and it is only a matter of time till we are all cloud based.

Speaking of reconfiguring IT departments… Those seeds have been planted as well. We have spent a few decades with IT departments that spend most of their time doing breakfix and keeping the digital plumbing running. It has been an engineering based approach to IT. The seeds are planted for outsourcing IT infrastructure into the cloud, or just plain outsourcing the plumbing, which will now free technologists to be more creative and artistic in building customized solutions and workflows that actually support the business mission. Technologists will completely change the way we approach helping an organization from one of reactive support, to proactive and creative solutions and intelligent services. IT will look nothing like it does today in ten years. Nor will the players resemble some of the antisocial introverts that now prowl the dark rooms eating cheese whiz and drinking Red Bull while adding yet another star wars character to their desk landscape.

Personal transparency will be forced upon us. Social media has sown the seeds of a whole new concept in how we relate to others – and how much they know about us before we meet. Online reputation will become so critical that people will pay dearly, and invest huge amounts of time trying to craft or repair what is said about them in the statusphere. With a simple addictomatic.com search a person can learn what other people think of me, what I look like, how I speak on video, and what my thoughts are in my online musings. Forget what I say about me, you have hundreds of comments from others that say what they think about me. We have spent centuries believing that it is a bad thing for people to know details about our life. We have fought having our privacy invaded. We have said “none of your business” a hundred times. Give it up now. People can learn about you – they will know things about you that you did not share. If you have nothing to hide, and are good at what you do, this is fantastic. If you have lots to hide and you are a poser – you will be found out before the first hello.

There are many more seeds that have been planted. I just listed a few. Predicting the future is really not that hard. Things are moving so fast at this point; we are seeing flashes of the future everyday. All you have to do is open your mind to accept what your eyes and ears are already aware of…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Upon dissecting this story a bit more, I learned that the company feels that when their leaders have a high online profile, it is easier for them to hire good people, and do deals on behalf of the company because when people do a search, they get to see a waterfall of content – mostly positive – on the exec. Now, I must admit that I have been carefully observing my online presence, and making sure that I do all that I can to generate good blogs, tweets, and UGC media with the word Klososky somewhere therein. As a speaker, I am clear that when a potential client wants to learn about me, they go to the Internet and instead of just going to my Website, where they will get glowing and eloquent words about me, they run searches to see what others are saying about me. Sites like Addictomatic.com are great at showing what the social sphere thinks of people like me. So I was not too surprised that a company would focus on creating the best online reputations it can for its leaders. I was just a little surprised they hired a third party coach to help with the job.

There are moments of time when I have two minutes with nothing to do, and I will search for someone I went to high school with – and get nothing. I don’t mean, nothing important, I mean nothing. These are people with unique last names, and I should be able to find someone, somewhere, that has mentioned them. Maybe even a Facebook account, or LinkedIn. Nothing… It is as if they simply do not exist on this world. This leads me to think of high school. For some reasons, kids like to categorize other kids. They like to label them as jocks, goth, cool, geeks, or druggies. Girls get labeled in a long list of even more unkind ways. In other words, most kids in high school have a reputation as something –earned, or unearned. Then there are the kids that are just ghosts. They went to your school, but were just non-entities in the reputation land. I guess they have never turned up. We leave high school and for the most part, our reputations are grown out of, left behind, and strangle us. Get ready, your online reputation is going to bring a bit of this back…

On the organizational side, we have a wonderful story that warms my heart. It is a video uploaded to YouTube and now viewed over a 3.5 million times, called United Breaks Guitars. If you have not seen it yet, please click the link and view it before you read on. So now that you have seen it, what do you think pubic relations like this does to United? I swelled with pride for the poor guy that had to spend his time making this video as a way to get even with United. I secretly cheered for he and his whole band as I watched the viewer counts skyrocket. I was uplifted whenever I saw someone email the link to his or her friends, or post it on Twitter. And I wondered if anyone else understood that for the first time in history, a person with a little effort and no money could strike back at injustice. For all the people that the airlines abuse, rip off, and lie to every day – one man got even. One man held them accountable for poor service when he had no choice, or ability to make the do what was right after they broke his guitar. For some reason, the US Congress refuses to pass a flyers bill of rights. Well, I guess I know why, and it is because abused flyers do not have the same kind of lobby the as the airlines. At last, we the people have the ability to deservedly tarnish an online reputation without having to marshal huge resources. This video should serve as a serious warning that social media has the power to impact those that once could hide from poor service, or behavior.

Reputation was once a bit of a mysterious thing that was only known to people that were close at hand, and had associated with us for years. Within a few more years, reputation will be whatever those around us say about us online – and then anyone with Web connection will be able to imply a reputation from afar. There will be good and not so good news about that.

Useful links

• YouTube video of United Breaks Guitars.
• Addictomatic.com
• An excellent online reputation management provider: Buzzding.com

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Would Jesus use LinkedIn? Most certainly. He would quickly find out that as he spoke to people, they would be intrigued with him and would send a connection request after a sermon. Jesus would not want to reject a stranger so he would accept everyone that wanted to Link with him. He would then turn right around and use this list of people to send information to – probably in the form of questions and parables. He would not care how large his connection base got from an ego standpoint, but would relish the ability to “talk” to many people at once – with the click of a button. Well, at least 50 at once because that is all LinkedIn let’s you email at one time. Jesus would be annoyed with this pointless restriction. He would never use the capability to “find” other people because people are supposed to find him.

Would Jesus have a Facebook account? No question – yes. He would need to have one place to upload stories, pictures, videos, and documents that he would like to share with followers. And no, he would not need a MySpace account because you only need one or the other and he would go where the most followers are, and where he could create an application that would run inside the platform. What kind of app would he have built? Probably a widget that delivered just the right holy inspiration at the moment that people needed it. He could do this by parsing the text in blogs, tweets, and messages his friends would post, and then matching their concerns to Biblical insights. Much like wefeelfine.org. By the way, his Facebook picture would be of him holding the hand of a child, and he would not care that people thought it overdone.

Would Jesus be on Twitter? If he could have only one application to use in social media, it would be Twitter. Twitter is built to allow one to accrue followers, and then allows concise messages back to those followers. He could also follow everyone he came in contact with so that he could see his or her concerns and directly respond. Jesus taught by speaking in couplets and questions and he could easily do that in 140 characters. He would over time become the number one most popular on Twitter, and would do so without ever once mentioning what he had for lunch, how he is feeling, or how frustrated he is with dropped calls.

Would Jesus care about his online reputation? No, not at all. He did not care about his reputation 2000 years ago, and would not care now. He would be saddened by the animosity of the replies to his postings. He would be shocked at the parodies on youtube of his messages. He would shudder at how people would twist his words after copying them from his musings. In the end, he would not care what people thought of him – other than to be graceful towards them.

Would Jesus have a blog? He would have a blog because not every concept he would want to get across can be done in 140 characters. There are some things that take 500 to 1000 words. These include longer stories, and deep concepts like forgiveness, grace, and trust. His blog would probably be published monthly however because weekly would be too often and would dilute the importance of the message. The hardest part of blogging for Jesus would be having to peruse the responses he would get from the people that have nothing better to do with their time than to flame the author with pointless attacks that lack any sense of intelligent debate. He would one day have many offers from companies that would want to buy his blog, or advertise in it. Only because someone else would write about his Comscore results and note that he had a following of millions. In a twist that would surprise people, he would accept the offer from Google to deliver targeted ads as a way to generate revenue that he would then use to fund missions. And he would kindly remind Google of their commitment to “do no evil”

Would Jesus have his own Website and buy Adwords? Only after the disciples agreed to manage it and keep it updated. Jesus would refer to it as a mission and would agree to record some video for the site, but after that, would let the disciples manage it. The site would become a constant source of learning experiences for the disciples as Jesus struggled with them to make sure that all decisions on functionality and ecommerce were made with a sense of holiness. They would outbid every other site on a collection of keywords and phrases like, “the meaning of life, God, evil, love, suicide, redemption, forgiveness, faith, and Bible.” Of course, the site would be defaced every now and again by Russian and North Korean hackers.

Would Jesus be OK with building online communities instead of face to face communities? For some reason, there are many people that turn their nose up at a community that is formed of like minded people online. These folks believe that if you have not shaken hands with a person and looked them in the eyes, then the relationship you build is somehow second rate. As if being in the physical presence of a person somehow builds a bond that is better than what can be built online. I believe the relationships are just in two different categories and not better or worse than the other. People can build intellectual bonds online that surpass that exchange in person for some. This comes from sharing ideas, concepts and beliefs. With that said, I think Jesus would be fine with followers building eCommunities around his teachings. The word “church” meant something very different to Jesus than it does to modern man. Two thousand years ago, it simply meant those that were believers. It did not mean a building, a denomination, or religion in general, as we use it today. As long as the communication exchange was done in truth, love, grace, and forgiveness, he would be fine the medium.

So what would Jesus do with social media? The same thing he did back then. Just faster this time.

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com

Why? Why get into operating systems and browsers when they are making tons of money in search and advertising? Since I do not have access to the internal thinking at the Googleplex, I will have to just use my left brain skills to divine the possibilities, so here is a list:

1 – Google is the king of Web based free (or low cost) software that is advertiser driven. The better a netbook runs, the better their products will perform, the better they perform, the more people that will use them, the more people that use them, the more money Google makes on clickthrough.

2 – They enjoy competing with Microsoft. Bill Gates once stated, when addressing monopoly charges, that one day soon, a competitor could develop products that would change the game, and compete mightily with MS. I am not sure he really believed that, but he does now. Google has the brain power and brand name to compete with MS and they are now attacking two of the most powerful revenue drivers at MS – Office, and now Windows.

3 – Google believes that the browser and the operating system can become one piece of software, and the world would be a better place. Well, better if they are the ones that put it on the streets – hence the common moniker on their applications.

4 – There is a hole in the market for a lightweight netbook operating system. Windows is too big for this job, and Apple may be too distracted with the iPhone success to have time to configure the MacOS into a netbook play. Even if Apple comes out with a killer netbook and their own OS, there will still be room for a competitor for those that do not swing to the Apple paradigm.

5 – Search is a great way to make money, and Google owns a 60% market share. Where else is there to go but to a different platform to sell advertising? Might as well take all that search money and broaden the revenue base. Hey, it worked like a charm for Apple; they went from a PC company to an mp3 player and cell phone company almost overnight.

As you often mention to me, so what? Well, let’s postulate why this might be interesting for you and me… There are actually more operating systems than just Windows and the MacOS if you count a couple more on handheld devices. And in every case, they do not really integrate with the browser well. This is a problem because all of us are starting to use the browser, or at least Internet enabled applications, more than we are using installed applications. So the ability to run fast, solid, and with cool features over the Web is getting to be a big deal. What Google will likely do now is force MS and others to create new hybrid versions of operating systems that are custom made to work well with the Internet, and also tuned to the device they are running on. This will be great for consumers. Even better because Google typically works to drive prices down and leverage their powerful advertising supported model.

This is the American free enterprise, competitive economy at work and I love it. Without a Google challenging MS, we would have much less innovation. Without Apple challenging Palm, Motorola, and Ericson, we would not see such advances in handsets. I give Google credit once again, for stepping into a market where competitors already exist and pushing for innovation at a low cost. I hope their Chrome operating system is awesome, and it gives engineers at other companies fits. Then I hope someone combines a netbook with the Kindle so I can just carry one lightweight device with 24hours battery time and still get my work done. Device consolidation… It is coming, and I wish it would hurry up because I need a new laptop!

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

If the Internet is the foundational first tool that allows us to create a collective and shared knowledge-base, then social media/networking is the second stage. With an infrastructure that allows us to communicate for free (or next to it) and that provides tools that make connections possible from anywhere at anytime, we are now exploring the boundaries of creating new ad-hoc electronic tribes. We have labeled this social media/networking and these tribes are now blossoming, imploding, and reforming at a high rate. These tribes can be technology based – Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn. Or they can be media based – Youtube, Scribd, or SlideShare. Or community based – Ning, corporate Intranets, or event based sites. As a member of most of these tribes, I now have a powerful collection of new tools for marketing, relationship building, idea sharing, and communicating. Every day there is a new innovation in this social media world, and I feel blessed that I understand this new movement and how to leverage it as a tool. I feel blessed for mankind that we will forever more have a set of tools that will allow us to relate to each other in new ways, to vote on the content we think is powerful, and to create streams of thoughts and ideas to share moment to moment. Alas…

I read one time that monkeys in a specific group will learn how to use a stick as a new tool and will for many generations pass down that knowledge. Yet monkeys from other tribes will never get it – even when they observe the behavior benefiting their own kind – they don’t get it. I mean really, how hard is it to understand sticking a twig in an anthill and pulling it out with lots of ants attached as a tasty meal?

I had a long conversation with an executive the other day about Twitter and the concept of microblogging and why it is a great marketing tool – he did not get it. I mean really, how hard is it to understand a flow of communications from selected sources that let’s us communicate concisely to a self-chosen group.

If you feel like I have been wandering you around on a safari in getting to the point, let me be clear… There is a powerful and growing collection of new tools under an umbrella we call social media. It is nothing more than a bunch of humans (your customers, clients, and members) learning to use the Internet infrastructure as a tool to create tribes in order to share information, communicate, and collaborate. It is more effective than many of the methods of relating we have had in the past (TV, radio, telephone, fax, etc.) It is cheap, unregulated, unfiltered until I choose to filter it, and scalable to a number of people I have never been able to share with in the past. Young people use it because it works. It is not magic, it is not complicated, and it is not expensive. It is the most democratic institution we have ever created because it crosses all geographic boundaries, and is uncontrolled by any power-broker. It is not a fad, it is a powerful trend and the longer you wait to get it, the more you are losing.

I have heard all your excuses – here they are in order. I don’t have time for this! I don’t understand this! I am afraid people will learn things about me! What if someone says something bad about us! I don’t know many others doing this in my circle!

I guess I just wonder how much you might have to see before you will accept that this new tool actually provides value. Or, I guess you can self select out of the game and let the next generation show you how to use the tool when they take over…

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com

Now we write Technology Story for business people, with business reasons, and such is the case with this topic. As business people, we need to examine the concept of eMultitasking (Yes, I just coined that for this article) and how it is already invading the workplace. Don’t think this is an issue really? Then what do you say about the raging debate about people doing email on their phones or laptops during meetings? What about all the people that do email, text, and twitter during presentations? The reality is that we already have to wrestle with the appropriateness of multitasking in the workplace, we just have not chosen to really recognize what is going on. I get asked all the time about how I feel as a speaker when I look out and see people keying in things on their mobile devices. I always tell them that I believe I either have to capture their attention fully, or have to be OK with the fact that they may be texting, twittering about me, or taking notes, and that is OK with me.

The fact is, we are just on the front end of a trend that will radically change how we do meetings, how we work, and how we view people multitasking. Most people think it is rude today to multitask – let’s be honest. They do not like sitting around a table talking and seeing half of the room typing what is surely not notes about the discussion. We think it is rude for people to text message during dinner at a restaurant, much less at a funeral. We believe people should focus on the event at hand, and the people across from them. Anything less is clearly rude – right? I remember when cell phones first came out, I was standing in line at the airport to get on a plane and was talking into my first generation phone. Being the geek I am, I was one of the first people to be doing that specific thing, and an old man came up to me, WHILE I WAS ON THE PHONE, and proceeded to tell me how rude I was for having that phone call in line at the airport. I am guessing you get the point, what he thought was rude just a few years ago, is now common.

So what is my viewpoint? I am impressed with the next generation’s ability to split their mind onto different inputs. I grew up being told I was only using 10% of my brains capacity. I am not sure scientists know that, but if true, they I believe that the next generation may use 50% of theirs because they will do five things at once and do them fully. It is a sign of things to come in the marketplace. Instead of raging against this as a business leader, I am going to embrace it and provide a culture and methods that leverage it. I am going to require people to be able to multitask, and to do it well. After all, I do not want to be the old man at the airport with GenF and their new found skills. Just a disclaimer… If my mother reads this she will disagree and tell me that no one can focus on more than one thing at a time (she is 70 and she probably cannot). If my wife reads this, she will say that you can choose to multitask, but it will drain your life energy because you are burning mind focus at triple the rates – and for my generation, she may be right…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com
klososky.com

For example, Facebook has created a platform for the eCommunity space. Their platform is allowing developers to create software programs that leverage the community aspect of Facebook by providing the connections between people that know each other. In other words, once the community is built, and you give a developer the ability to write an application inside the community’s walls, there are all kinds of interesting features that can be provided for people to share and use as a group. If nothing else, you can expose your application to the community so it is easy for them to get to your functionality.

Apple created the first wildly successful platform that is phone (or handheld) based. The iPhone platform has over 50,000 applications now written for it and is setting the bar that all other handheld makers will now have to reach. This includes Google with their Android platform built for the G1. Google clearly understands the power of a platform because their Adwords and pay-per-click empire is built on a search based advertising platform that is also defining the marketplace. It makes sense that they will now attempt to capture a major piece of the online applications space by promoting Google Wave as a platform for building online capabilities into applications, or maybe applications into an online platform.

Twitter is also a platform now. It is defining the process of microblogging. You can microblog through Facebook and other systems, but Twitter is hands down the platform that has been built to best write applications that extend the concept of microblogging. I don’t even need to waste your time giving you statistics on Twitter growth because it is pretty obvious to everyone that it is on a quick curve upward – even if it takes a time out from time to time to catch it’s breath. What is not slowing is the number of new Twitter based applications coming out EVERY DAY.

One lesson to learn for sure is that there is an advantage to writing applications for a platform in its early days. The developers that were early into Facebook, Twitter or iPhone, have been able to ride those waves to success in many cases. In other words, just being early into these platforms has created wealth for people that otherwise would never that kind of chance. It might be wise to take a little more seriously trying to figure out what the next platform to explode might be and get in front of it.

Back in the 80’s, the computer hardware manufacturers all fought to set hardware standards because being anointed with a standard gave them an advantage in the market. “They who set the standards wins” was the model. In much the same way, being anointed as the software platform of choice guarantees a company a large part of the market share in that space. Google has over 60% market share of the search space, Apple has the fastest growing handheld ever released and is now the one to beat in the market. Facebook has just passed its 250 millionth user. Clearly winning the hearts of developers and users to your platform for development is a winning strategy. I suspect this will mean a race for the next ten years of companies jockeying to be the leading platform across the spectrum of areas in technology. The reality is there can be a platform built for any type of application, and in many cases it makes sense to give the platform away for free, or a low amount of money just to have it gain majority traction. I guess this is really the model for open source anyway. So with that said, how long until we see companies providing free, or nearly free platforms in areas such as accounting systems, security, network monitoring, CRM, workflow, etc… I envision we will have a free platform for just about every type of functionality within the next 10 years. I can’t wait!!

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I started telling people some months ago that organizations, large and small, needed to document a policy for how they would like employees to use, leverage, and participate in social media as it concerns the organization. When I first started saying this, I was shocked that some people did not understand why a company would try to dictate standards to team members on how they would use these tools. It seemed quite obvious to me that their employees were representing the company on the Web through the use of tools like Twitter and Facebook, and writing their thoughts in blogs. These communications represent their feelings and thoughts as employees of the organization – even if they were meant to be framed personally. So there exists huge potential for the miscommunication of a companies messages – or at least a misrepresentation of the voice the company might want to use.

In addition, the organization can really benefit from using social media tools as a sales, customers service, or communication device. So why not set standards, and goals for the progress the organization would want from leveraging these tools? There is a benefit from being proactive and beating your competition by getting your customers to be attached to your social medial connections first. So there is great opportunity in learning to leverage these tools, and great danger if you do not get them under some kind of control. So…..

Why not create a written policy and standards document that defines what your organization wants to achieve from social media? Why not set goals for the number of connection, mentions, and followers you would like to achieve each month? Why not dictate what the organizational voice needs to be, and who can represent it, and how? I promise you, in a few years, it will be very normal to see a written policy on how employees can handle Facebook profiles as it concerns the organization. You will see contests running to see who can get the most Twitter followers. Companies will compete for the most mentions in the social space and proudly declare that they are the most talked about.

Creating this kind of document is both an offense, and a good defense. Don’t wait until five disasters drive you to write it. Get our in front of this trend and state clearly what you want from these tools so employees do not have to guess, or just simply make it up on their own.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

As always, let’s take a high level view of what they are doing… Over the last 15 years, we have developed a number of tools that have caught on as mainstream capabilities. Email, text messaging, ranking, Twitter (microblogging) and discussion groups are just a few examples. As stand alone capabilities, these are all providing value to a large audience. The next step in the evolution is to combine all of these capabilities with applications like spreadsheets, word processors, and presentation tools. Think Microsoft Office with lots of social media built in. This appears to be what Google Wave is all about. They want to provide the application platform that truly enables collaboration between anyone on the internet – at the next level. Someone will get this accomplished so we might as well keep an eye on Google because they certainly sell their products at the right price – often free. I even saw one writer today that asked the question, “is Google Wave a Twitter Killer?)

Which brings me to Twitter… One has to ask why Twitter tool off when it is in some ways, just glorified instant messaging. Be that as it may, Twitter has grabbed the worlds fancy and is now in the dramatic climb that Facebook has been in for a couple of years. So I ask myself, is what Twitter is providing anything that will not just be mimicked by many others? Certainly Google will buy, or seek to mitigate Twitter. So will Microsoft, Yahoo, and a host of others. After all, the technology behind the concept is simple. I suppose that Twitter is at a crossroads where people will either just adopt their engine as a standard, or seek to build their own and improve on it. One thing is for sure, the growth rates on Twitter are amazing. The fact that they are talking about doing a TV show is wild, and USA Today have a front page spread showing how they used Twitter to ask questions of business leaders.

Predictions can be fun in that you eventually learn if you are right or wrong. So here is my prediction… Twitter will get acquired one day soon, and regardless who buys them, at least 3 other competitors will come out with technology that does the same thing. The only advantage Twitter will have is an ecosystem of applications that have been developed around it, and a few thousand people that have lots of followers they do not want to lose. In other words, Twitter will follow the path of Netscape as a browser…

I came across this article on TechCrunch and wanted to share it. They did a great job with the explanation of Google Wave Trackers, robots that hunt the Internet for information and offer you views as it happens. Below is the first paragraph and a link to the whole article.

Google Wave may be a big deal for Google, but it’s an even bigger deal for Microsoft. It forces Redmond to step up at the very time it would rather run silent and deep. Correct that: those owners of the crown jewels who’ve guided the aircraft carrier for decades would rather ignore the impact of these two brothers and a product manager who moved Down Under to build what may well be Google’s realtime core.

The Manhattan Project at TechCrunch
by Steve Gillmor on June 1, 2009

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com