Our Public Private Lives

Recently, a blog post about a Yelp comment gone wrong circulated through the office. Despite being fictitious, this isn’t something to be written off. One doesn’t have to look far to find legitimate instances of social media blowback in our real-world lives.

What does this mean? Do we, as social media participants, need to craft all our posts to the lowest/most-agreeable common denominator, avoiding any possibility of offense (or individuality)? After all, it’s becoming a given that your online activity will be examined fairly early in the courting process, whether by a potential employer or partner. Or, will society mature, acknowledge the merging of personal and public, and evaluate people as a whole; on both their skillset and ability to conduct themselves as appropriate given the setting? If you put any stock in this CareerBuilder survey, it seems like Corporate America is at least a few years away from such an enlightened stance (and if you ask me, that’s being generous), so either get editing or get ready to defend your life.

While I like Kit Eaton’s take on the CareerBuilder survey and issue in general, I feel like he’s missing a fourth option: let it all hang out. Being a reader of this blog, I’m going to assume you’re an intelligent, well-rounded, and high-performing individual who contributes a lot to their organization and/or clients. Employers are lucky to have you and clients want to work with you. Do you think their opinions would change if they found your mullet-adorned, beer-swilling college photo? What about last week’s salty tweet about Mel’s, ahem…opinionated…voicemails? If so, maybe that fit wasn’t as good as you thought. However, if truly putting yourself out there means posting stuff that would turn off even the most open-minded of us, maybe you need to reexamine your life.

This seemed like a good idea at the time (on multiple levels)

That’s a tough stand to take in such tenuous economic times, but do you really think this whole social media thing is a fad? Me neither. So let’s be the ones to jump in with both feet and show the way. If we’re to do that, there’s definitely some reorienting of expectations needed by all players.

Users: Expect everything you post will be discovered. By everyone. Forever.
Employers: Learn and embrace the new sharing. Focus on the whole person and their ability to be a professional in professional situations.
Parents/Educators: Orient your charges to the impact/permanence of online posts. Help give them the perspective they inherently lack.
Creators: Manage participation, but don’t suppress opposition. Use your power to build communities.

Nobody’s going to argue that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook sure have some things to learn in the PR department. And while what the Facebook creator said in January about privacy no longer being a social norm could have been phrased a bit better, I think the idea behind it is right on. People are sharing more and more of their private lives online for the world to see and despite threats to the contrary, nobody’s leaving because of privacy controls (especially Phil). We like the idea of privacy, but when push comes to shove, we’re pot-committed to our social media lives even if we’re not ready to admit it.

Social Media: No Spectators Allowed

How many times have you heard a key stakeholder in a digital initiative throw out a broad statement like “we need to include some social media in this”?

“Well Duh” Statement #1: Many folks who say these kinds of things can’t really quantify what they mean or what the value proposition might be.

“Well Duh” Statement #2: Many folks who say these kinds of things do so in the same manner that they might say “what the heck, let’s super size it too” or “can we throw some racing stripes on there too? That’d be cool, right?” Obviously, they don’t get that there’s a whole discipline of business strategy emerging around the phenomenon. It’s not nearly as simple as “turning it on” – especially because with social media there’s not simply the potential for great uptake vs. no uptake, but also for self-destruction. You need to curate and shape your social presence, not just “set it and forget it”.

Illustration by Mike Colibraro

But there’s also something more subtle going on that I’ve recently come to see as a trend: too often we hear these folks (particularly those in higher positions at larger organizations) talk about social media as if it’s something that will occur at ground level and they’ll watch it unfold from above. They talk about it as if it’s something to delegate to others. They talk about it as something that might perhaps be good for some other class of folks but not for themselves.

If social media is good for your business, it’s good for you. It is not good enough to read articles about how social media is influencing the business landscape and to know some of the buzzwords. If you don’t have accounts in the various types of outlets and you’re not actively using them, then no, you don’t get it. Period.

I’m not saying that all executives should be engaging in social media on behalf of their brand, per se (though when done right, there are benefits to be derived). But they should be engaging at least on their own, and here’s why – if you’re not in the thick of it, you simply can’t understand the dynamics of the interaction, the manner in which things trend, the way news breaks, the way brands are made or destroyed, and the real dynamics behind things like crowd-sourcing and cyber-bullying (of people, brands, or otherwise). That’s important because, “duh” again, if you’re a decision-maker for initiatives that may have social components, you need to be familiar with how these things work in order to effectively manage, direct, and lead in this space.

Not Even If You Dedicated All Day, Every Day

But, let’s put some parameters around this too – you should be familiar with the different flavors of social media, but being everywhere (see above) would be impossible even if it was your full time job. The key is to be informed and participate in a qualified subset and to leave their opinions and preconceptions about those channels at the door. It’s OK if you “don’t get why it’s so popular”, but it’s not OK to let that be an excuse for avoiding it. That’s the same as a 1940′s advertising executive saying, “this TV thing is a fad, newspapers aren’t going away – that’s where we should be focusing our business.”

The good news is that getting up to speed is free – it just requires some of your time and dedication. What it all boils down to is that you can’t effectively answer the question “how can we harness social media?” until you’ve answered “how can I?”

An Overlooked Enemy of Good Design

Today I did something I don’t get to do very often: I turned off my email. Aside from three pre-scheduled check-ins to make sure nothing was melting down, I was off-line almost the entire day and able to focus on a single design assignment. Toward the end of the day I reviewed my work with the client to collect their feedback and tomorrow we’ll start the review process with other stakeholders.

It later struck me that eight consecutive hours of focus is a rare thing. In this case I was making significant changes to two months worth of work due to a very wise decision made by a very wise executive. That is not sarcasm – a good decision was made, and to be successful we needed to take three steps back in order to take four steps forward. It was refreshing to do this kind of rework and feel like I was “doing the right thing” rather than diluting something as a result of design-by-committee.

I’m a huge fan of theoatmeal.com, but when Matt Inman vents over idiot clients or copycat design methods, I feel like he’s missing the point. In my experience, one of the greatest enemies of good design isn’t what we typically blame: clients, technology, time, money, or even nepotism. I’m calling out the turf war.

illustration by Mike Colibraro

We do a lot of work with pharmaceutical companies and much of my efforts focus on helping clients communicate important information to physicians, nurses, and pharmacists. I’m not talking about your typical marketing site for a new drug, but the volumes of clinical information that pharma companies provide to the medical community free of charge and without any marketing messaging. This information gives your healthcare providers the data they need to make informed decisions and, without question, it saves lives. The sad fact is that the medical industry doesn’t always trust information coming from “Big Pharma.” There are a lot of reasons that have contributed to this situation over the years. The pharma industry has been spending a lot of energy trying to remedy the situation, but fixing trust issues is a hard game.

I can’t meet physicians without grilling them about how they use technology in their practice. A while ago I ended up sitting next to an ER doc at a baseball game. We got to talking and I asked him about the electronic medical record systems at his hospital. I was not surprised by what I heard, but it’s a great example of how turf wars are the enemy: a series of battles between medical departments, vendors, healthcare systems, and their IT departments leaves many ERs with multiple systems. Sometimes they have multiple screens up for one patient: charts, radiology, labs, research, etc. Many of these systems don’t talk to each other because they’re built by competitors who want to dominate the market. None of these decisions were made to improve usability or achieve better patient outcomes; they were all made to “protect” someone’s group, market share, or position.

So…back to my entire day of focus: the reason why that’s so rare is due to the unfortunate reality that in my typical day, much of my time (and I suspect yours) is dedicated to dealing with the fallout from turf wars. Over time, those successful in these wars become unable to function any other way – they default to tactics of offense or defense. The wisest don’t contribute to the wars. Fueling that fire means you’re not doing what you do best: focusing on good design. Less time spent on design means less time collaborating with your friends and colleagues over in Content, Development, IT, and Testing. It also means missed opportunities reaching out to users and stakeholders for critical feedback.

David Maister wrote a book called “The Trusted Advisor” that every UX designer should read. Much of the book is dedicated to trust building. You don’t build trust by getting sucked into the turf war, you build it by doing the right thing.

Memorial Day w/ The HTC Incredible

About three weeks ago, I spent an excessive amount of time in a Verizon Wireless store and finally made the decision to order the new HTC Incredible. I’ve been in the market for a smart phone (my first!) for some time now. I played with a couple of friends’ iPhones when they first came out and really loved the touch interface and the variety of apps. Then another slew of friends picked up Motorola Droids and, once again, I found myself green with envy. Yet I waited, wrestling with the knowledge that the next best thing is always 3 or 4 months away from being released.

The HTC ended up winning out over other smart phones for a few reasons:

1. I was already a Verizon customer so it was a simple upgrade
2. It was being touted as a multiple app running beast (very appealing to the multi-tasker in me), and
3. I thought there might be more interesting apps coming out of Google’s Market than the more strictly moderated iTunes Store

After running around all holiday weekend with it by my side, I think I made the right choice.

Observations:

Easy setup: Even though I was upgrading from an older model phone (Motorola W385), I was able to transfer my contacts without any issues using Verizon’s Backup Assistant app. The Incredible downloaded them all, sorted through the rather disorganized mess of numbers/addresses/emails and did a great job of linking everything together into an usable directory (finally!).

QR Barcode

Fun apps: I immediately downloaded a number of apps that I had heard about, like Barcode Scanner, Pandora Radio, FourSquare, Google Sky Map, and a new battery widget that let me easily manage the WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, and screen brightness. I’m really taken with the Barcode Scanner, as it ties right into Google Shopping so you can quickly check out price ranges on anything you can scan. It also supports QR Codes, which you may or may not have seen before. They can be used to quickly share a URL or short message and are great for accessing something quickly on a mobile device without having to type anything.

Holy 8MP Camera, Batman: I’m exceedingly impressed with the camera. It’s not the high megapixel count that does it for me, but the performance of the autofocus. My last phone came with a VGA camera which was useless unless I wanted to know what something would look like if I was underwater with a clear plastic bag over my head. The Incredible on the other hand takes great pictures and the Photo app is very intuitive. I also like the app FxCamera which provides a number of filters to apply to photos to make them look like Polaroids (nostalgic), overexposed (hipsterific), or Warhol-esque (groovy).

These camera pics turned out far better than I expected...

Battery usage: The battery life seems to be alright. I’m very aware that anything I decide to do will use it up but I’ve been good about enabling/disabling services as needed. I can definitely go through the whole day on less than one charge. (As I’m typing this, the phone has been up and running with moderate usage for 8 hours and I still have 70% of the battery left). Because my previous phone could go for 3 or 4 days without a charge, I initially felt cheated – but the Incredible has far more in common with a laptop than a phone. That point of view helped massage my expectations into something more reasonable.

I feel the need – the need for speed: Thus far I’ve experienced nothing but great performance while navigating features and running apps. The phone is very responsive and the haptic feedback (the buzz whenever you click or type) is very nice. Last night I started running all sorts of apps to see if I could make the phone sweat and, even while using Google Earth, Layars, generating directions in Navigator, playing music, and recording a video; the phone never stuttered. I don’t know if that should be expected but I was impressed.

Call quality and messaging: To be honest, the calling is only so-so. My last phone was unable to do anything but make calls and double as a doorstop, but it did both of those things exceedingly well. The Incredible falls down a bit here. I do like the way it handles SMS messages, however. It displays them like a chat log, increasing the feeling of natural conversation rather than uni-directional texts.

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Anyway, my iPhone lovin’ friends at Think Brownstone were interested in my gut-level thoughts on usability with this very alien device after the first 72 hours and I thought maybe you would be, too. Has the battle for the smart phone throne just gotten even more intense? For me, it’s over. For now, anyway.

Cool ≠ Useful

If you’re anything like me, then whenever a friend sends or posts a message that says, “this is cool…” you follow the link. And if you’re anything like me, you spend a lot of time playing with cool things on the interwebs, eventually forwarding them on to other friends until it grows faster than Heather Locklear’s recommendation for Faberge Shampoo.

Here’s the thing we all seem to forget: cool doesn’t always mean useful. Cool just means cool. Cool is relative and difficult to measure while useful is easier to recognize. Those of us who like to build things that are useful like to believe that useful is universal, but that’s not always the case (see Charron v. McIntire).

NYT Globe Interface

To me and the friend who forwarded it to me, the NYT interface for looking at images and videos from news feeds is cool, but its usefulness eludes me. Ignoring the bugs I discovered with the search field on the right, I’m not really sure when I’d go to this for a purpose. I go to it to play, and I have fun. Then, when I want to find an image about a specific news story, I use a well crafted image search tool like Google or Bing. Why? Because they fulfill my need in the most convenient way. If, someday, I have a need to see the frequency and location of images on the earth, I may go to a globe-based navigation tool. For now, it just adds a cognitive and psychomotor load that I don’t need. Don’t get me wrong, I still like to spin the globe and play with the stacks of photos, it just doesn’t fulfill any needs of mine other than entertainment.

A whole host of UI and UX companies out there have elaborate navigation systems that show off the design and flash-coding skills of their staff. I’m not going to point out any because that’s not our style here at Think Brownstone. They’re easy to find, I’m sure you’ve seen them, and once again if you’re anything like me, you’ve said, “Hey, that’s cool!” and forwarded it on to a friend. The problem with those fancy navigation systems is that they may impress your friends and attract the attention of a client or two, but are they doing anything to help your users?

One of the fundamental principles of design is to focus on goals: in the UX world these goals are most often Business Goals and User Goals. The designer’s job is to address those goals. Period. If you have determined that one of your goals is to provide entertainment, then the “cool” types of interfaces that require users to invest time to learn how to interact and explore for content are legitimate options. If not, then all you’re doing is appropriating your user’s time and they don’t like that. No matter how good the content is, if you obscure it, they’ll go somewhere else.

Don Norman likes to use the impossible teapot to demonstrate Cool v Useful:

Impossible Teapot: Cool, But Not Useful

If you’re a child of the 70s and 80s, think of it this way: you spent hours on end in a shady arcade somewhere navigating the mazes of Pac-Man (with an all Rush and Van Halen soundtrack, natch). It was entertaining. It was cool. In fact, it was so cool that a few days ago Google celebrated the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man by putting a working version of the game as the banner on their search page. Hours of productivity were lost around the world. Google drew even more traffic to their site.

Google Pac-Man: Cool, But Not a Recommended Search UI

If Google Pac-Man was sooo cool, why didn’t they force you to clear the maze to conduct your search?
Because Cool ≠ Useful

Information = Action!

Recently I watched a highly recommended video of Eric Topol discussing the future of smartphones in health care and wireless medicine. The potential inherent in the technology he discusses is enormous…but it got me thinking a little more deeply about how this type of technology might affect human behaviors – and more specifically, how this type of information might affect them.

One of the issues with leading healthy lives is that people know that there are things that are “Good for You” and “Bad for You”, but they have traditionally had no way of conceptualizing and internalizing just what that really means. In most cases, that kind of knowledge only comes with experience – sometimes when it’s already too late to change things. There’s a lot of wiggle room when defining “healthy” (plus, it varies significantly per individual), which is why we need more information to be consistent. More on that in a bit…

First, a disclaimer: I’m the type of person who likes more information. Give me HUDs and readouts, maps, charts, and figures! I want as much information as possible, about everything around me, and then I’ll sort through and reprocess it. For instance, my parents’ car has a cool little display that provides all sorts of information about the car; which doors are open, if the tire pressure is low, the temperature outside, which direction you’re driving, etc. It also has a gauge to show you both your overall and real-time fuel efficiency:

The Dashboard Setup in a Honda C-RV

As we learn to drive, we each develop a working mental model of how we think a car operates. I suppose I believed mine was pretty good but in fact I never really thought much about it. Once I started driving a car with a meter that told me exactly how much gas I was using, I found myself making conscious adjustments: accelerating a little softer, or laying off the gas to coast to a stop instead of slamming the brakes. These behaviors weren’t completely new to me, but that little meter helped reinforce them and made me more consistent.

Now let’s take that concept and apply it to our own health:

• What if your Smartphone helped you track your blood sugar levels, so that when you had an enormous slice of cherry chocolate cake you could see quite clearly the effect it had on you? How long would it take before the food selections you made and portion sizes would start to change?
• What about applying that same principle to cholesterol levels?
• How could continuous blood pressure monitoring help you consciously make decisions to control your stress levels?
• If you had access to a sleep diary like the one Eric Topol discusses, and you found out that the nights you had a late dinner or fell asleep with the TV on resulted in an hour or two less REM sleep, would you act on that information to feel more rested and alert?

For years we’ve obeyed the gauges in our vehicles, but we didn’t have gauges on our bodies and so it was easier to make decisions that deep down, we knew probably weren’t the best for our health. It’s going to be a lot harder to turn a blind eye to destructive health decisions with this kind of technology becoming available to the masses – and if that’s what it takes to turn more people onto the benefits of preventative health behavior, then I say bring it on!

Lessons in Redesign: Popular Contributors Know Their Audience

Some interesting things have been going on over at The Atlantic’s online magazine. Several days ago, the organization launched a redesign of the entire website.

Interestingly, none of the regular editorial bloggers for the site were pleased with the results. Political blogger Andrew Sullivan showed his displeasure in a few fair, critical, complementary and informative entries on his blog. According to the original entry, Sullivan’s blog accounts for 55-60% of the traffic for The Atlantic.

Rather than launch into a lengthy deconstruction the entire redesign to extract the good ideas from the bad, I’d just like to point two elements of the process that could have been used to predict the outcome:

1. Andrew and his staff are constantly in touch with their audience. He says he has passed on feedback from his users to The Atlantic for the past three years. His blog is responsible for 55-60% of the site traffic, yet he wasn’t directly consulted by the redesign team for ideas.
2. Andrew admits that he “signed off in advance” based on paper prototypes of the redesign (except for the removal of the search tool). He takes responsibility for this misstep, which is appropriate.

Working with stakeholders is not only about buy-in. Content creators are often the closest to the users and can provide insight on not only the content itself, but how users consume the content. At the same time, content creators should not sit back and let redesign efforts happen without insisting on providing input. Content is not only about content, it’s about your connection to the audience. If you’re generating that much traffic, you have insight others cannot capture – find ways to share it.

The good news is that The Atlantic has continued to work through the concerns and has already begun to address some of the issues expressed by the staff.

OK, now two critiques:

• Removing a search tool on a blog that generates up to 300 posts a day doesn’t seem very wise (there’s a search tool on the parent site, but not on the blog).
• I’ve always regarded the continued reading feature that requires rendering an entirely new page as a naive attempt to increase pageviews. Come on, there are ways to track interest without frustrating the user.

Do You Believe In “It”?

As you read this post you’ll likely be able to identify an early interaction that made you conscious of “it” on a grand scale – for me, one of those would be using an “Automated Teller Machine” for the first time. 24/7 access to cash and all I needed was a card and a PIN – it was truly magical. Still, some folks were apprehensive about those machines – some fearing that they wouldn’t receive the correct amount of money, and some simply not understanding exactly how the machines interfaced with their accounts. Fair enough, but many of those trust issues have been ironed out over the years and today only the most stubborn banker still avoids ATMs.

Moving on, as I started making more customer service calls of my own, I became aware of another instance of “it” – phone trees.  Calling the airline, the phone company, the electric company…being directed through endless sub-categories only to reach an “answering machine” or be disconnected…terrible, hair-pulling experiences that haven’t improved much in 20 years.

What Is “It”?

The “it” I’m referring to is the endless march toward self-service that began sometime in the late 70s and early 80s as a way for companies to cut costs and outsource client and professional services to the customers themselves.  What may have seemed like a radical concept at the time is now ubiquitous. In fact, we’re so used to it that it only becomes obvious to us when it doesn’t work, and we really NEED some insightful help that is nowhere to be found.

I thought the image below was extremely telling of our collective response to the concept of outsourcing services to end-consumers (click to see in its full glory):

Courtesy Of Mike Sacks At www.mikesacks.com

Of course, almost everyone knows who IKEA is, and for the most part they do an excellent job creating a customer self-service model that works. However, what the illustration cleverly points out is that there can be a heavy burden placed on the end-customer when previously in-sourced roles and services (in this case, furniture assembly) are placed in the hands of the uneducated consumer without a full set of tools (clear instructions) to bridge the gap.

What Does This Example Have To Do With Customer Experience? 

More than you might think. If we go back to ATMs and phone trees, and think about all of the additional things outsourced to customers (those who don’t wish to pay a premium to continue to “have it done for them”) since, the list is lengthy – here are just a few:

• Pumping Gas
• Purchasing Stock
• Assembling Furniture
• Doing Taxes
• Instigating Legal Procedures
• Banking
• Checking Out (Retail)
• Booking Travel
• Managing Investments

Of course, the list will continue to grow, and will someday encompass areas we would today never consider as a category for self service such as professional medical services, or university education (although those areas are already becoming encroached by semi-self service).

Why Should We Care?

Well, last week I was at the grocery store checking out with my milk and eggs preparing for the impending nor’easter, and this is what I encountered:

Niiiiiiice. For All The Sordid Detail, Click To Enlarge

The user experience is so bad, the staff at the local grocery store has resorted to 3 different post-its with varying messages in the hope that the customer will read them before and during their use of the machine.  Need I say more?

The direct correlation on the web is that more and more applications and services are being placed in the hands of end-customers, and I fear that companies of all types (SAAS or on applications on-demand anyone?) are largely unprepared to fully understand and translate the needs of those customers in applications that are easy to use, and fully functional.  I suspect the “virtual post-it notes” will continue to grow in size as firms struggle with the onslaught of customer frustration they will unwittingly generate all under the guise of “making it easier for consumers to help themselves”.

If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing Right

Don’t get me wrong, customer self-service can be a GREAT thing – for companies and customers alike. Back to the ATM – do you remember how things used to be? Trying to get to the bank before it closed (or risk being without cash for the entire weekend)? Being forced to wait in line for a simple transaction, behind folks with all manner of requests (large and small) and all degrees of financial (and social) aptitude? Who would want to go back there? And why should banks pay tellers to preside over the kinds of basic, repetitive transactions that can be handled by ATMs? The efficiency gained and amount of money saved that goes directly to the bottom line can be astronomical.

Once again, it’s about allowing innovative ideas like customer self-service to truly flourish by applying design thinking to their deployment. It’s about reducing the cognitive burden on users, providing the full set of tools necessary for interacting via the selected channel, and being honest about where the line should be drawn: sometimes the best solution will still require human interaction at some point. This in no way constitutes failure – after all, the goal is not simply to put as much of the process on the customers as possible, it is to drive them to completed transactions (satisfaction) as intuitively and efficiently as possible!

Facebook’s ‘Evil Empire” One Year Later

It has been nearly a year since I penned my original rant about Doomsdayers and Nay-sayers terrified about Facebook wanting to own their content. As many predicted, FB changed their entire business model and made a fortune selling all of those riveting lunch updates and pictures of sleeping cats. My guess is they’ll probably pull all ads from their site soon because the revenue they’ll make on all of that inanity is worth much more than the targeted ad revenue they could make off of a community of 350Million+ users.

Seriously though, in the comment thread for that posting, KS posted an understandable comment that the issue is more about privacy than content ownership. KS must be some kind of fortune teller, because the latest doomsday meme concerns Facebook making all of your content accessible to public search engines.

I fittingly put my feelings about this issue in my FB status last month. It was so funny, four of my friends copied it to their status… I practically went viral, yo:

Attention People: time to panic. As of forever, things you put up on the internet may be available for people to see on the internet. This is a clear violation of your privacy on this completely voluntary system. To disable this, go to your start button and choose “Shut Down.”

This posting mostly annoyed Mac users who could not find the start button…

Most of the rumbling calmed down once FB instituted a series of messages and annoying dialogue boxes to warn you that this meme isn’t 100% true. Then Zuckerberg opened his yap again and some chicken littles kept venting about it. Essentially, FB is allowing Search Engines to crawl the profile information that YOU determine is part of your public profile.

Many aren’t taking issue with the fact that FB has done this, they just take issue with the fact that the default settings made more of your information public than the average user would like. Novice users are probably completely in the dark. These points make sense, and are much less alarmist than the folks who are using the social networking site they (theoretically) despise to terrify the masses.

My Public Facebook Profile: Most of these people don't even like me

For me, I stand by my original thoughts: FB is a business. FB is enjoying tremendous growth. The more users, the more money there is to make. The last thing FB wants to do is make decisions that will cause them to go the way of MySpace. FB even reacts appropriately when they make a decision and forgot to consider the viral reactions of some alarmists. However, when they made the decision in 2007 to create PUBLIC profiles and recently to open them to PUBLIC search engines, it wasn’t part of some Orwellian plan to make a few bucks or deceive their users. Their thought process probably went something like this:

FB1: You know what – if an old friend of yours isn’t on FB and they’re looking for you, they can’t find you.

FB2: Well, they can search for your public profile through FB…

FB1: But wouldn’t it be better if they Googled your name and found a link to your public profile in the results? I mean, it’s a public profile, and that way they may join FB to become your friend.

FB2: Hey, good idea… it would certainly increase our organic search placement. Let’s get on that!

So, what’s the lesson here? It’s not really the privacy issue as much as it is the way FB approached the change. Somehow they have to work into their updates a communication plan to explain exactly what changes they are implementing and why. They need to get into the heads of the alarmists and defuse the bomb before it goes off. They need to be proactive rather than reactive. That’s a tough order when they’re probably making hundreds of minor changes regularly…which ones are the alarmists going to pick?

Or they could follow the path they’ve been walking and lose the folks who are terrified of Big Brother lurking in the darkness. What does FB care, though? Those people only cause trouble and the noise doesn’t seem to be impacting their market share… yet.

Taking Social Media To Task (Part 2)

You’ve been waiting with baited breath for this, no? Well, I aim to please…and this one is unique in that after posting initially, Phil sent me a response with some further insght that I think is brilliant – so I’ve included it here for a nice little point/counterpoint. Chime in!

Don’t Call It Multi-Tasking – Jacks Of All Trades Are Masters Of None

This one is really more of an observation put out there for further thought – but it was also sparked by my attendance at epatcon. At one point during the conference it suddenly hit me that 60% or more of the audience had laptops open in front of them (not counting those who were on PDAs and Smart Phones). Sure, some people use them to take notes or to look up links being mentioned, or tweet key points – the kind of behaviors that were the clear majority at AEA. But what I saw at epatcon was clearly of a different ilk. I was baffled by a woman at the table next to me who, for the entire day, worked intently on what was clearly an unrelated work document.  I wondered “why would you pay good money to come to a conference like this, and then pay absolutely no attention to anything going on around you? Why not just stay in the office…or if you needed to get away, go to the local coffee shop?”

I’ve heard people defend this behavior before by saying that they are “just multi-tasking” – but if I had asked that woman for her opinion on what had just been said, at any point throughout the day, I’m quite certain it would have been like a teacher calling on a student who had been daydreaming. People are of course free to waste their conference fees if they want to, but not only is it distracting to other attendees, it is incredibly rude to the presenters. As a sometime presenter and adjunct faculty member in the digital design program at Philadelphia University, I felt bad for those up on the stage for having to wonder if the large amount of people staring into their screens were engaged in what they were saying or in something else entirely. The lack of feedback in the form of eye contact and body language can really leave one feeling a bit out to sea.

Guilty as charged! We all do it...but for the record, this was on a break!

The really amazing thing is that we don’t see this only at large conferences where we can remain largely anonymous – we even see it in small meetings with co-workers who we know well. I know I’m not saying anything we don’t all know there – but what is the cost of this behavior? Again, forget simple manners and mushy stuff like feelings…what is the monetary cost when I have to repeat everything I just said for the past five minutes because when I ask someone’s input they are jarred and say “what? Oh sorry, can you repeat that?” And how good will their answer be when they weren’t really present during the rich discussion that preceded my question? Multiply that by the hundreds of times per week that happens across your organization…makes you think, no? Loss of time, loss of money, and loss of quality – quality of interactions, team-building, and decisions/outcomes. Quality of experiences.

So I ask, what is this ubiquitous technology doing to our real-world interactions, communications, and experiences? As in the Twitter example, the etiquette will probably shake itself out in time…but it is fascinating that somehow over the past ten years or so what would have once been considered complete disrespect and poor interpersonal skill has become modus operandi. In the words of the inimitable Mr. Horse, “No sir, I don’t like it.” It’s not about shunning the technology or stunting its integration. It’s about maximizing effectiveness and efficiency – and on the whole, the very real disconnect I felt at epatcon makes me think we ain’t there yet, folks.

PHIL’S RESPONSE:

Hey, check out this link – it offers some additional insight and perspective on this and your last post – be sure to click through to the links (particularly the Danah Boyd – fascinating).

Additionally, some comments – much my personal opinion. First, there is support for your “multitasking is a myth” argument – some you’ll find in the link above.

I personally don’t think the “people on their laptops during conferences” argument holds water. You’re up on stage, the people who are engaged are the ones you should be talking to, you don’t know who is taking notes and who isn’t paying attention. It’s time to get used to the fact that people have laptops and at large venues, it’s just a part of life. The people in the room who are distracted by others on their computers need to get over it too. To me, if everyone is cruising the internet ignoring the speaker, it means the speaker is not engaging, and that’s a different issue.

In more intimate environments (classrooms, breakout sessions) I get it… it frustrates me too. It has been hard for me to get over my own students typing during class, but now I live with it. If I notice they’re browsing and not note taking, I ask them to stop… but I know this is the way people are.

I’m not trying to detract from your argument about meetings, though. I am guilty of violating that rule too. Your point is very valid and I think you should make it. Tons of time is wasted by people who think they’re “multitasking” when they’re actually ignoring what is going on in the room. To me, it’s the equivalent of talking on the phone while someone is trying to converse with you face to face.

There are times when this kind of behavior is appropriate, but it takes some situational analysis and some agreed-upon rules… for instance, if you walk into a regulatory meeting and are told to have a seat until they’re done with their conversation, you should open your laptop and be productive. They’ll tell you when they’re ready for you. But the rule of the room is known – not everyone is relevant to the conversation, but the people who are  should pay attention.

The other day I had a pizza delivered. The guy showed up and was speaking on his phone. I asked, “How much?” and he put up his index finger to say, “Hold on.” I couldn’t believe it, so I said, “No, tell me how much.” He told the person the phone, “Hold on a sec, I have a customer.” The only tip he got was the coinage.

In the end, society will work out some generally accepted etiquette about our ubiquitous technology, but there will always be detractors. It’s like driving, there are things you just don’t do even though there are no rules about it. If someone is daydreaming when there’s a red light, you give them some time before you tap the horn to wake them up. But there are always jerks – the ones who lean on the horn the second the light turns green. They may be racing to the hospital with a severed limb, or they may just be a jackass.