Facebook’s nailed it!

There’s been a lot of talk in the media about online social networking tools such as MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

In my view, Shakespeare predicted MySpace nicely with his line from MacBeth: “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

There is research that indicates that people tend to ignore all data when they are given more than they can process. Recently, neuroscientists tested people for the effects of information overload and found these symptoms:

1. Irritation
2. Boredom
3. Inability to take decisive action
4. Pervading sense of “So What?”
5. Failure to respond

This is how I felt about MySpace. I found MySpace overwhelming and without meaning.

When I read an article in the February issue of Business 2.0 about LinkedIn, I was excited about the possibilities of LinkedIn and started to use it to link to other business professionals.

After a slow start, the service has nearly doubled its membership during the past year. Seeded with Hoffman's own high-powered network, a magnet for tech's movers and shakers, LinkedIn has capitalized on the Web 2.0 boom to attract more dealmaking members and race past its rivals.

VC heavyweights Sequoia Capital and Greylock - whose hit parade includes Apple, Cisco, Google, and Yahoo - have pumped nearly $15 million into LinkedIn. The private company says it's profitable and on track to hit $100 million in revenue by 2008.

I feel sure that if I were job-hunting, a recruiter or solely-responsible for business development, I would use LinkedIn much more than I do.

So far, the actual results have been underwhelming. I can’t see how it’s had any significant effect on my business or my relationships with professional contacts.

Then Bill Petro invited me to join Facebook. I’ve known Bill since he took our “iPresentation” workshop at EMC in March of 2002. We’ve since become friends. At first, I thought, “Oh, great – another networking site that won’t live up to it’s billing.” That was followed by the thought: “Bill is a pretty tech-savvy dude. He must see some value. Why not give it a try?”

I signed up and found it easy and pleasant to interact with friends and clients online … but it still didn’t hit me as a ground-breaking application.

I read an article in Wired magazine about Facebook that caught my attention. It was titled: "How Mark Zuckerberg Turned Facebook Into the Web's Hottest Platform."

Today, Zuckerberg, 23, is famous for other reasons. For one thing, analysts think he could be the nation's richest man under 25, with a net worth estimated at $1.5 billion. But more important, he has transformed his company from second-tier social network to full-fledged platform that organizes the entire Internet. As a result, Facebook is the now most buzzed-about company in Silicon Valley, and Zuckerberg is constantly compared to visionaries like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Even some of the tech industry's most legendary figures are genuflecting before Zuckerberg. In an entry on his blog, Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen called Facebook's transformation "an amazing achievement — one of the most significant milestones in the technology industry in this decade." Says Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, "I'm in awe."

This article caught my attention and raised Facebook's profile on my radar screen. Then, something remarkable happened. I received this Alert from Google: “Serena Software Adopts Facebook as Corporate Intranet."

Serena Software is a client. In fact, I have managed the Serena Software account at The Henderson Group since we started working with them in December of 2003. In addition, I have personally delivered all the workshops we’ve done at Serena in that time frame. We’ve worked with sales, marketing, professional services, and development teams. Consequently, I have a LOT of relationships there.

This struck me as a seminal moment for both Facebook and Serena. Both have received significant press as a result of this announcement.

In the last few weeks, I have found myself having conversations with clients, many from Serena, on a daily basis.

Here’s what I’ve noticed:

1. I find myself looking forward to spending time on Facebook much like I enjoy spending time at YouTube or IMDB.com.
2. Facebook is the ultimate web mash-up incorporating so many elements of the web into one interface.
   For example, videos and photos can be posted on Facebook. Hence, YouTube and photo apps such as Flickr, Yahoo! Photos and Snapfish should be feeling the heat. When I can log into one site and interact with friends and associates, take a look at their photos, blogs, or videos, without having to do another stinking log-in … How cool is that?!?
3. Conversations with clients take on a MUCH less formal tone because I am hearing about the details of their day. For example, people post their current status such as:
   “Terry Gault is enjoying the comfort of home. Aaaah.”
   OR
   “Dave is contemplating leaving the City...”
   This last remark led me to contact this client/friend to learn more about the reasons for leaving and explore if there might be a business opportunity for my wife, RealtorRobin.
   Hence, the platform drives a higher level of intimacy and authenticity – a major theme in my work as a communications trainer and coach.
4. Facebook is the hottest platform for do-it-yourself developers. In this video (from Serena) titled, “Why Facebook?” Tim Zonca brings out some amazing facts:
   Facebook allows users to access 7400+ different applications
   The most popular apps have 3 million users every day
   
5. The traditional marketing methods are no longer necessary to create an audience of users.
   The decision to open the Facebook platform to developers has enabled them to create applications that users can easily access in one place and recommend to their friends. Hence, do-it-yourself developers can develop a HUGE audience of users by creating a fun application that spreads through viral word-of-mouth recommendations. Whenever, someone adds an application to their profile, that fact is published to all their friends. Often, these applications (comparing movie tastes on Flickster with Bill Petro, comparing traveler IQ with my nephew, insulting my actor buddies with the Shakespeare Insult Generator) are how the interactions take place on Facebook.
   

It’s a fully integrated web experience unlike any other I’ve experienced. Facebook has delivered on the promise of creating community online in a way that’s been talked about for years but never delivered … until now.

Story Corps - A Worthy Project

I can't recall the first time that I heard about Story Corps but I know that the moment I heard about them, I was inspired. Storytelling is a HUGE component of communication. I preach it regularly to all my clients and in all the workshops that I lead. In addition, it's how we share the collective wisdom of our families and communities.

"Our mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening.

Since 2003, almost 30,000 everyday people have shared life stories with family and friends in our StoryBooths. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to share, and is preserved at the Library of Congress. Millions listen to our broadcasts on public radio and the web. StoryCorps is the largest oral history project of its kind.

Everybody’s story matters. Every life counts. Help us reach out to record our history, hopes, and common humanity—and illuminate the true character of this nation."

The Story Corps has a website as well as some fun blogs for their mobile trailers, both west and east. There is also StoryCorps Griot - a one-year initiative designed to collect the stories of African Americans. You can find their blog here.

NPR.org has posted recordings on their website that you can download as a podcast or hear online from the Story Corps project.

You can order either a CD with recordings or a book titled, "Listening Is an Act of Love" at Amazon. I ordered the CD and am looking forward to listening to it on my next flight. (The spoken word on a MP3 player/iPod is a great way to pass time on planes.)

Green web host

If you have a web site, you can do something to make an environmental difference - go solar.

I read this article in the (Sob!) final issue of Business 2.0, one of my favorite biz rags: "Server Farms Go Solar."

Massive data centers are vital to the economy. They are also notorious power hogs. If their numbers keep growing at the expected rate, the United States alone will need nearly a dozen new power plants by 2011 just to keep the data flowing, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

That's why a small server-farm company called AISO.net (for "affordable Internet services online") has gone completely off the grid. Located 80 miles southeast of Los Angeles in the desert hamlet of Romoland, AISO.net has flanked its 2,000-square-foot building with two banks of ground-mounted solar panels, which generate 12 kilowatts of electricity. Batteries store the juice for nighttime operation.

Relevant Factoids:

• AISO.net is completely off the grid, gathering all their energy from the sun in Romoland, CA.
  
• GreenestHost.com is reselling AISO's 100% solar service to mom & pop websites.
  
• Al Gore's LiveEarth concerts were webcast on AISO's servers.
• Sun Microsystems cut energy consumption 61% with their new state-of-the-art facility.
  

Paint the web green!

SeatGuru.com - A Traveler's Friend

Check out SeatGuru.com.

As a frequent traveler, I've used this service many times over the last couple of years and found it valuable and informative.

You select your airline and aircraft and the site will give you information on every seat. If you roll your cursor over seats on their map, up pops a box with more detailed information.

Transparency and Reputation

Thom Friedman is one of my favorite columnists. In the column that appeared in The Santa Rosa Press Democrat (A NY Times newspaper), he writes about the transparency brought on by the blogosphere.

Reputations retained forever on the Web

THREE years ago, I was catching a plane at Boston's Logan airport and went to buy some magazines for the flight. As I approached the cash register, a woman coming from another direction got there just behind me - I thought. But when I put my money down to pay, the woman said in a very loud voice: "Excuse me, I was here first!" And then she fixed me with a piercing stare that said: "I know who you are." I said I was very sorry, but I was clearly there first.

If that happened today, I would have had a very different reaction. I would have said: "Miss, I'm so sorry. I am entirely in the wrong. Please, go ahead. And can I buy your magazines for you? May I buy your lunch? Can I shine your shoes?"

Why? Because I'd be thinking there is some chance this woman has a blog or a camera in her cell phone and could, if she so chose, tell the whole world about our encounter - entirely from her perspective - and my utterly rude, boorish, arrogant behavior. Yikes!

When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone is a publisher. When everyone has a cell phone with a camera in it, everyone is a paparazzo. When everyone can upload video on YouTube, everyone is a filmmaker. When everyone is a publisher, paparazzo or filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. We're all public figures now. The blogosphere has made the global discussion so much richer - and each of us so much more transparent.

This related to the idea of "radical transparency" that I wrote about in a previous post. I was thinking about this today.

In a YouTube world, political candidates can no longer control their message if they slip in an unguarded moment.

In the world of the blogosphere, companies can no longer count on a press release alone to reach their audience.

In the age of Digg and Yelp, Everyman becomes the taste maker, the reviewer, the critic rather than the traditional media.

It seems to me the solution is to identify one's core (most authentic) values, then work everyday to manifest those values. Only through consistent and diligent effort, can we build and protect our reputation.

I am reminded of the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said:

"What you are thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary."

Images and PowerPoint update

bigstockphoto.com

Check it out.

They license stock photos for $1 - 2 per image. The quality of images seems high and the selection appears to be good.

I'd like to hear about your experience using them.

The Urban Dictionary

OK, so, maybe you are a middle-aged white guy ... like me. You wish you could be all hip and urban and down with the latest street lingo. But, instead, you are a middle-aged white guy ... like me.

Here's the solution: The Urban Dictionary.

Finally, it's a level playing field. You can find out what "word" and "ese" actually mean without having to reveal what a unhip, dorky white guy you actually are. You can toss around hip, edgy slang like "That's how I roll" and "bling" with the best of them. You can watch "Boys n the Hood" and "Colors" without subtitles.

The Urban Word of the Day is hilarious.

So, now you have a resource. This internet things is pretty stinkin' cool especially for mawgs like me. Double true.

Images and PowerPoint

Finding images for PowerPoint slide shows is a time consuming process.

That said, it can be time well spent ... if you are using PowerPoint correctly, making images and graphics the focus rather than text.

PowerPoint is misused by the VAST majority of corporate users. Edward Tufte (described by The New York Times as "the Leonardo da Vinci of Data") believes that PowerPoint is responsible for degrading the effectiveness of corporate presentations. In his words:
"Rigid slide-by-slide heirarchies, indifferent to context, slice and dice the evidence into arbitrary compartments; producing and anti-narrative with choppy continuity."

In a sense, we are using a linear, hierarchical, left-brained format to communicate a layered right-brained narrative.

It's clear to me now that learning to utilize the right-brained big picture tools of story and metaphor is a requisite to excellent communication.

Finding the right image to capture a visual metaphor or to tell a story can be a tricky business. That's why I was very interested in an article in the April issue of Business 2.0, titled, "You Ought To Be In Pictures." The article focuses on the business of licensing images and lists several image sources.

There are "The Goliaths":

• Corbis
• Getty

And "The Davids":

• Fotolia
• Dreamstime
• Shutterstock

I would add to that list:

• Concept Images
  

Of course, Google's image search is a great resource for images but one has to be careful about violating copyright laws, especially for corporate presentations. Also, Google can be far more time consuming as the images are usually not labeled or tagged with the searcher in mind.

In other words, if you are looking for the image of a female archer, you are likely to use "female archer" or "woman archer" as your search string. However, Jill, an avid archer might post dozens of high-quality images of herself practicing archery on her personal web site and never use those words to label her photo files.

The sites that license the use of their images are incented to tag them so that they can be found easily. Hence, searches using the paid sites can often be less time-consuming.

When I work with intact teams, I coach clients to create a pool of images that each team-member can draw from. This can help to cut down the amount of time spent on searching for images. In addition, it encourages conversations about how various images, stories and metaphors are being employed. "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." said Pablo Picasso. You SHOULD be stealing ideas from colleagues, if you want to truly master the art of communication.

I've made much personal effort to make sure I had access to all the images that we at The Henderson Group have compiled over the years. Having a good recall of these images has often saved me from time-consuming image searches.

This is an important personal practice that can benefit your team-members as well. Some final tips:

1. Thinks in terms of story and metaphor
2. Use images to tell your story or illustrate your metaphor
3. Use image resources and services to help you find the right image
4. Make the image the focus on the slide, taking up more real estate
5. Minimize the use of language
6. Keep bullets to a minimum
7. Think of your bullets as very succinct "hooks" (more on this is a future post)
   

Radical Transparency and Authenticity

The cover story "The See-Through CEO" for the April 2007 issue of Wired Magazine addresses a new philosophy in business driven largely by blogs and the internet. They call it "Radical Transparency."

The article argues that it is impossible to control the image of your business anymore.

" 'You can't hide anything anymore,' Don Tapscott says. Coauthor of The Naked Corporation, a book about corporate transparency, and Wikinomics, Tapscott is explaining a core truth of the see-through age: If you engage in corporate flimflam, people will find out. He ticks off example after example of corporations that have recently been humiliated after being caught trying to conceal stupid blunders. There's Sony, which put a rootkit - a piece of spyware - on music CDs as a secret copy-protection technique, only to wind up in court when bloggers revealed that the code left their computers vulnerable to hacker intrusions. There's Microsoft, this time on the wrong side of the transparent shower curtain, offering to pay people to buff up the company's Wikipedia entry. And Diebold, which insisted its voting machines were unhackable - until a professor posted a video of himself rigging a mock election on them. The video went viral and racked up some 300,000 YouTube views."

The example they provide that drove this point home very powerfully was this:
"When Shel Israel and blogger Jeff Jarvis wrote about wretched treatment by Dell's customer service, their posts were so gleefully linked to that for a while they appeared as the number one and two search results for 'Dell.' "

I found this article extremely intriguing. This made me think of transparency not only from a corporate standpoint (a company being transparent to build trust with customers, employees and investors) but also on a personal level.

Authenticity is an important element in the work that I do with The Henderson Group - leading workshops and coaching clients on their communication and presentation skills. This idea of transparency is strongly connected in my view. If you have developed superb communication technique but are not being fully authentic, your co-workers and audiences will sense that there is something amiss.

Transparency on a personal level translates to being vulnerable and up-front. It means revealing personal details and quirks. Trying to hide them suggests that you are concerned that people will discover your true self. That invariably comes across as lacking in confidence.

In our workshops we address the dynamic of "explaining" when receiving feedback. When we try to show that our intentions are perfect and there were understandable reasons for the reason that our performance was not perfect, we come across as defensive and lacking confidence.

Truly confident people (who know themselves and are willing to be seen as vulnerable and imperfect) project a rock-solid belief in themselves: "Yes, I made a mistake in this case but I still believe in myself."

It also means being proactive in pointing out our mistakes. I remember vividly early in my management career the lesson I learned about fessing up when I'd made a mistake.

If I did not report that mistake to my boss, ESPECIALLY if I tried to cover it up, he would be on me like white on rice. (Does the phrase "reamed" have special meaning for any of you, too?) If I went to him and said, "I've screwed up" and explained the problem, invariably he was very understanding and compassionate.

David Henderson, my dearly-departed former mentor and co-founder of THG, used to tell me, "Tell your first truth first." By that David meant that in moments of fear and confusion to turn inward and examine deeply what is most truthful for one's self.

A client recently asked me about giving feedback to her teenage children. She confided that they were often resistant to feedback. (Really?!?! Teenagers resistant to feedback from parents?!?! Alert the media!) I spoke about the idea of authenticity and framing her feedback as a positive statement. I asked her, "What is your core message? What is most important to you?" She thought for a moment and her voice dropped into a deeper register with her eyes welling up. She replied, "I want them to understand that I am setting limits because I care about them." I suggested that she make certain she said that when she speaks to her kids. "If they see that deep sincerity, they will get it. They may still resist but they'll understand and be more likely to comply."

Finally, the willingness to laugh at one's own foibles is a liberating way to demonstrate transparency. When I was younger (and much stupider) I used to spend inordinate amounts of energy focused on being "right." It was more important to me to be respected than liked, I have since learned (largely due to this work) is that vulnerability, transparency, warmth, good-humor and empathy are FAR more important.

One of my favorite writers, Frank Herbert (author of Dune, the world's best-selling science fiction novel) said something like, "A person who has the ability to laugh at one's self has taken a step toward the highest level of civilization."

The willingness to be up-front, vulnerable, show one's warts can go a long way in being authentic and building trust.

Movie fan? Try peerflix.com

At peerflix.com, you can trade DVD's with other users for $1.50 per trade.

Terry Gault
Sent with Wireless Sync from Verizon Wireless

Google CEO Eric Schmidt's preso course

Recently a client at Charles Schwab suggested that I check out a video of Eric Scmidt, Google's CEO. The video shows him taking a presentation course early in his career while he was GM of Software Products Div. at Sun Microsystems.

It's interesting to see him progess over the course of the workshop. He starts out looking uncomfortable and nervous. He is using a lot of verbal filler, moving his feet constantly, not sure what to do with his hands, and struggling to hold eye contact.

Later, he seems more purposeful, decisive and confident. I would coach him to extend his gestures and take up more space but he's dramatically improved toward the end.

Notice the coat and tie (in Silicon Valley?!?) and the massive spectacles. SO early 80's.

Guy Kawasaki, Visionary!

Back in January, I was leading a workshop at TIBCO with their marketing team. Stefan Farestam sent me some links to sites that he likes.

I spent about an hour surfing around Guy Kawasaki's blog, How to Change the World.

As his site states, "Guy Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine."

He offers very interesting perspectives on work, business, start-ups. I loved his ideas about presentation and the use of PowerPoint. I particularly liked his "The Art of the Start Video."

I am not worthy ...

Addiction to Connectivity

I have been working in Palo Alto the last few days and staying at a
local hotel. The "broadband" network speed was so p-a-i-n-f-u-l-l-y slow last night that I cancelled my reservation for one night next week and am unliklely to stay here again.

In fact, I couldn't post last night because pages simply would not load.

It brought home to me how critical it is for businesses and entreprenuers to stay connected to the web, especially those in high tech or those who serve high tech clients.

It reminds me of one of the themes of Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" - Does our technology serve us or are we the servants of our technology?

Jott.com - A very cool service

Say you are away from your computer ... driving ... or riding the shuttle to your rental car.
Your mind reviews recent events, conversations, your upcoming activities.
You want to remind yourself to do something.
You can speed dial a phone number on your mobile, record a message, and in a few minutes you will receive an email capturing your words in text.
How?
Using Jott.com. It's a beta service at this point.
I tried it today and can already see a TON of uses for this cool service.
Check it out at: http://www.jott.com/

Test post from mobile

We live in an age where we take magic for granted.

I posted this to my blog from my mobile phone.

Terry Gault
Sent with Wireless Sync from Verizon Wireless