Unsecured Social Indexing

I just read THIS today on ReadWriteWeb.  Basically a new study says an overwhelming percentage of people don’t use privacy settings for their social presence.  This begs the question, “If so few people do it is the setting really necessary?”  Sure, it’s great to have the option to control who sees what where, but if so many people don’t use it, is it possible that people just don’t care?

With BusinessCard2.com, we automatically submit our customer’s unique domain link to major search engines for indexing.  Not to toot our own horn, but we’re really good at it.  Over 90% of our users climb up into top search results for their name in about two weeks.  Someone might say that since we do this automatically that we’re not doing a good job of providing options.  But, I’d say our customers call this FREE SEO.  In the history of our company I can only think of two instances where people emailed us because the explicitly did not want to show up in search any longer.

What I’ve found and heard through my many discussions with our users/customers is that they want to have control over the way they appear in search engine results, and we’re part of a mix of ways to make that happen.  Although I find the data from Webroot interesting, I find it a little suspect that they didn’t fully identify WHY people don’t use a heightened level of privacy setting.  My guess is that most don’t care, so long as they have control over what presence they have via the particular social network.

The Social Graph in Business Contraction

So I’ve had some great discussions lately about the macro economic environment.  In the last week I’ve been meeting with fund managers overseeing hundreds of millions of $$$ in cash.  The pretty unanimous response is that we’re looking at economic instability until about Q2 of 2010.  Depending on the specific conversation, the average response is that we’ll see a sharp uptick in economic activity thereafter, with a major spike in inflation.  The reality we’re all facing right now are layoffs, generally less demand for products & services, tougher times accessing capital, and all the other stuff that comes with a prolonged recessionary period.

On Feburary 2nd Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer put it best when he said, “The truth is, you only get economic growth from the following things. Population growth, inflation, productivity increases…and financial leverage.”  So with that I’ll get into what I really wanted to talk about.

BusinessCard2 has been experience tremendous user growth in new sign-ups, but the traffic level of searchers has not (yet) grown at the same rate.  Nevertheless, we offer the service freely to those looking to market themselves.  The benefits are: 1) Improve SEO/rank performance, 2) no competing with ads since YOU are the ONLY advertisement, 3) you can store files and other data in our cloud to inform/educate prospects who visit your page, 4) It’s FREE.

My experience in building out this offering has provided me unique perspective in tactics for climbing the social graph.  Now this is good experience and knowledge when you’re running a company, but as of late it has also meant that lots of people are crawling out of the woodwork asking me for my infinate wisdom on social strategy and how to climb the social graph.  It seems that as the economy worsens, more people are taking this stuff seriously.

To maximize your time, and my efficiency, I’m putting this post out.  It’s more of a place to direct people to so I can keep focusing on the work in front of me.  It’s not perfect, but it’s my top-level recommendation to get you started…

1. Set-up a “blog” link on the website, and start to build up a readership of  interested readers.  This can also be done by attaching a wordpress or blogger account.  In testing, I have found it performs pretty well to create BOTH a wordpress AND blogger account and simply post the same content to both sites.  I call this mirroring.  Both have good SEO performance and weighting, and will probably entertain readers that wouldn’t otherwise be discovered simply through a site-specific blog (although I recommend he consider mirroring this same content to your site-specific blog as well).

2. Post lots of good photos to Flickr and good videos to YouTube.  Imagery is a good part of a social marketing strategy.  Simply create an account, update images/video, tag the heck out of your content, and embed links on other sites and ask your friends/colleagues to do the same.  Also embed these links in your social sites (like facebook).

3. Create both a “group” AND “product fan page” on Facebook.com, and do an initial invite of friends into each.  When this is done and people either join the group or become a fan of those pages, it shows on the wall of all those people’s friends.  This is the viral effect.

4. Create an RSS feed of your updates.  There is a good population of people out there that would like your RSS feed for their feed reader.  To create an RSS feed, this is good guidance:  http://www.rss-specifications.com/create-rss-feed.htm From the feedreader or google reader, users simply capture the RSS url and load it into their reader.  You want to make it as easy as possible for visitors to grab your content rss and put it in their reader, so slap those orange rss buttons all over the place.  To create and convert to rss, I recommend www.feedburner.com.

5. Create a Twitter account for your message/brand/website/you/etc.  Twitter is probably the most convenient way for you to quickly/easily update people with content. Although somewhat limited for narrative (the have a character limitation for each message), a social strategy is to create a summary and TinyURL in twitter linked back to your longer blog posts and pictures, or other content.

6. The social graph does extend to email!!!  Create an email newsletter subscriber list.  Send out a weekly or bi-weekly email newsletter with top-level summary of activities, and also post links to all the other ways people can follow you on a daily basis (facebook, flickr, your website, wordpress/blogger, rss feeds, twitter, etc.).

7. Be aware that effective social is very hands on.  It means altering your lifestyle by accommodating these updates to keep constituents informed. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of letting a couple of days slide without updates.  Social is a snowball effect and takes time to build up the audience.

[This advice was recently passed along to a dude that's been on the Oprah Show, but it now just starting to get going on a real social strategy.]
So now that other part of all this effort…the EXPECTATIONS.  In other words, what in the hell is going to come of all these efforts!?!  Well, speaking honestly, for many of you it will be an exercise in learning social, but it won’t result in much benefit.  For the few of you who take it deadly serious, these are some of the things you might expect…

1. Exposure and buzz
2. Personal, profession, or business branding and awareness building
3. More effective management of your personal, profession, or business reputation
4. Sales and new lines of business
5. You will get hired for a new job
6. External links will be created by other people to your content
7. People will become viral carriers of your messages
8. Your sites will rank higher in search engines
9. All this will grow on inertial and will manifest into a well-oiled machine positioning you as a though-leader in your space.  You will have unforeseen traffic volume increase and people will be clamoring to know you, buy from you, or have your baby.

A word of advice…
It’s a lot easier putting this stuff up than taking it down, so always take a very professional and respectful tact to any content you put up, because it might be there for many years to come.  Make sure your content is appropriate to the audience you want to serve.

World Wide You

You shouldn’t feel privileged just because a Google search of your name actually results in websites that refer to you, that’s what Google’s search algorithm is designed to do. However, when you can control the content on those results…that is powerful.

Now don’t lie. Surely, somewhere in the corners of a dull afternoon, you typed your name into Google to see what happened. If you did, you’re not alone. Millions of people Google themselves every day. This ego phenomenon is so pervasive that a slew of businesses are providing services to help people control how and what comes up during a search for their name (see: Qalias, Reputation Defender, etc.) Recently I came across THIS VIDEO that plays off this aspect of vanity so commonplace for those of us who live online with frequency (Warning: crude language).

The internet has undoubtedly forever altered the way we do business. It used to be that a referral from a trusted source was all that was needed before going into a meeting. Today, before almost every single new meeting I’ll perform a quick “due diligence” search based on the person’s name. If nothing comes back, I have this knee jerk reaction that the person may not actually exist. I’m certain that other people do the same type of pre-meeting searches that I do.

If you’re like me, one of the critical items I look for is number of results that come back in Google. For example, if you Google my name “Lief Larson” you’ll find about 250,000 results. If you Google my friend “Dan Schawbel”, publisher of the wildly popular Personal Branding Blog, you’ll get about 84,000 results. A search on “Michael Arrington”, the publisher of TechCrunch, will net you about 700,000 results. Of course this isn’t a barometer for your reputation significance on the web, but it does indicate your reach, which may be interpreted as good or bad by those wanting to learn more about you.

More important are the Top 10 search results. Although you could create a bunch of websites, diligently contribute to your blog every day, you may have little if any control over the top results if the other websites that reference you have better search relevancy. This can be a problem when you want to control those Top 10 results to make sure people see you the way you want to be seen.

If you’re looking to put some effort into controlling how others see you online, take a gander at Pete Kistler’s article “How to Interlink Your Web Presence“. Pete does a great job of providing some practical tactics that can be employed over a weekend to ensure you are giving yourself the best shot at having control over the way others see you, and getting those results to take over the Top 10 spots.

The Localization of American Commerce under the Globalization of Capitalism

I’ve always been a believer that if you’re going to write a blog, than at least keep up with it.  Admittedly, this cardinal rule has been broken (I have not written in weeks).  Rather than putting out sound bites to the marketplace (and world) at large, our time has been spent working on modeling and technology development surrounding the future of BusinessCard2, so I hope you’ll accept my humble apology for the infrequency of posts.

This Monday I attended a small forum called “Innovation: Drivers and Impediments” held at the University of Minnesota.  The event was moderated by U.S Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez and professor Rajesh K. Chandy, who also serves on the Dept. of Commerce Measuring Innovation in the 21st Centry Economy Advisory Committee.  The panelists included the CEO of 3M George Buckley, the CEO of Medtronic William Hawkins, and board director of Carlson Companies Marilyn Carlson Nelson.

During this forum on Innovation there was much talk about the U.S. value proposition to the world.  The consensus was that we are a country of innovators.  The panel dissected the unique nature of the American people and how we strive to find solutions to problems.  The majority of questions addressed by the commerce leaders came from the small audience, including yours truly.  What I took away from the event was that for the U.S. to stay strong in the “international business war” we need to maintain our fundamental competitive differentiators — leading the world in innovation — by supporting invention and focusing on the impact innovation has on the economy.

In an article coming out in the September 2008 issue of Minnesota Business, I have gone out on a limb by stating that I do not espouse to Tom Friedman’s theory “The World is Flat.”  Although Friedman has strong ties to Minnesota, he might as well be from another planet.  Although his analysis of globalization has proved accurate for those seeking to remain competitive in the global market, it is my personal and professional believe that the world is proximate and this is a big opportunity which I would love for him the write on.

During my studies at the SJMC at the University of Minnesota back in the late 1990’s, I put forth a theory loosely based on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that I called the Theory of Geographic Relativity. In my theory I postulate (axiom) our lives, both personally and commercially, are always first defined by the geographic distance from an object of prioritized need.  That is to say that although a bottle of water might only cost a nickle in Beijing, you’re still going to buy it for a dollar from your local convenience store, especially if you can’t afford to die from thirst.  [Keep reading, I'm going to make a point here.]

Even though China is becoming a viable economic competitor to the U.S., if we are reliant on our energy in the form of gasoline from Saudi Arabia and Russia, because we don’t have supply to meet demand here, and the cost of bringing the products we prioritize on ships burning fuel back here to save costs, we’ve just undermined economic value.  In math, it looks like this…

Toothbrush made in the U.S. = $1.05
Toothbrush made in the U.S. w/distribution cost to U.S. = $0.22
Toothbrush made in China = $0.31
Toothbrush made in China w/distribution cost to U.S. = $0.96
TOTAL COST FOR TOOTHBRUSH MADE AND SOLD IN U.S. VS. TOOTHBRUSH MADE IN CHINA AND SOLD IN THE U.S. = $1.27 vs. $1.27

This is of course a hypothetical cost scenario, but it is one that shows the former cost advantages can now be viewed as a deterrent with increasing energy costs impacting transportation of goods and services.

On the Discovery Channel I’ve enjoyed watching The People’s Republic of Capitalism, hosted by Ted Koppel.  This has provided me some insight on the cultural differences of the Chinese, as well as their growing economy.  However, I have seen nor heard anything that makes me fear China.  Let me explain why…

Maslow, for the most part, was correct with his Hierarchy of Needs. No where on this list of needs is a single item that can’t be procured locally from any city in the U.S.  Therefore, all items outside are not needs, but rather wants.  So, in essence China has successfully exploited its cheap labor force and established an economy based on foreign “wants”. America has an uncanny ability to meet “needs” in proximity.  The economic downturn has shown that the first thing people cut are the “wants”.  Our net gasoline consumption in the U.S., for example, is a “want” that decreased by 11 billion gallons in the last year.  In fact, we are staying home more often and traveling less.  My local gas price has fallen from $4.04 a month ago to $3.44 this morning and I’m betting this is going to continue.  This is not a direct result of supply and demand or commodity future’s speculators, this is a result of “need” vs. “want” prioritization.

Now, as China and India boom, the real question is how do we balance the playing field in terms of global trade?  Well, the first thing on both of these countries “want” list is going to be improving infrastructure (something coincidentally we’re dealing with again here in the U.S.*).  Next, their growing middle and upper classes will move from basic needs, to wants.  American innovation, quality and progress are the envy of the world.  In Koppel’s program, he showed a slightly upper middle class family that “WANTED” to buy U.S. made Ethan Allen furniture because of its “unparalleled quality”.  By the year 2012 the middle class of India will be larger than the entire population of the U.S.  That is a huge growth in want consumers.

I would argue that a properly trained and well-equipped manufacturing company in India or China can produce quality for it’s own consumers.  I don’t think this is the boon for the U.S. that will kickstart our global trade, save a minority of quality manufacturers in the U.S. that have a strong brand.  I also argue that because of the same energy costs making internationally sourced consumer products more expensive, it is fruitless to dream of a future where the U.S. becomes a low-cost manufacturer to the rest of the world.  So, what is the answer then???  Where does the U.S. position itself in the global market?

Only time will tell.  But to remain a successful country I strongly feel that our ability to take risks, our ability to pioneer new methods and practices, and our ability to invent and innovate are our future strengths.  I believe that there will be a movement in the U.S. to buy locally produced commodities, goods, and services not only because they are the best available, but also the cheapest.  I anticipate that we will “want” less and fulfill more “need” locally, and this will improve our quality of life, standard of living, and also improve our position globally as we reduce foreign dependency.  We will invest locally, but sell our innovation both nationally and abroad. Our next national chapter may be the localization of American commerce under the globalization of our capitalism.

*I’m happy to report that the 35W bridge down the street from me that collapsed last year will reopen, incredibly, in the next 45 days.

Building and Protecting a Professional Reputation

Not all professionals are created equal. One of the most obvious career differentiators available to professionals today is the ability to stand out in a competitive marketplace by calling attention to experience credentials. Another factor that can differentiate you is your professional reputation. Often the two go hand-in-hand, and there is no better place to expose this opportunity than the web.

Have you ever been considering doing business with somebody and decided to look them up in Google or Yahoo!? If so, you’re not alone. Hundreds of millions of searches are performed each year based on name alone. Typically the way this works it that you type in “John Doe” into Google, then start looking for results on that person. However, as utilizing search in the due diligence process has increased, potential partners, customers, and even vendors are searching for more in-depth information. In other words, having no web-based identity or reputation is almost worse than have a few pages floating around out there.

Beyond merely entering a name in the search field, many people are also using more advanced tools, such as tracking people with Google News alerts, to stay on top of a search subjects’ identity. We all know that you need to be careful what kind of pictures and content you put in sites like Facebook and MySpace, but it’s equally important that you can find, understand, and manage what other people have to say about you online; this information also influences how people doing research on you perceive you professionally.

Now that you’re ready to start controlling your reputation, I have some good news for you. BusinessCard2 has just released a recommendation system that allows friends, current and former colleagues, clients, and vendors to provide feedback on their experiences with you. We supply this information to the search engine robots to make those recommendations available for indexing in the search engines. What is so novel about this is that you can manage the recommendations from your BusinessCard2 account, thus having a point of control for your professional reputation.

The more positive information and constructive feedback, such as recommendations, that exist online, the better your chances of pounding home the fact that others have had positive experiences with you should influence new searchers’ attitudes toward you. In other words, one negative comment online can get buried by 30 positive comments.

Release of BusinessCard2 Widget V. 1.1

Well. It’s there, finally. We have released BusinessCard2 web widget v. 1.1. It’s a long time in coming and I’d like to give a little public praise to Jereme Allen for his hard work. Before saying what it is, I’d like to describe why we did it. Late last year we started to look at making some modifications to the badges we provide people as a quick link back to their business card. However, were very keen on the idea that interpersonal communications are moving outside of the walled garden. A widget solution seemed a natural fix, but Flex was just in its infancy (which was o.k. because it bought us some time to work on pressing issues with the BusinessCard2 platform). We created the BusinessCard2 widget over the last 45 days to empower our users to move outside of our walled garden.

So what is it? It’s basically a tool that takes content, as our users publish it, converts it to flash, and acts as a dynamic means for people to look at that data virtually anywhere on the web. Since this is such an early version I can confirm that we’re looking at taking it to the next level, but we’re pleased that we have our foot in the door with something that users can implement on their websites (er, virtually any place they want it to go). When the content in BusinessCard2 is updated, the card updates no matter where it is residing.

Here’s an example of my widget… (please note that I did not load it into WordPress because they are slow to adopt Flash Widgets).

VIEW LIEF’S BUSINESSCARD2 WIDGET

We’ll be working through the proper channels to allow users to extend their card widget. Until then, you can log into your account, click on “MyCards” and then click on “Card Widget” if you’d like to see how your card widget appears or if you’d like to code to publish your widget to other web sites.

Musings on Contention in Data and Portability Thereof

If you ever read Master Sun’s The Art of War, you’ll understand clearly that contention leads to conflict, and conflict leads to war. No clearer is this the case than yesterday’s battle about data ownership amongst some of the most prominent technology bloggers. Warning: the following link is to a podcast that contains adult language. You can listen to the discussion here.

At the heart of this heated discussion is the ownership and portability of personal data proceeding the tete-a-tete involving Google and Facebook. The summary scenario goes like this… if you give somebody your business card, the social contract states that you’re sharing your information with that person and they’ll then own it. However, you trust that the transfer of that data is on a one-to-one basis. Now imagine for a second if that person took your business card and published all of your contact information publicly in a way that any person could gain access to that, but that is not exclusively what you intended with your contact info. Would that be a breach of the social contract?

Of course there would be a penalty in such a scenario. If you did not want your information widely published, you’d hold the party you shared your business card with responsible, right? Well, that’s the scenario being faced in the web social networking space. Facebook, through their actions, appears to believe they own any data that you have created on their application. In fact, up until a couple of months ago it was extremely difficult (if not impossible) to delete/remove yourself from their application.

In an effort to make our personal data more portable, groups such as OpenID are working to allow users to carry their personal information with them across the web. But now let’s look at the bigger issue. Imagine for a second that you have a friends list, social graph, or contacts data. Should you be able to take that with you too? And if so, does your social contract with all of those people empower you to take their contact data wherever you want?

This is a very challenging issue. BusinessCard2 has been on both sides of this issue; we have allowed for the publishing of contacts’ data and have also put full account and data control in the hands of our users. Just in the last week we made the decision to avoid the problem of contacts assigned to a single identity by opposing any functionality in our application from importing a users’ contacts. This was a rather simple decision because we felt it was the right thing to do. It may slow our growth, but we think the rewards are that we can sleep at night without concerning ourselves over maintaining data on people who are not or do not want to be a part of our application.

This contention also brings up an even bigger issue, and that is the fact that BusinessCard2 is not purposed as a social network. In fact, I’d say we’re the opposite of a social network. A social network is about aggregating contacts and connections, primarily involving those who you have relationships (whether authentic or virtual) with. BusinessCard2, on the other hand, is purposed to help bridge the gap between you and somebody you don’t yet know. In our model, it’s a solution to uniting two disconnected nodes (you and a customer who doesn’t know you yet).

As a commercial connectivity tool, we are providing our application as a means of broadcasting your professional identity to new audiences: potential new customers, potential new partners, etc. This of it as your own personal dynamic website that you own and control, but can go outside of the walled garden of BusinessCard2.com.

The walled gardens of systems like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., are good for Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. At times they’re also good for the body of the social network (Facebook may not have grown as large if they didn’t have a walled garden). Regardless of personal opinions on the moral and contractual obligations of data and data portability, the simple fact is that people want to and should be able to move freely outside the walled garden, and should be able to terminate their data within a walled garden any time they wish. The leading social networking websites understand this, or portability wouldn’t be an issue. From a defensive position, they want to ensure that their application isn’t just a fad, so they’re willing to talk about things like portability. But, when they say one thing and do another, that is a smoke screen, right?

Launched Beta Today

After several weeks of hard work (special thanks to Jereme) we pushed http://businesscard2.com live today.  Still a little buggy, but I really didn’t have anything better to be doing at 11pm on a Wednesday night.  If you’re interested in checking it out……

In 1658 a Star Was Born

In or about 1658 in France, during the rule of Louis XIV, the business card was born. More than 350 years later and approximately 140 million of us worldwide are using business cards in almost the same way – a small piece of paper used to transfer contact and commercial information.

Although the business card might have been inspired during the period of Louis XIV, it has matured from a calling card into a necessity preceding business transactions. Several years ago, while talking on the subject of business cards with a colleague, he identified the business card as “the world’s tiniest billboard”. And isn’t that what it really it; a billboard that can be easily passed around?

In 17th Century England, the “trade card” grew roots. In London at the time (a period before GPS) is was often difficult to find merchant shops. Shopkeepers used the trade cards to help potential customers find them more easily. Typically there was a small litho map giving their shop context to the vicinity.

In the 19th Century, business cards begun their use in France by nobility, while at this same time they made their away across the pond to America. Within fifty years business cards were widely used and accepted in commercial transactions.

During the 20th Century business cards reached critical adoption rates. Nearly all types of businesses and professionals used business cards to trade information at the beginning, or end, of meetings. This custom continues to this day. Business cards are most widely used in the Unitied States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Australia. However, due to global westernization, business cards can also be found used with frequency in Eastern Europe, Russia, China, and India.

After the fall of Japan in World War II, the American influence on commerce included business cards. In fact, like many of the post-war developments of Japan, they took the business card and made it better. In Japan the business card is known as “Meishi”. If you ever have an opportunity to do business in Japan, you’ll do well be reading this information first. Trading business cards in Japan is serious business and if you forget to bow, you might not get the deal.

Back in late 2006 the BusinessCard2.com team was working on a web-based SaaS and discovered several users appreciated the way we helped them to display and manage contact information in the web environment. In March/April of 2007 we launched a new application (called Lyro) to test out our hypothesis that business people may want to share business cards across the internet. Although the service was met with some fanfare and some critical suggestions, we were genuinely the only company putting all our efforts into the concept of a Business Card 2.0.

So here we are in 2008. Thousands of publishers and blog owners continue to hide their contact information behind forms. Hundreds of large e-commerce websites maintain people behind walled gardens of data, making it as difficult as ever to find the right person at a company. And, in the mindset that business is all about two people connecting in a meaningful way, tens of thousands of websites of service provider companies don’t even publish information on who their sales reps are. This is likely a turning point in personal branding on the web. More than ever, people want to be easily discoverable.

So what is the future? We believe that future is BusinessCard2.com, and it will launch Summer 2008.