Alas, I’ve fallen behind. Two weeks ago, 23 Things for Research focused on social networks.
Thing 10: Facebook
My Personal Page
I have a personal Facebook page. My challenge has always been how to manage having Friends from a variety of different contexts:
- 1. There aren’t a lot of things that I want to tell all of my Friends…
- 2. …and frankly, some of my Friends are prone to posting things that I would rather not read. This has been particularly irksome during the election season that we Americans have just endured, in which gratuitous inflammatory rhetorical flourishes have been our favorite mode of discourse, be it print or post.
To sort out this problem, I have I discovered and used the List function, categorizing all of my Friends into groups based on how I know them. This way, I can:
1. Read specific Lists when I’m in the mood to hear from specific groups of people…
2. …and share information only with specific Lists that I think would be relevant and interesting to them.
A Community Page – E.B., Bunny About Town
Beside my personal page, I have created a Community page for E.B.
Backstory: I stole an Easter Bunny from my mum’s brunch table decorations a few years back. I’m not proud. (That’s not true, actually. Yes, I am.) I carried E.B. about for a year, taking pictures of him and telling his stories, sharing all of them on Facebook. E.B. went all over the world, from home in Houston to Asia and Oxford. You can see his pictures from Britain here.
Thing 11: LinkedIn
I work in the private/commercial sector, and I have had a LinkedIn profile for some time. My profile had been Spartan with no details beyond companies and dates.
At the #23Things Twitter chat on 1 November, I asked how much detail was recommended on LinkedIn. Liz McCarthy responded that her profile echoed her CV. My friend Kathryn had said something similar, so I spent some time cruising the LinkedIn profiles of other Contacts I respected. I found that many people included a resume-like description of their experience. I spent some time dusting off my resume this weekend, and I updated my profile accordingly.
I had a minor existential crisis over what to put in my Summary. I looked at Liz McCarthy’s and Kate Lindsay’s profiles to get ideas for style. I quite like the Summary that I posted:
IT professional with over ten years experience solving problems and creating business value through technology
Specialties
Facilitation for consensus-building | Critical and creative thinking | Analysis and synthesis | Documentation for knowledge sharing and preservation
Now that I’ve updated my Summary and Experience, I await the aftermath. There is a truism in the professional world that the only reason to update your LinkedIn profile – like your resume – is to start a job search. LinkedIn sends a digest of activity to its users, meaning that my contacts will see that I updated my profile. How many people will ping me, asking if I’m looking for a new situation?
Thing 11.5 Yammer
There is not a Thing about Yammer, but I thought it appropriate to mention it here.
If Facebook and LinkedIn were to have a love child, it would be Yammer. Yammer is a Facebook-like interface for discussion, with the notable exception that users create closed, company-focused networks. It is intended to give co-workers an online forum for conversations and cameraderie.
My company has a network on Yammer, although it is not sanctioned officially by IT or HR. Since Yammer is a dotcom as opposed to an internally-developed system, users are on the honor system not to introduce external individuals into the network, thereby making them privy to potentially sensitive competitive information.
I don’t know if Yammer will ever become a true enterprise solution. However, IT leadership (ahem) should take notice that a tool such as Yammer exists and thereby recognize the need for social collaborative tools between co-workers. If enterprises do not provide these tools internally, employees will find them externally.
Thing 12: Academia.edu
Alas, I am not a researcher or a professor. Therefore, I did not investigate Academia.edu.
However, following the 23 Things program and interacting with the engaged and engaging scholars from Oxford has made me miss university and think, not without longing, of The Road Not Taken.