Micro Persuasion

Recession Proof Your Job with Web Based Tools

The economy is the story of the year. And although Congress is poised to pass a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry, we're not out of the woods. Many feel that a deep global recession is imminent. This means there will be layoffs - perhaps lots of them. To protect your job, you need to ensure that you are personally accountable and adding value every day.

Social software and web applications, if applied correctly, are sharp arrows in your quiver. They can also become massive distractions. Here are three techniques using web tools that can help you become more personally accountable in your career.

Track Your Browser Time with PageAddict

Time and attention are finite resources that must be harnessed properly if you want to succeed. Nevertheless, this is not simple in the connected age. Given that many of us work in Internet-related fields, it's easy (and some would argue quite valuable) to spend the entire day in your email inbox or on Friendfeed or Twitter. Problem is, you may not accomplish a thing.

Like my friends Paul Stamatiou and Kevin C. Tofel I spend the vast majority of my computing time "in the cloud." This means my browser, Firefox, is used more than any other application. But recently I have started using PageAddict, a free Firefox extension, to collect data on my Internet usage and I have found it invaluable.

PageAddict monitors the sites you visit and logs your time. You can then tag them into categories. All the data is stored locally on your computer. A similar tool that people love is called RescueTime. However, given that I spend a ton of time in my browser I have found PageAddict more than adequate for my needs.

Above is a screenshot from PageAddict that shows where my time was spent over the last two weeks. Email includes my corporate web-mail and GMail. Soc Nets includes Facebook, Friendfeed and Twitter. While docs covers Google Docs, which I use to write, and Google Spreadsheets, which I use for GTD, goals, projects and ideas.

As you can see almost all of my time online is work related. Still I can see that I need to shrink my social network usage a little bit and increase my time with documents, web applications while also keeping RSS contained. I also need to go through the undefined section to see if there are big groups of sites that can be tagged.

Wrangle RSS

Many of us are RSS addicts. ReadWriteWeb recently did a great job showing how blog reading can help you grow in your career. This has certainly has been true for me and it's why I read 568 feeds, tag much of what I unearth there, file it in Gmail and share it liberally.

Still, as great as RSS is, it can eat your time. I have worked over the last couple of years to a) shift most of my reading to the early mornings or evenings when I have time to really ponder the content and b) use RSS as a knowledge management hub for information that others can use, including you, my colleagues and clients.

Google Reader Trends gives you the data you need to track this over time. You can see how many items you have read, what day/time you consume feeds as well as how many items you have shared. It also shows you the feeds you read the most, even via a mobile device - this is something even RescueTime or PageAddict can't track. Analyze the data and make sure it's aligned with your goals. Below is a screenshot from my reader.

Track All Your Time via a Web Calendar or Online Spreadsheet

In my field we all track our time. In some cases this is how we know what to bill clients for our time. In others, it's to ensure that we aren't over-servicing accounts. However, if you don't have to track your time I highly recommend it since it's a great way to ensure that you are focused and delivering value.

I have been using Google Calendar to track my time. I set up a calendar just for this purpose and use it to log when I start/completed a task. Then I transfer this data to our enterprise-wide time tracking tool. What I like about using GCal is that I can search my time or go back to a specific date to see what I did when. I also use bookmarklets to speed up the logging of my time.

As a next step I may move this to Google Spreadsheets or Zoho since I can generate charts to see where my time is being spent. I also want to think about how to synchronize my logs with PageAddict.

Bonus Tip: Create a Motivation Wall with Picasa or Flickr

This tip isn't really about measurement, but it's a little web app hack that I use to motivate myself. Using Picasa Web Albums I set up a private album called "The Motivation Wall." On the wall I collect images of people - some living, some dead - who achieved greatness. I try to hit this site every so often because I know it will inspire me to do the same.

In the screenshot above you will find some of my heroes - Michael Jordan taking the final shot to seal victory in the 1998 NBA Finals, Michael Phelps winning his seventh gold by a hundredth of a second and Ben Franklin (a tinkerer like me) discovering electricity.

Additional links of note...

23 Personal Tools to Learn More About Yourself

Bytes of Life : For Every Move, Mood and Bodily Function, There's a Web Site to Help You Keep Track

Make Magic with Metadata in Gmail

Personal knowledge management is becoming one of the most critical skills that information workers like journalists, marketers and PR pros need to succeed today. Specifically, I am talking about the efficient collecting, processing and weeding of massive amounts of data. In this post I want to offer tips on how to take full advantage of tagging information in Gmail. (I have covered Gmail previously in this context in three separate installments.)

Gmail is not just an email client, but a rich, searchable database. Think of it as a data mining system. The more data that you allow to flow into Gmail, the more you'll get out of it - if it's organized.  Even better all of this information is available across any device and even offline using IMAP. As much as I like Evernote, it's lack of offline notes on the iPhone made it a deal killer for me. Plus I already live in Gmail so it was easy to stick wit it.

GMail has labels, which are essentially tags, but they're unwieldy. You need to constantly manage them if you store a lot of info. It's a pain. I prefer to tag on the fly. And using GMail's unlimited plus addressing and filtering capabilities, you can. Here's how.

First, set up a filter in GMail so that all mail from the prefix of your email address to that prefix is auto-archived and marked as read. In my case this means mail from steverubel to steverubel. This will ensure that the emails do not show up in your inbox.

Next, as I find information I want to collect, I email it to myself using Ubiquity, a new extension for Firefox (Google Toolbar offers a similar email capability). However, instead of emailing it to just my regular email address I add a tag to the prefix by tacking a word on to the address with a plus symbol. To add multiple tags I send the message to multiple plus addresses all at once.

For example, Nielsen just published some interesting data about health and social networking. I know I might need this later so I select the article and invoke my email command in Ubiquity and send the message to both steverubel+health@gmail.com and steverubel+socialnetworking@gmail.com. The article never hits my inbox. It gets autoarchived where I can get it later.

Now if I want to find everything I have tagged under health and social networking, all I need to do is search for to:+health or to:+socialnetworking and bingo, the article turns up.

Finally, you need to make your tags easily accessible. Searching for these keywords every time is a pain. The solution is to use GMail Quick Links. For tags I access regularly I pull up the search in GMail and either bookmark them in my browser or add them as a Quick Link in GMail. (Note you need to enable Gmail Labs first in the settings.)

That's all there is to it. Next up I plan to couple this technique with Google Alerts and Newsgator's POP3 capabilities, which comes free with Newsgator Online, and GMail fetching to add have news and RSS flow into GMail that matches certain conditions I set up in advance and have them autotagged.

Is Google Docs Encouraging Schoolchildren to Steal Photos?

I love Google Docs, but this is just wrong. In a seemingly innocent blog post running down new features for back to school, Google now says they let you search for images off the web via your document so you can drop them in. In other words, they're arguably inspiring schoolchildren to liberally steal from hardworking photographers ...

"Fans of Google Image Search will be happy to see that you can also find and insert images into your documents. Again, you just highlight a word or phrase. Then, use Tools>Search... using Image Search. Once you find the right image, you can drag-and-drop that image directly into your document"

There's a simple solution here. Add a Creative Commons filter for re-usable content to any image search activated from Google Docs and teach students how to source them.

Radical Transparency: Three Lessons Apple Can Learn from Google

Google isn't exactly known as the most transparent company in the world, but they're light years ahead of Apple - a company that in some ways they share a kinship with when it comes to their reputation for innovation. Apple (or for that matter any big company) can learn a lot about radical transparency, customer service and PR from Google, even though they're hardly perfect here.

First, Google does a great job of telling you where they're fallible. Many Google products have pages that list the bugs that they know need to be fixed. GMail and Google Docs are just two. You can visit each of these pages for an update and even let Google know if you're experiencing one of these issues.

Apple, by contrast, just lets you know when they've fixed bugs, but leave it to bloggers to dig into the code to see just what was fixed. Most Apple software update release notes from Apple simply say "Bug fixes."

Second, Google, like Apple, has forums where users can voice their opinions about new features, gripes, wishes, use cases and more. Google employees actively participate in these forums and you can track their activity. Here's a page that shows you all of the posts that a Google Reader forum guide, "Roger," has responded to. Apple does the same in its forums. Here's a list of all of the postings that Jason L has responded to.

However, the difference between the two is that users can rank the posts of Google employees or even report misconduct. I give credit to Apple for participating, however, I wished they would let users rate employee postings.

Finally, Google has a ton of blogs. Most of them link back to the bloggers who link there. Some are beginning to allow for comments. Google Blogoscoped aggregates them here. Even better, all Google blog posts clearly identify the employee who authored the post and their title.

Apple meanwhile has one blog for its much troubled MobileMe services, which I am probably dignifying by calling it that. It's bascially a news feed of product updates. The authors aren't identified. Worse, there are no comments or links to other bloggers.

There are other companies in the tech industry that go even further than Google in their transparency - namely Dell and Microsoft (an Edelman client). However, Google and Apple are often closely linked in their cultures. The reality is, though, that when it comes to customer engagement, they are quite different.

It's Time for the News Aggregators to Come Clean

Correction appended about Yahoo's operations 9/12/08

A news story from 2002 about United Airlines filing for bankruptcy tripped up investors yesterday when it re-appeared on Google News, Barry Schwartz reports. The Google News team follows with their own explanation. However, the entire issue raises the lack of transparency that permeates the major news aggregation sites. It's time for them all to come clean.

According to Reuters consumers are increasingly turning to news aggregation sites for their info fix because of the growth of the mobile web and an appetite for broad perspectives. These sites, which include Google News, Yahoo News, Topix and Daylife, differ from RSS readers. Feed readers also roll up news but they put the user in complete control of the sources they consume.

News aggregation sites operate without editors. So, they're prone to the occasional glitches like the one that occurred yesterday. The problems are deeper, however. Most of these sites also roll up blog content and they don't tell you that. Yahoo just recently quietly started to link to blogs. Google is doing the same.

The problem is that these sites don't delineate blogs from news sources. On the one hand, that's terrific news. I have long said that there's no such thing as social media - it's all just media. However, on the flip side, as we all know the quality can range here and that presents a challenge for the reader in determining who to trust. Transparency can help.

Although this specific incident with United Airlines did not involve blogs, it underscores the lack of transparency that permeates these sites. They are doing everyone a disservice by not providing detailed information on how they crawl, who they chose to crawl and why they roll up some sites and ignore others. Give us information to help us make choices on who to trust.

--

Correction:: Yahoo has a team of 24+ editors based largely in Santa Monica, CA as well as some in satellite offices in New York City, Chicago, and Sunnyvale, CA. So technically, they aren't a news aggregator in this context. Further, they do clearly delineate news from blogs when linking to them.

CNN Twitters Its Way to Direct Audience Engagement

@acarvin tweet on CNN by Steve Garfield on Flickr

If you haven't been watching CNN on the weekends you've been missing out. CNN anchor Rick Sanchez has been increasingly using Twitter to engage viewers in conversation while on the air. He was particularly active during the lead up to the conventions and Hurricane Gustav. Now Sanchez is now taking his Twitter love to the next level with a brand new show called Rick Sanchez Direct, which debuts today at 3 pm EST.

Craig Stoltz has the deets on the new show. Sanchez is using Twitter to create a level of interaction with viewers that is transparent, authentic and captivating. Hopefully this will raise awareness for Twitter among corporations who will also start to use the platform towards similar outcomes.

Watch for more media to follow CNN in lock step. Newspapers are already jumping in. Newsday, my local paper, was using Twitter to track Tropical Storm Hanna as it hit Long Island on Saturday.

How Search Will Revolutionize Social Networking

Social networking is on fire. eMarketer predicts that in the US the category will reach 44.3% of Internet users by year's end. According to Google Insights, related searches are up 3,000% over the last four years. It has a ways to go before it's truly mainstream on a global level. (More than half of adults in 17 countries don't know what social networking is, according to Synovate.) Still the phenomenon is a sure thing, even though the individual winners and losers will surely shift.

What has me most excited though about social networking is a capability that isn't really in place yet in a powerful way - and that's search.

Much like the early days of the web, social networks have yet to fully exploit search. Recall that before Google came along 10 years ago web search was woeful at best and also un-monetized. Eventually that all changed. Even though Facebook's search is weak, already it's one of the fastest growing search engines. That's remarkable.

Search will become a core feature of the social network experience, add in social elements, usher in easier monetization and in the process revolutionize advertising. Here's a look at some trends to watch...

TRUSTED SEARCH TRUMPS UNTRUSTED SEARCH - Do you trust Google? I do as does most everyone. Do you trust what's in Google? For me, that depends on what I am searching for and where it comes from. However, I do trust the 1,000 people I have added to my social network on Facebook. In fact, it's why I limit my connections there to people I have either met or corresponded with. I value what they talk about and share there.

However, there's a gaping hole in the Facebook experience. While I can search through my friends, find new friends and also groups, I can't search the content my network creates. In addition, I can't go a layer deeper to see what my friends' friends are sharing (as I can on Friendfeed). Look for search to get embedded deeper into the social networking experience and create a split between trusted and untrusted search. The impact on PR will be major here too.

Microsoft's forthcoming integration of Live Search into Facebook could be the first step toward trusted search. MySpace has already site-wide search and can tweak it to achieve the same. (MySpace and Microsoft are Edelman clients.)

CONTEXTUAL SEARCH ADS GET SOCIAL - Google and MySpace have an advertising agreement going back to 2006. Facebook and Microsoft have a similar arrangement that started last year. So the search engines clearly view the social networks as a monetization venue and vice versa.

Social network advertising to date, though, has been a mixed bag. Everyone is innovating. But the draw on social networks is your friends, which makes it harder to be distracted by ads. Enter search. Watch for contextual search advertising and programs like Facebook's social ads to mix. New models will emerge where contextual ads are surfaced based on the content created and recommended by your friends.

SOCIAL NETWORKS BECOME SEARCH ENGINES - If you went through my browser history, you would be bored. I spend most of my time in Google's universe of sites and on The New York Times site. Beyond that, you will find a bushel of social networks - Facebook, Friendfeed, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Now, what if I could interact with any or all of my favorite sites all from a single social network and have my friends add value to that experience? It's coming. Today, for example, on Facebook I use Six Apart's BlogIt to Twitter. I also catch up with my favorite sports teams using Sportsline's Facebook application. These are simplistic though. Notice what's missing - I can't search the web yet from inside Facebook. However, on MySpace I can. But this is the beginning.

In the near future the search engines will all create applications or hooks into soc nets that let you search and annotate the web in conjunction with your friends, changing the web experience. The image above from the Shifted Librarian shows how she is able to search her local library direct from Facebook. Now imagine that same search application gets social and you can see that a major evolution in how we mine the web with friends is coming soon.

The World's Clicks Don't Always Tell the Truth

The following is also my column in next week's AdAge...

The dirty little secret in the blogosphere is that bloggers get free books - and lots of them. Often they show up without anyone asking. Most of the ones on Web 2.0 or the Internet just aren't that good or are woefully outdated by the time they hit your Kindle.

Still, my Andy Rooney moment aside, there are two in this fall's crop has a stats geek like me really excited. They deserve a spot on your shelf - but with an important caveat.

The first is The Numerati by BusinessWeek reporter Stephen Baker. In the book Baker details how companies are hiring math geeks to dissect and make sense of mountains of data to spot everything from consumer patterns to future terrorists. An entire chapter is dedicated to discussing how savvy marketers are using data modeling to dig through reams of blog chatter in search of insights. Baker and his publisher, Houghton Mifflin, are even running a behavioral targeting campaign to underscore the value of studying ad clicks.

Click by Hitwise's Bill Tancer tackles the same theme but from a singular perspective - search data. Tancer, who makes a living selling insights to major marketers, leverages Hitwise's search engine data from ISPs and its panel to provide perspectives on what people Google for and why. Like Baker, the anecdotes range from the general to the esoteric. Click even features a riveting chapter on pills, porn and casinos. So, be sure to cuddle this book tightly in bed.

In the web era, data, not content, nor community is king. The companies and individuals who can make the most sense of our footprints and place strategic bets are the ones who will succeed. Michael Lewis illustrated this wonderfully in his 2003 book Moneyball.

However, data should not be relied upon exclusively. It can be wrong. At the Web 2.0 Conference last October Tancer predicted that KeepVid and Veoh would be two of the next hot sites. A year later, according to Google Trends, traffic to both is flat.

Data brings power but also a danger that marketers will over rely on clicks and ignore their intuition; knowledge gleaned from old school face-to-face interactions like focus groups, secret shopper visits and years of experience. Hook the traditional with the new and you're unbeatable.

How Globalization Handed One Blogger a Big Scoop

Philipp Lenssen has long been one of my favorite bloggers. He co-authors one of the best blogs on Google, which is also one of my obsessions. Today he scored a big scoop. Google's long awaited web browser is launching tomorrow. If you're reading this Tuesday or later, the browser is here.

So how did this happen? This is just my analysis. I haven't confirmed with Philipp (who I have known for years). But I suspect globalization is totally to blame.

You see, Philipp blogs out of Germany, where there was mail service today. So a comic book tease from Google that probably every big US tech blogger is going to receive tomorrow once the US Post Office re-opens, was in Philipp's mailbox today. Oops.

I would not be surprised if there are Google media embargoes that will lift tonight at midnight. (For an explanation for how these work read this great post.) In fact, Philipp's blog post has prompted Google to basically go ahead release the news via its blog today even though it's a holiday and a very busy news day with a hurricane bearing down on New Orleans and the GOP convention about to start.

The lesson here is that it's a global playing field. That can work to a public relations professional's advantage or disadvantage but you need to always keep it in mind. The world truly is flat.