LinkedIn users don’t want to engage in discussions

Being present on a variety of social platforms, I’ve noticed that there’s a fundamental difference between LinkedIn and, say, Twitter.

(Of course, there are more differences than just this one, but bear with me.)

Post something on Twitter, a little controversial or provocative, and it elicits a response. Or at least a retweet.

Ask a question, and most often somebody has something to say about it.

Post something on LinkedIn, and absolutely nothing happens. Ask a question, total silence.

The same goes for commenting. If you comment on someone’s posting in the LinkedIn live feed, there’s something like a 90-percent chance nobody picks it up. Not even the person who first made the post.

Now that LinkedIn is doing its best to become THE social platform for professionals – and doing a pretty good job, if I may say so – should I assume it’s the users who are to blame for non-existent exchange of thoughts?

Groups are a different story. There you might actually get a conversation going. Unless it happens to be a popular group riddled by content spammers. Fortunately, I’ve personally managed to avoid joining dubious groups.

How are you using LinkedIn? Is it a listening post for you, or would you like a more intense back-and-forth in the feed? Or do you confine your discussions in groups? Now click on that comment link and make us all wiser

 

The solo entrepreneur’s royal problem – how many is one?

Trawling the depths of the Twitter ocean (there are whales, aren’t there?) you can’t help noticing that the major part of your catch consists of individual fish. Especially if you’re following marketing people or a creative profession. True, there are companies around, but solo professionals are extremely well represented.

I’ve noticed this sometimes leads to something of an identity problem. If you’re working through your own company, are you “I” or “we”?

It’s customary for companies to refer to themselves as “we”—a collective. Rightly so. But if the company consists of one person, what do you do then?

There seem to be three basic approaches.

The first approach, perhaps the most common one, is to boldly reveal you’re operating by yourself. This, of course, doesn’t exclude having a wider network that can bring more to the table than just you alone. If you’re not famous to begin with, however, you may have a hard time proving yourself, being a relative nobody from nowhere.

The second approach, as far as I can see, is circumventing the whole problem by wording websites and other content in ways that allow talking in the third person. In a way, this is good. At least you aren’t prone to overusing the first person, a common cause for forgetting whom you should be talking to about what. Customers are more interested in getting their problems solved than you talking about how excellent you are.

The third approach is somewhat schizophrenic. The one-person company starts its talk with “we”, but sooner or later it will become clear to the audience that there’s just you. A typical example is a website telling you “we work with…” and in the next paragraph slipping into the first or third person: “I have X years’ experience…” or “NN has X years’ experience…”—NN or I simultaneously being the company figurehead and only employee. I’ve seen very few people pull this one off successfully.

Are you a freelancer or independent contractor? How have you solved the one-man-company problem? Are you yourself, a third person or the royal “we”? Feel free to add a link to your website or other material in your comment, I’d love to have a look.

Creative Commons vs. professional creation

I ran into a blog post where someone told a story about taking a photograph while on holiday, posting it on Flickr with CC rights, and six years later, the photo found its way to a newspaper article.

So far so good. And great for the photographer that her image was deemed worthy enough to be picked into a publication.

What followed was a salvo of negative comments from professional photographers, mostly in the “you’re robbing my children of their future by giving away stuff I do for a living” category.

This set me thinking.

On one hand, the pro photographers are right, in a roundabout way. On the other, though, lots of questions arise:

1. Would any of them have had a photo available for just that purpose?
2. How can someone’s hobby deteriorate someone else’s income?
3. Why, in this age of public sharing, should certain professions be surrounded by protective walls and No Trespassing signs?
4. Ultimately, are these professional protesters in the twilight of their careers and need to get protective because their skills are no longer up to date?

I think the world has developed far enough in the direction of sharing that if you can’t sustain yourself with your professional muscle, that’s just tough luck.

What do YOU think?

Feedly reinstated—looks really good!

Nearly two years ago, I wrote about my disappointment with Feedly, the online content curation service. But I left the door unlocked:

I will certainly re-install it if/when the bug is fixed.

Now it is.

So, from today, I’m once again a happy Feedly user. The problems that irritated me in 2010 have been ironed out, the service works perfectly and looks absolutely great!

Feedly is a content curation service that enhances your feed reader (like Google Reader) experience. You can install Feedly for free as a Firefox add-on or iPhone/iPad, Android or Kindle app at www.feedly.com.

(Disclosure: I’m in no way affiliated with Feedly nor do I gain any material benefit from this post. I’m just a previously unhappy user now made happy again.)

Do the Wrong Thing: overoptimize your web copy for search engines

SEO, search engine optimization, is something you come to do almost automatically when you’ve blogged for some time. It’s easy to go overboard, though.

When you’ve read about a quarter of this post, for example, the terms unconventional headlines and conventional blog post headlines — with a few variations — almost make you stop reading. Despite the article making a good point.

It’s been said a thousand times before, but needs to be said once again: write with a natural flow. You don’t repeat yourself in speech every two sentences, do you?

Stuffing your writing with keywords might also harm your content. Google’s recently introduced Penguin algorithm will penalize you by pushing overoptimized content down in the search results.

How is it with you? Fed up with keyword repetition in the stuff you read? How do you optimize your own content?

Newest research says QR codes fail to deliver

I’ve long been doubtful about the success of QR codes, and the most recent study I found seems to corroborate my view.

1. Companies want to spread information about themselves and their offering through QR codes.
2. People want good deals through QR codes.

Looks like a fairly huge disconnect to me.

I’m not saying QR codes are a failure. It’s just that they were originally invented for tracking the movement of industrial components, not for marketing. A wrong tool for the wrong purpose seldom achieves anything.

Perhaps companies should think twice about how much they invest in this particular communication channel. And more importantly, how they could better match their audience’s needs and wishes. They might find other tools much more efficient.

The moral of the story: don’t be blinded by nifty new tweaks to technology, find out what your audience wants and deliver it the way they want.

Post-PC revolution, what the heck is that?

Reading this article in Computerworld prompted me to chime in.

The gist of the article is that PCs as we know them now are gradually becoming obsolete and replaced by tablet-like terminal devices.

The writer, Mike Elgan, of course has a point insofar as the two worlds, desktop and tablet, are certainly converging. Tablet features, such as touchscreen operability, are making their way into desktops, and desktop computing power is making its way into tablets.

The article is a bit of a troll, though. On the surface it seems to suggest the death of PCs (read: desktops) but if you look at it closely, it talks about the majority of consumers gradually switching to tablets for everyday information consumption AND tablet features (mostly the ease of deploying and getting rid of applications) coming to desktops.

Tablets are for consumption, desktops for creation

Yes, tablet-like devices are perfect for content consumption. As long as you’re reading stuff, watching videos or listening to audio content, even a small device is sufficient.

Even Elgan doesn’t deny that hardcore content creation will require powerful desktop equipment. My subhead above is a direct quote of one of the commenters on the article. Very true.

Perhaps the most interesting sentence in the article is this:

As an increasing number of consumers embrace iPads and other tablets as their full-time computing device, they’re going to want bigger ones for the desktop.

That is clearly a point well made. The keyword being ‘bigger’. As long as humankind is limited by its ability to see and the size of its hands, there’s a limit to how small devices can be made. We are reading news about credit card size, fully functional computers, but the user interface still needs to conform to human physiology.

Time for prediction

So where will computer development be heading a few years from now?

I’m not a computer expert by any stretch of the imagination, but my guess is that Elgan is right about the convergence. The future computer that will cater for both creation and consumption of content will probably have these characteristics:

• 10–12″ screen (aging population can’t use much smaller, device requires sufficient width for nearly-full keyboard—see next point)
• slide-out keyboard (analogous to QWERTY smartphones today)
• tilt-up screen (also like some of today’s smartphones)
• very thin and lightweight alloy casing (MacBook Air type)
• powerful combination of processor speed, RAM and flash HDD
• WLAN/WiFi capabilities built in
• 3G, 4G (or whatever is state-of-the-art at the time of launch) telephony capabilities
• applications available on-demand (much like Apple Store) and installed/uninstalled very simply

Another alternative might be to go the route of what Motorola introduced with its Atrix smartphone:

• smartphone with a high-end processor
• dockable to a terminal with screen, keyboard and local storage capacity

So in a way we’re talking about the rebirth of the netbook, wouldn’t you say?

Price will always be an issue

From the technology point of view, I can’t see any reason why such devices couldn’t be available within a couple of years. The price, however, will have to match the market’s expectations.

For a device like I outlined above to become popular among the masses, I think its price can’t be much more than $300–400 initially. The challenge, therefore, is who can produce it in that price bracket? We will probably see, at least in the beginning, telecom operator subsidised packages with minimum contract length. (And lots of jailbreaking advice on the net.)

A writer myself, I would heartily welcome such a device. How about you? Shoot back in the comments!