In Depth: Why you must keep track of your online profile

Very good article here....

In Depth: Why you must keep track of your online profile: "

You might not realise it yet, but you're a brand. All this time you've been walking and talking and posting on the internet, thinking you were a person, when you've been a brand all along. Who'd have thought it?

All of your activities have been contributing to the brand, building a profile for it and even advertising it.

Why is it important to think of yourself as a brand? Because as information about individuals becomes increasingly available online, you want to make sure that information is not only accurate but also positive and succinct.

For example, this weekend I arrived early to meet a friend at his friend's house. I didn't know this friend of a friend, so on my way there I Googled him. I found that I was already following him on Twitter and discovered his blog, the company he worked for, his Facebook page, his Flickr account and so on. In 10 minutes, I thought I had a pretty good profile of his interests (cats, anime, politics) and personality (funny, busybody).

However, if I'd been really committed, I could have found all sorts of information. Deep Googling of my own name threw up fan-fiction from a magazine forum I used to work on, as well as some gadget fanboys threatening violence against my person for underscoring one of their preferred devices five years ago.

It wouldn't be good for a future employer to see that as one of my main hits, but thanks to good profile management and search engine optimisation, it's buried deep in Google's archive.

What differentiates your brand from you, the person? Well, everything you do as a person can contribute to the brand, but it shouldn't necessarily. Many other people can contribute to the brand, too – sometimes unconsciously, sometimes negatively.

All the data and media that we're generating and adding to the internet and social networks is part of this database, and additions are increasingly automated (location tracking on Latitude or Gowalla, media tracking on LibraryThing, LoveFilm or Raptr) so there's a need for effective filters to reveal where important events have occurred and manage their impact.

Media and social monitoring is about tracking any brand across all media. Simply put, it's about making sure you hear everything important that people are saying about your brand, and filtering out the noise, the incorrect results and the homonyms so you can reach out to the positive and negative people out there – to reward the friendly and correct the unfriendly.

It can vary from simple, free tools such as Google Alerts to complicated expensive tools such as Radian6.

Egosurfing – the act of searching for your own name – is therefore little different to standard media monitoring. The only real difference is your lack of resources – most of us aren't going to spend our entire salary on a Nielsen BuzzMetrics subscription. Nor are we going to have the time or the staff to set up and maintain a complicated monitoring tool. We just need something quick and dirty to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Taking this into consideration, we've picked four products that enable you to track your online profile. We've had Radian6 recommended to us by no less than Microsoft's Internet Marketing department, so we've included it here even though it's high-end stuff.

Google Alerts is a no-brainer because it's free and simple. Finally, Social Mention and Trackur offer easy social media monitoring. There are several tools we would have liked to examine, but which were too niche for our deliberately wide-ranging test.

Technorati is an older tool that only rates blogs and uses a fairly arbitrary metric. Blog Pulse is similarly blog-focused, but more up-to-date. Board Reader, as you might guess, tracks message boards and forums. Scoutlabs and SM2 are similar to Radian6, but Scoutlabs is cheaper and lighter on features, whereas SM2 is more useful for PR and marketing. AlertRank sorts your Google Alerts for you and is also free, so we've included it under Google Alerts.

Almost all of these, and the products on test, output RSS feeds. Put these into a feed reader and you've got a bespoke social media tracker – if you're willing to take the time to configure it.

Finding your brand online is only the first step. Next you need to ensure that the results that come top are positive, that your own content comes first and that you have procedures in place to deal with crises or negative feedback. Profile management is just starting to grow in importance. It can't be long before a standardised metric is accepted by social media experts and, more importantly, HR departments, meaning that personal profile monitoring will be key to job applications.

Now is a good time to start shaping your profile so you can become the brand you want to be.

Radian6
Price: $500 (10,000 results), $1,000 (25,000 results), $1,500 (50,000 results) + $100 per user, per month.
Supplier:www.radian6.com

Two separate 'social media gurus' have recommended Radian6 to us. Getting hands-on with it is initially daunting; the highly polished interface makes it seem more complicated than it is.

Thankfully, no-one's allowed to even use it without a thorough demo, and there are video tutorials to further explain it all.

The heart of the tool is in its configurability. It allows you to set up keyword profiles, choosing languages, media types, regions and sources, and output the resulting data in a variety of colourful and useful ways. It also includes team management tools, so someone like Stephen Fry can identify problem content and assign it to someone else.

While this power is wonderful, it's not so necessary for smaller users, especially as the base price is so high and it takes so much time to configure and maintain. If you're a media personality, the power and flexibility of this are great – but it's not really useful for most individuals' purposes.

Verdict: 4/5

Google Alerts
Price: Free
Supplier:www.google.com/alerts

Google Alerts Egosurfing starts when you first type your name into a Google box and hit [Enter]. Google Alerts is just an automated version of that, and deceptively simple with it. You put your keyword in, and hit [Enter].

It then starts delivering digests of all the mentions of your keyword across the web. If you want to configure it further, you can specify the type of content you're tracking (blogs, video, groups and so on), the frequency of the emails you receive and how many results you get (a measly maximum of 50).

It's hard to detect a difference between the results this finds and those of Radian6, but it's the output tools that Radian6 throws up and the way it rates content for you that give it such a large edge (forgetting, for the moment, its huge cost).

Alerts has been mashed up to create AlertRank, a separate rating tool that sorts alerts before they hit your inbox, but it doesn't match the flexibility of the bigger products.

Google Alerts is free and comprehensive, but if you want more results or filtered results, look elsewhere.

Verdict: 3/5

Trackur Free
Price: Free (one search), $18 (five searches), $88 (25 searches), $197 (250 searches), $297 (unlimited searches).
Supplier:www.trackur.com

Claiming a 60-second set-up time, Trackur performs a similar search to Google Alerts from a keyword or search string. However, it's slightly more powerful, allowing non-exact matches, mandatory includes and excludes, domain exceptions and unlimited results (which can be seen as a graph).

Once you've run a search, you can export it to CSV, grab it as an RSS feed or get it through email. It also includes sentiment tracking, colour-coding the results by traffic lights so you can easily see which are positive and negative.

Sadly though, despite several searches for very famous names, we never saw any sentiment other than neutral. Trakur also limits you to one saved search per account.

If you want more, you must subscribe (or create duplicate accounts) which isn't particularly desirable, but not initially expensive either at $18 for five – though the costs can rise quickly if you get into setting up corporate accounts.

Verdict: 3/5

Social Mention
Price: Free
Supplier:www.socialmention.com

Like Trackur, Social Mention aggregates user-generated content. It also has the same ability to customise your search: you can select the type of content, the date and so on. It does everything Trackur does, and it's free for any number of searches.

Its sentiment tracking actually works and is useful, though you can't click through to see it. Social Mention breaks down the top keywords, users, hashtags, postrank and sources for each search and provides you with CSV data for all of them, as well as letting you sign up to alerts that are at least as good as Google Alerts. It even gives you some handy stats about how you're reaching out to your audience.

Finally, Social Mention produces more results than Trackur does (though not as many as Google or Radian6), can be integrated with your search bar and, though it doesn't let you save searches, allows you to export as many RSS feeds or email alerts as you like.

Combined with the fact that it's free, Social Mention is an easy winner here.

Verdict: 5/5

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(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)

In Depth: How cheap technology is costing us dear

Very nice article by TechRadar about the cost of technology, particularly cheap technology. The story about Dell with UT is pretty shocking.

In Depth: How cheap technology is costing us dear: "

It's a great time to be a gadget geek. From wireless routers to Windows PCs, smartphones to sat navs, our technology has never been smarter - or cheaper.

The internet is a hardware heaven where you can pick up enormously powerful bits of kit for tiny amounts of money. It's just a shame about the whole economic damage, worker exploitation, environmental catastrophe side of things.

Cheap technology isn't as cheap as you might think. When something's designed to a particular price, compromises have to be made. Those compromises aren't just in the design, although of course you can't expect Porsche quality at Primark prices; they're in every part of the technology company's business from the factories it uses to the way it provides technical support. Typically, cheap technology means cutting every possible corner to make the price as low as possible.

What happens when you cut one corner too many? Let's ask Dell, the pioneer of ultra-cheap PCs, who managed to ship 11.8 million faulty - and potentially explosive - PCs between 2003 and 2005

The problem was with dodgy capacitors, manufactured from a stolen - and, it turned out, incorrect - formula. Writing in The Independent in 2003, Charles Arthur noted that Dell was aware of the compromised capacitors, and interviewed Dennis Zogbi of Paumanok Publications, who said: 'People want Western quality and Chinese prices. Well, you can't have both.'

Dell thought you could.

Dell's business was - and is - based on what the New York Times describes as 'limiting its inventory and squeezing suppliers', but it's possible to squeeze too hard. Cheap technology is a balancing act between price and quality control, and it seems that Dell lost its balance: the NYT reports that Dell suffered far more from bad capacitors than its rivals.

Despite internal tests finding that Optiplex desktops might have a failure rate as high as 97%, Dell didn't want an enormous and enormously expensive product recall, so it had a brilliant idea: it would blame its customers for the faulty computers.

According to the NYT Dell told the University of Texas its computers were failing because staff were 'making them perform difficult math calculations.'

BAD CAPACITORS: This Dell customer's capacitors don't look too clever. In total, Dell shipped 11.8 million machines with capacitors likely to fail

Still, at least if your Optiplex exploded you'd be able to speak to somebody knowledgeable about it. Wouldn't you? Nope. Dell was one of the first tech firms to outsource its customer service and technical support to Bangalore, and while the results were so bad and unpopular that Dell very quickly reinstated US-based support for its lucrative corporate customers, the idea stuck. These days, cheap kit means outsourced or online-only, irritating and inadequate technical support. You get what you pay for.

Unemployment and unhappy workers

Decent wages, employee healthcare, pensions and other benefits aren't compatible with cheap kit.

Because of those costs, Western technology firms have been outsourcing assembly work since the 1980s. Incredibly, there are fewer people making computers in the US now than there were in the 1970s: writing in BusinessWeek, former Intel boss Andy Grove says: 'manufacturing employment in the US computer industry is about 166,000, lower than it was before the first PC, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975.'

OUTSOURCED:There are fewer people employed making computers in the US today than there were when this was cutting-edge tech

People still make our gadgets, of course. They just don't do it in the West. From Xbox 360s to iPhone 4s, many of our devices are put together in China. China's biggest electronics subcontractor, Foxconn, has around 800,000 employees and adds 100,000 more every year; Grove says that Foxconn employs 'more than the combined worldwide headcount of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, HP, Intel and Sony.'

In total, an estimated 1.5 million people work in Asian assembly plants. For every Western employee a technology firm has, there are ten Asian assembly workers putting its products together - often on very low wages and in poor working conditions.

By outsourcing the assembly work, we're missing out on money that would otherwise be spent locally. With no factories here, there are no machines for local firms to service, no subcontractors providing key components, no armies of hungry workers for the local shops and take-aways to feed, no pay packets injecting cash into local businesses from cake shops to car dealers.

For now it's Foxconn's turn in the sun, but that won't last forever. The same things that eventually made the US too expensive for tech firms - rising wages, good working conditions and organised labour - are starting to happen in China, too.

After a wave of suicides led to unwelcome foreign attention, Foxconn massively increased employee wages; meanwhile, a wave of strikes in China is forcing other firms to pay more, too.

That's good and bad. It's good if you're getting a pay rise, but it's not so good if your employer decides to up sticks to somewhere cheaper. And there is always somewhere cheaper. Right now that's inland China, where living costs and therefore wage expectations are lower than in coastal regions, so firms are moving there.

In the longer term firms may leave China altogether and go where labour costs are lower: South America, perhaps, or Vietnam. They're already thinking about it.

Carcinogens, conflict and child labour

Tim Hunt is with Ethical Consumer magazine, which hopes to make us think again about cheap, disposable technology. As EC reports, the gadgets we dump often end up in places like Indonesia, where 'those processing the waste are often overworked (up to 18 hours per day) and underpaid, and the use of child labour is common… often unprotected, workers use fire and mercuric acid baths to extract the precious metals. Burning releases dioxins - some of the most toxic compounds on Earth - while the acid residue contaminates drinking water.'

'There are also problems around the mining of natural resources, from the Congo for instance,' Hunt told TechRadar. 'Here the trade in metals has been blamed for fuelling the conflict that has raged there for several years.'

WASTED: Disposable technology doesn't always end up in recycling plants. E-Waste has become a global problem [image credit: CP on Flickr]

As technology becomes increasingly fashion-driven, this year's must-have gadget quickly becomes unwanted - and the move to mobile-based computing means things are speeding up. Where a PC has a useful lifespan of three to five years, we replace our mobiles every 18 months.

'It is clearly worse than it was 20 years ago because there is just more technology around and things are progressing so quickly,' Hunt says. 'If there is a closed loop where all products and materials are recycled then it shouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, even with the new EU regulations, much of the waste finds its way into the landfills of poorer countries.'

Greenpeace wants to see tech firms eradicate toxic chemicals altogether. 'The issue of toxicity is overarching,' it says. 'Until the use of toxic substances is eliminated, it is impossible to secure 'safe' recycling.'

Perhaps the Electronics Industry Code of Conduct will save the world. The work of the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition, the EICC is a code of practice for electronics companies that prohibits the use of child labour, illegal working practices, dumping poison into duck ponds and so on.

It's been around since 2004 and signatories include Dell, who Greenpeace is currently attacking for its use of toxic chemicals and Microsoft, whose KYE subcontractor has been accused of child labour. So that's working well.

'Images of electronic waste in the form of discarded computers and other 'electro-scrap' dumped in Asia, other social and labour issues as well as pressure from civil society, prompted the electronics sector to develop an Electronics Industry Code of Conduct,' Greenpeace says.

'However, despite this Code, the hi-tech sector continues to produce ever shorter-life, often superfluous products with inherently hazardous materials. Why are hi-tech corporations, which profess to be responsible corporate citizens, allowing this to happen?'

It's a rhetorical question. 'One answer is that CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] initiatives, whether they involve Codes of Conduct or reporting guidelines, are voluntary,' Greenpeace adds. 'At best, CSR can be a way for the best companies to lead the way. At worst, CSR initiatives can even be a diversionary tactic, used by industry to pretend that they are taking action and to avoid regulation.'

BAD GRADES: Ethical Consumer grades firms on their Corporate Social Responsibility pronouncements. It's not a great result for HTC

Economic realities

Those iPhones you see being assembled in Foxconn factories have an estimated profit margin of 60 per cent. Could Apple still make money without using Foxconn? Absolutely. Could it still make money if its kit was assembled in the US? Probably. Will it try? No chance.

Apple, like every other corporation, must give its shareholders the best return on their investment - and the best way to do that isn't to get your products made in your own country, or to work only with firms whose assembly plants are filled with joy and laughter.

'Most companies are taking some steps,' Tim Hunt says, 'but as they all strive to generate more profit by producing more and more goods at the lowest possible price, they are clearly going to come into conflict with labour and the environment.'

Perhaps the answer is to embarrass them. When Greenpeace wanted to draw public attention to the tech industry's environmental record in 2006 it picked on Apple, which was actually one of the more environmentally friendly firms; nevertheless, the Green My Apple campaign used Apple's high profile to great effect and Apple made more improvements. Apple now mentions its products' green credentials in its marketing.

POOR FORM:It's no coincidence that the firms low on Greenpeace's green electronics meter tend to be makers of low-cost kit

Could the same trick work with corporate citizenship? Probably not, because the way our economy works - essentially, shares are owned by large pension funds whose managers are paid by performance and therefore don't really care about the longer term or the bigger picture - means firms' number one priority is short-term profit.

Then again, perhaps the problem isn't the companies. Maybe it's us. Those pension funds are our pension funds, and we're the people who choose to buy cheap kit. Apple is atypical: the profit margin on a laptop is around 2%, while the margin on a netbook is less than one per cent. The aggressive pricing that makes netbooks so attractive also means manufacturers can be left with a margin of just twenty cents.

That means our buying choices matter: if we buy entirely on price, choosing our kit on the basis of who offers the most bang for the least amount of bucks, then we're helping to perpetuate the system.

If we want companies to care about the bigger picture, we need to show them that we care about it, too.

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(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)

The End of Wealth

The End of Wealth: "

Unless you have been living under a rock, you will know there are some major problems in the world’s financial markets at the moment. Working for a global bank, I guess you could say I have a front row seat for this debacle that in recent days has worsened with the stunning collapse of Bear Stearns.

Much of what I have read has blamed Wall Street for turning the problems related to subprime lending into a major global problem. But I also recently read this Newsweek article where a former mortgage broker shares his insights into the fraud and greed that has plagued his former industry:

Lenders… which underwrote loans offered up by brokers and resold them to giants like Countrywide, spent much of their workdays trying to spot the stupid tricks brokers routinely used to get unqualified borrowers approved for loans. They’d say a buyer intended to live in a house when it was really an investment property. They’d falsify the buyer’s income by having a relative pose as his employer, or use scanners and software to forge W-2 forms. They’d find ways to hide debts (like a car payment) by looking for a credit report that omitted key data. They also routinely gamed the appraisal system, encouraging appraisers to look for ‘comparables’ that were far nicer homes in better neighborhoods—all in an effort to drive up the appraised value of the home they were mortgaging.

Perhaps because I know a lot of people in this industry, this article really got me thinking about wealth and the ways in which we go about trying to accumulate it.

Greed and shady business dealings are obviously nothing new, but what are we to make of them? And how does it relate to self improvement?

Ends and Means

Now, the last thing I want to do in this article is come across as self-righteous in the moral advice that follows. Let me state here that I am far from perfect, and I am not always proud of the ways I act. But this current chaos in the world’s financial markets, and other recent examples of greed (eg Enron), reminded me of Gandhi’s teachings of the seven things that will destroy us. These are:

• Wealth without work


• Pleasure without conscience


• Knowledge without character


• Commerce without morality


• Science without humanity


• Worship without sacrifice


• Politics without principle

As Stephen R. Covey points out in The 8th Habit, each of these admirable ends (eg wealth and commerce) can be accomplished through an unprincipled or unworthy means.

Many people give little attention to the means as their ego tells them the ends justify the means. This approach was infamously promoted by Machiavelli in The Prince, which suggested, amongst other things, the shrewd methods an aspiring prince could use to acquire the throne (remind you of any modern day politicians?).

If you live according to this philosophy, I would like to invite you to consider a very different way of looking at ends, and the means in which you go about accomplishing them. If we are to quell our ego, and instead live a life where we follow our conscience, then the ends and means become inseparable.

According to Stephen R. Covey, if you reach an admirable end through the wrong means, the ends ultimately turn to dust in your hands. It may appear that you can, but there are unintended consequences that are not seen or evident at first that will eventually destroy the end. The example he gives in The 8th Habit is:

• The parent who yells at their kids to clean their rooms will accomplish the end of having a clean room. But this very means has the potential to negatively affect relationships, and it is unlikely the room will stay clean when the parent leaves town for a few days.

Now, to return to the topic of wealth, I think it is possible to see much of the world’s current financial problems as stemming from people who wrongly believe the ends justify the means.

My advice? It is wonderful to aspire to wealth, but don’t lose sight of the means of accomplishing it as you go about your journey.

What do you think? We would love to hear your thoughts on anything discussed in this article. As a small incentive, we have a $20 Amazon gift certificate to give to one person who shares their thoughts.

"

(Via PickTheBrain.)

Managing Change

Managing Change: Three Phases of an IT Organization Transformation

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Business Ethics, Part II

While corporate scandals seem to be either more prevalent in recent years or at least more publicized, it still continues to amaze me how these things happen. I do believe a certain culture has to exist within an organization for these things to happen on much more than theft of office supplies.

The Microsoft CIO termination for violating company policies caused me to tilt my head a little. I actually heard a presentation by Stuart Scott earlier this year in Redmond during the Public Sector CIO Summit. His presentation was fine but there was something about him that seemed curious--he seemed to lack the intellectual curiosity or drive that I would hope to expect from someone as the CIO of MS. Nothing rubbed me wrong, just failed to impress.

I also knew a CIO who I actually respected for his thought processes and ability to relate to people. He had a tumultuous home life and some people noted that he seemed to have a particular loyalty to one vendor in particular. I didn't pay much attention to it until later when I heard that the police showed up in the corporate headquarters as he was taken away for embezzlement charges because he was getting kick-backs from that particular vendor. It saddens me because I liked him and respected him professionally. I never held him in hero-status but I was let down to hear that the activity was going on.

With the selection of any employer or business partner, I suggest you make it a point to research the people and company. If you value high moral standards you need to pay attention to things and try to pay attention to the slightest nuances.

Business Ethics, Part I

Last week I attended a panel event on Business Ethics hosted by my alma mater, San Francisco State University Graduate School of Business. It was a 4 person 2 hour event discussing recent events with a lack of business ethics (Arthur Andersen and Enron were mentioned more than once). There were some philosophical discussions about these things snowballing and the general theme seemed to be that the breakdown of ethical breakdown almost invariably happens from the top and trickles down. The matter of absolute power absolutely corrupts was also alluded to. There was some discussion about how a few publicly held companies who are faced with compliance with SOX have chosen to buy back stock and return to being privately held. That subject also moved to HIPAA compliance and how both of these (HIPAA & SOX) are really adoptions of best practices.

In terms of technology, I've dealt with both and I can't say that I fully agree with the statement of best practices, at least not in their entirety. I think particular sections are probably best practices but you will find several contradictions if you take them in their entirety. There are good ideas and as a good HIPAA compliance officer will tell you is that there are specifics for which you should comply but the biggest step is raising awareness of the entire organization. Ensuring that awareness will lead to better thought out procedures and policies. The first step is the biggest and I would encourage any organization to have dedicated personnel to implement this. The personnel should not be of a police-nature but they have to be collaborative with authority and should report to senior management. If you don't have someone trained and well-versed on the subject matter, individuals can very readily throw out 'I have to do it because of SOX/HIPAA' without providing any substance because there isn't anyone to challenge it. I saw the same thing happen frequently in the university with the phrase academic freedom. As soon as you hear someone say that their academic freedom is being compromised, I recommend paying special attention to find real logic.