Louise McGregor Digital

Facebook Timeline – the Inevitable

Apparently from Saturday you’ll have to switch to Facebook’s timeline.

I’ve resisted it. I found it harder to find things on other people’s profile so I didn’t want to change my own but I finally gave in to the inevitable and updated my facebook page to timeline last weekend. I did some research, and the two things I knew I had to change were the cover image and my privacy settings. I also knew I needed to check which apps were connected to my facebook account and ensure that there was no frictionless sharing that I did not want.

1; The Cover Image

This is the large banner style image that is at the top of the page, your profile image is now set into the lower left of it.

The large image with the orange people is the cover image, the small one on the lower left is the profile image. It’s good if they work together.

I’m a bit leery of posting photos of myself online, I like my face well enough, but I’ve had a couple of minor stalker-ish issues in the past. So I choose my favourite image from my holiday last summer, of calm seas and boats at anchor. It was taken soon after dawn on a day with no wind in the middle of a sailing holiday. It goes with my profile picture – but that’s luck rather then good management. The overall impression is pleasing, but not particularly creative.

Facebook said that around half of my friends had switched – but not all of those had uploaded a new cover photo, so I suspect for some it hasn’t been a choice.

For a brilliant (and funny) riff on the whole cover photo concept, take a minute to check this out.

2; Privacy Settings

It’s one of my gripes about Facebook – the privacy settings aren’t that easy to find. But because facebook now pushes everything you do onto your timeline it’s important to find them and check your settings.

Look for the little arrow on the top right of the page, click on it and you’ll see a short menu which includes Privacy Settings.

Facebook privacy settingsOnce you have found it and clicked on privacy settings it is easy, easier than it has been, to control who can connect with you, and who can see and post to your timeline.

You will also need to go through your timeline and remove anything that you don’t want to be seen – some things that were buried in the past are now easier for your friends and contacts to browse to. You can remove items individually by clicking on the “edit or remove”button on the upper right of the image. I like the “micro control” this gives visitors to facebook.

It’s easier on timeline for someone to find old posts you made, to limit this to friends only click on “Limit the Audience for Past Posts” on the privacy settings post. They’ve made this step hard to reverse so be sure it’s what you want before saying yes. For me this was a no-brainer, I’ve never wanted to share publically on facebook so limiting who can see the history probably doesn’t change what non-friends can see – but I enabled it just to be sure.

You can also delete your posts from other people’s timeline – this could be important because you do not know their privacy settings, and it’s their settings that will apply to your post. Here’s how.

3; Frictionless Sharing

This is the concept that information from one place, or internet service is shared on facebook. It’s why you’re seeing what your colleague listens to on Spotify or what your brother has read on Washington Post. I don’t particularly want to know, and I definitely don’t want to share. So I haven’t enabled this sort of sharing. In fact I will not click through to articles from Washington Post because I don’t want this sort of cross-platform sharing.

When I set up timeline I checked which apps had access to my facebook account (via the privacy settings), it’s only two and neither of them post to facebook automatically. Which is good news for me – I won’t be spamming my friends.

So it’s done. I’m on timeline. It took me about fifteen minutes.

Others have become more concerned about the facebook security, in some cases to the point where they purge their profile regularly or delete it all together. My personal approach is that I don’t put anything there that isn’t more or less public, and I only connect to family and friends. I lock down the security fairly strongly (only friends can see my profile), and I check the site daily (OK not just for security reasons). I still think it’s a great tool – but everyone has to take responsibility for protecting their own data and being smart about what they share online. It’s public people.

Louise McGregor design

Dutch Design; Cycling Style

Two of the things I like about living in Amsterdam; cycling everywhere, and Dutch pragmatism. Both are combined in latest bike design from VANMOOF.

VANMOOF design for urban cyclists, so their bikes are sturdy, but light and stylish. It’s dark here at 4pm in winter so the lights are built in and there’s a dynamo integrated into the bike. Bike theft is the most common crime here, so there’s a built in lock – one that comes out of the frame. I’ve noticed their distinctive design around town but didn’t know what they were until recently.

The design is so good it’s won awards.

The interesting thing about this company is they’re trying to design new products with genuine co-creation, take a look at their facebook page – they are always asking for feedback at every step of the process. They’re heading for 7,000 likes, and the community is submitting photos and stories of their VANMOOF bikes from all around the world.

Not only have I “liked” their facebook page, I want one of their bikes!

(Disclaimer – no of course they didn’t pay me to write this).

Louise McGregor Digital, social media

3 Things I Hate About Pinterest

I am having a lot of fun playing on Pinterest, I probably visit it daily and add something each day. But there are a few things that annoy me.

1 Lack of Curating of Categories

Pinterest have set up a set of default categories, which you don’t have to use.

I like to browse through these categories for ideas, particularly the architecture, history and geek categories.

I’m prepared to stretch a definition but it’s getting ridiculous. Here are three items from each of the categories I mentioned.

Architecture History Geek

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for yoga and for more understanding of individuals with autism, and I’m really happy for you if Leather Honey Leather Conditioner really is the best leather conditioner. These things just don’t belong where they’re categorised.

The history category seems to be the worst curated – with images of everything from Cameron Diaz at the Oscars to a memorial of a soldier killed in Afghanistan to perfume bottles from the 1950s. I get that all items represented stuff from the past, but it’s not History.

2 Lack of Privacy controls

You cannot set up private boards – where you could collect images of Christmas presents or wedding ideas before the big day. Or protect yourself from online stalkers.

You cannot block people – so those annoying posters who provide 20 percent content and 80 percent advertising will always appear in the main streams.

Pinterest have no plans to change this as the goal of their site is to share as much as possible. Fair enough in one sense, until someone comes along with either a site that allows more functionality or a tool to complement Pinterest and give users the functionality they want.

3 Image rights

The terms and conditions state

By making available any Member Content through the Site, Application or Services, you hereby grant to Cold Brew Labs a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, adapt, modify, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise exploit such Member Content only on, through or by means of the Site, Application or Services.

Which means that any image that goes on to Pinterest could be resold by them without any payment to you. If they did a deal with a digital publisher your images could land in a book without you getting royalties.

For amateurs like me it’s not much of an issue – I’d probably be so thrilled that a photo I took was published in an actual book I’d immediately order five copies. But for professional artists this is an issue. On one hand they want their images seen on pinterest, on the other hand they don’t want to lose revenue. Which means that the pinterest “no pin” code is not a solution. One artist, Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void fame, has solved this by slapping a big ‘copyright’ watermark on all images in his online shop. Smart guy.

Pinterest is a relatively young site, and they’ve demonstrated that they can drive traffic and that they listen to user input. Let’s hope they’re listening!

Louise McGregor Editorial

Change is Good

This is the first time in two years I haven’t started my day looking at twitter.

I’m not talking about my personal account, but a work account.

I started the company’s corporate twitter account two years ago initially as a channel to promote our company’s press announcements and features. At first no-one was listening and certainly no-one asked any questions. But it started to pick up about a year ago, and now it’s growing steadily, OK the follower numbers aren’t Lady Gaga big, but they’re growing. We also know with the increased use of twitter and other social media tools we need to be listening to what is being said, answering questions and finding ways to help our customers.

It’s been fun running the account, but it’s becoming far more than I can do in between the rest of my job, so there’s a new role in our department – the only new position to be approved in the climate of cost-cutting we’re in – to start working with social media full time. This is a move to make it a professional service and it’s going to be great.

It’s also an indication that this social media craze is being taken seriously in the board room.

 

Louise McGregor Buzzword

Sweat Equity

Ownership in company, even a startup, can be shared. When shared the proportion each owner has is calculated based on what they brought in. For some owners it’s a straight financial transaction, for others – especially in a start up – some of that ownership comes from the hard work they’ve put in getting the business started. This share derived from work is known as “sweat equity”. It’s sweat equity that allows Mark Zuckerberg to retain a 28% equity stake in Facebook.

It’s often a highly valued part of the start up process for a budding entrepreneur, as explained in Blog Maverick, where Mark Cuban writes

Businesses don’t have to start big. The best ones start small enough to suit the circumstances of their founders. I started MicroSolutions by getting an advance from my first customer of $500. The business didn’t grow quickly in the first couple years. We didn’t grow past 4 people in the first couple years, and we all worked dirt cheap.

So what’s wrong with that? It’s OK to start slow. It’s ok to grow slow. As much as you want to think that all things would change if you only had more cash available, they probably won’t.

The reality is that for most businesses, they don’t need more cash, they need more brains.

The reality for entrepreneurs is that the less money they take from investors the great share of the equity they retain. But there’s a trade off – take no money and your opportunities to grow are reduced.

But recently I saw an article online that referred to increasing the value of your home by putting in “two weeks of sweat equity”. It seemed a weird use of the word to me, but in a sense it is exactly what hard work improving your house can be – you’re increasing the value of the asset by hard work rather than financing an improvement, and you’re also increasing the proportion of the asset that you own, since the bank is not adding an equivalent amount.

I then checked wikipedia, fount of all knowledge, and it appears I’m behind on my dictionary meanings, and Habitat for Humanity has used this model of funding to help people get into their home. A home that would otherwise be unaffordable.

image kick boxing via pixabay

Louise McGregor Buzzword

Mission Critical

It sounds terrifically important, to say that something is “mission critical”, and the definition is;

An activity, device, service or system whose failure or disruption will cause a failure in business operations. For example, for an online business its online transaction system is mission critical.

But I hear the term used to describe a range of things that I really don’t think are mission critical, so the term is in danger of losing its meaning. I suspect it is often used to mean that if a process or project fails we will look bad – rather than the company will sustain huge losses and may go under.

I think there are two factors needed to make something mission critical;

  • immediate impact
  • substantial loss or cost

Immediate impact, because if the impact is apparent only slowly then I think a business has time to improve the process or system, and repair the damage. The word critical implies an urgency.

Substantial loss or cost, because if it’s a relatively small amount then the company is not at risk of failure.

The last use I heard of it at work was in relation to a powerpoint presentation. Hmmm, I think not.

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image Shuttle Mission Control /Harrison Earl/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Louise McGregor Leadership

Hail the introvert

In this inspiring talk Susan Cain, self-confessed introvert, discusses that she sees as a world constructed for extroverts, and the loss to introverts trying to live and work in that world – along with the loss to the world of contributions from introverts.

As an extrovert who happens to work in a team with a number of introverts I’ve had to learn how to work with them. As it turns out I’ve also learnt from them; I now integrate “thinking time” into my week – increasingly important as my job becomes more complex, and I’ve learnt to listen before throwing my ideas into a discussion. I’ve also developed a sneaking suspicion that I’m not as strongly extroverted as I seem.

There is increasing evidence that open plan offices destroy our ability to concentrate, and evidence that idea generation is not a group activity. So perhaps it’s time for the introverts to take over.

Louise McGregor Editorial

The War on Email

Maybe “I can has cheezburger” isn’t for work.

Everyone has, at some point received unwanted email, I don’t mean spam, I mean being included in the cc of an email you don’t want to deal with, or receiving those chain letters, or the latest internet meme.

The nice people at OnlineITDegree.net have created a handy decision tree in an appealing infographic format to help you answer the question “Should I send this email?” which includes a nod to one of the most famous internet paradoxes – millions of people do fantastic work and post it online, but it’s pictures of cats that get sent and viewed millions of times.

I like the idea, and I’ve written before about efforts to manage or limit email. But while it’s true that email can be a drain on our time it remains a great tool for many tasks. It also has the advantage of being much less disruptive than phone calls or visits. Yeah, it’s sad, I like email.

But that comes with a couple of provisos. Emails need to be clearly written, sent to the right people, work-related. That work-related means that the email should contain information I need to do my job, or something I need to act on.

I also like having conversations with my colleagues, and I’ve noticed that “coffee meetings” can be very effective – they rarely last more than 30 minutes and so people tend to stick to the point. Plus at our office they’re in an open setting so it’s easy to move away when the discussion is done, rather than be stuck in a meeting room because it’s “booked for the hour”.

Anyway given that people work in different ways I created my own infographic “Should you send me an email?”


(Thanks to land of web for the twitter coffee cup)