Google's Second Best Bet in Social Networking

It's been a year or so since Google rolled out Google+. I never use it, I don't really know anyone who does. No buzz. But they should probably still keep it alive. I think their second best bet for succeeding in social networking Google's second best bet in social networking is to wait for Facebook to stumble. I believe the pressure to deliver short-term profits, given the poor stock performance, ironically increases the chance they may do something really dumb. Google should be prepared for that day.

(So what is the best bet? They should buy LinkedIn.)

Don't Like Frictionless Sharing

I got a Facebook notification, asking me to validate that I worked with a former colleague at a former employer. Fine, no big deal, I clicked yes. But Facebook--without so much as a "by your leave"--frictionlessly decided that meant that I desired to add my experience at that employer to my own status.

I use Facebook strictly for personal stuff, and segregate professional stuff to LinkedIn. So I don't really have any burning desire to list my employment details on Facebook. I don't really have any objection, so I'm not freaked out, but this is an example of being way too frictionless for my liking. At a minimum, Facebook should have asked me if I wanted to post that.

Lead Generation Sites

This NYT article explains a new (to me) form of internet-based scams, Lead Generation sites:

By that, the Haggler means that there actually is a guy named Bob Strom, who is a bonded locksmith. And he owns a business, which you can visit, at 7352 15th Ave NW. This might seem too obvious to note, but it sets Mr. Strom apart from more than 90 percent of his local competitors. According to Yelp, there are — no joke — nearly 3,000 locksmiths in Seattle, though with relatively rare exceptions these operations aren’t in Seattle at all. 

They are phone banks, typically set up in far-off places, often in other countries. Call them and they’ll dispatch a locksmith. Some are legitimate, but others may all too often do shoddy work and/or charge two or three times the estimate.

That is another example of why social recommendations could be very useful.

Facebook Beacon Functionality

A couple of years ago, Facebook got hammered for their "Beacon" program, where your purchases on certain partner websites were automatically (as in opt out) posted to your Facebook page. Really dumb.

Ironically, I think this could be useful, and very easily implemented. In fact, all that is needed is to make "Share with Facebook" an option for smartphone shopping apps, such as Google Shopper. You use the smartphone app to scan the Barcode, and it looks up the product. This is just what Google Shopper already does. All that is needed is one more button in tue UI, labeled "Share with Facebook".

The funny thing is, 1-2 click sharing is a common feature of so many smartphone apps. A bit mystifying why it is missing here (or at least in Shopper--I haven't surveyed all the other apps).

Facebook Parental Feature: Comment-Scraping

Our teens have Facebook pages. A requirement was that they let us be their friends. Of course I refrain from actually posting anything on their pages, but I check them every now and then. Here is the Facebook feature/add-in I would like. I would like a robot that scrapes their comments page every hour, aggregates it and emails it to me each day. I would particularly like it to highlight any comments that had been deleted!

Helping People Find Jobs with "Soft Referrals"

15 months ago, I left a medium-sized company in the mortgage industry. It had been a great place to work, right up until it wasn't, and I really liked and admired many of the people I worked with.

I was one of the earlier people to jump--the writing on the wall seemed clear to me--but many others stayed, for various reasons. The company I moved to, in a very different industry, is a huge employer, and was doing a fair amount of hiring. But it was such a huge company, and I was so new, that there was almost zero chance that I would have any direct contact with the the area doing the hiring for any given posting.

So what I told my former colleagues (the 90% that I would put in the "good person to hire category") was "if you see a posting that you are interested in, send me the requisition number, and I will find out who the hiring manager is, and send them an unsolicited, but internal, reference. Also, while my primary motivation is not the referral bonus, all things being equal, I would like to be in a position to collect it, so give me 24 hours to submit you through the system, then go ahead and assume I have done that, and apply".

This has worked out pretty well for all concerned. This helped 3 job seekers find positions. It helped hiring managers hire good people. And as the referrer, in theory, I should be eligible for a referral bonus. (Well, I guess it only helped me in that it helped the other two ways--2 of the 3 positions were for contractors, so no referral bonus there, and the third was for someone who had already posted before contacting me, so no bonus there either.)

I think for some reason, people are hesitant to send this kind of unsolicited referral. I don't know why. Obviously, you only do it for good people. But even a "cold" internal referral, especially coming from someone obviously in a leadership position, is significant. If I were choosing between 2 hireable candidates that I had no prior knowledge of, and I estimated one was a "7", and the other an "8", and I got a solid internal referral on the 7, I would probably take that "7 in the hand", over an "8 in the bush". So, from the job-seeker's perspective, you may have to "lean on" your contacts to take this step. Feel free to link to this post to help make your case!

Acting as referrer has the added benefit of providing you, the referrer, with a chance to broaden your network within the company.

Facebook Feature: Professional vs Social

As noted, I am a newbie to Facebook. In general, it seems to me like a dangerous time waster. But I let it harvest my Gmail account for addresses, and then proceeded to invite the people it found. As I think about it, though, it seems to me that mixing professional and personal is just not such a desirable thing. I wonder if Facebook should have some built-in notion of professional contact vs personal contact.

Otherwise, I might just stick to LinkedIn for professional social networking. (That is what a contact of mine suggested when I friended him, which is what got me thinking about it.)