Perceptive HR Technology

I’ve already vented here on the broader issues of the many social networking sites out there. And I had to laugh out loud when someone tweeted this week about how to solve the problem. In seriousness, the individual suggested you have two facebook pages (one personal, one professional), two twitter accounts, and who knows how many other plaxo or linked in sites.

I’ve also noticed that folks who’s blog I’ve followed of late are tweeting more frequently and blogging less. And I have to admit I’ve become one of them.

Blog posts take a lot of time and often are about formulating the background associated with one idea or concept. And when you HAVE to articulate it in 140 characters, you get good at summarizing and obviously you don’t worry much about eloquence (or do you do it even more?).

Bottom line — I’m finding myself tweeting all the best ideas/thoughts/discoveries in this pea brain of mine and lose all of my interest in writing a blog post.

I’m not finished, but I am going to let myself off the hook for the weekly posts I’ve committed to over the past couple of years (and anyone paying attention knows I’ve done a lousy job in the past few months anyway).

So join me on twitter (@larrydunivan) for regular stuff, and when something worthy of an in-depth discussion comes along, I’ll write about it here.

And of course, that’s all predicated on actually having something interesting to say — and in the world of social networking that is not trivial!

I’ve allowed my personal commitment to weekly blogging to get interrupted in support of a hiatus to get serious about other socicial networking technologies.   So if the blog just isn’t enough for you, I am now on Twitter (@larrydunivan), Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo (as Larry Dunivan).  Please join me at any or all of these sites.  The more the merrier!

It’s been an adventure, to say the least.  A few observations:

• I almost threw my cell phone against the wall one day last week.  A few of the folks I’m following on Twitter are so prolific that the phone vibrates 10-15 times per day.  I persevered until this weekend when I finally turned off the notifications.  But with Twitter, you’re capturing a tidbit during a moment in time.  So if I don’t read it as it happens, I can’t see myself going back to read through dozens of them some other time.  I’ll turn it back on after my leg recovers from the irritation of the vibrating battery — we’ll see how it goes.
• At least 90% of what I see, read or observe has no value.  As your network expands, the degree of intimacy you have with the vast majority of the people you encounter decreases exponentially.  I have to be honest — I simply don’t care where the guy from my alma mater ate dinner Saturday night.  But there it is in all its Facebook glory.  And no, I couldn’t have picked this guy out from a lineup (before Facebook) if my life had depended on it.
• LinkedIn?  My mission is to get to 500+ connections (bragging rights, nothing more…).  Please help me by sending me a request!  Pretty useless in the short-term, but I suppose valuable if I find myself in the job market anytime soon.  Truthfully, the biggest value I see is in helping folks looking for work leverage my network.  We all know it’s the only way you’re going to find a job in this economy.
• There is an occasional tidbit of interest — and I did find one nugget of gold.  And in my opinion, the person who said it never should have — and there’s the last, most critical issue.  I am an executive for a publically traded software company which limits many things I can talk about.  But more importantly, if I were to more candidly talk about my perspectives, it could easily compromise our business strategy.  Great for my competition and maybe would offer me a bit of an ego rush, but stupid in the long-term.

So it’s all very interesting, sometimes annoying, sometimes curiously fun.  I do have a few great ideas of how we can capture the best of it in our software products (yet another topic I can’t twitter about) and that’s worth it’s weight in gold.

The jury is still out, but I’m sticking around and I hope you’ll join me.  But unless it maintains some personal entertainment value (it does for me), the other benefits may not engage you enough to stick with it.