Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Ten Ways to Avoid Getting Pitches When Asking Questions on LinkedIn

One of the business uses for LinkedIn is to ask and answer questions. When you help answer questions posed by other professionals, you demonstrate expertise and generosity -- thus building visibility and earning a good reputation. If you want to keep track of questions asked by colleagues, the easiest way to do that is by adding the feed to that specific topic to your Google Reader account. Add more than one topic by organizing them in folders. Things to watch out for when asking questions When you're the one asking the question, you'll want to word the question in a... Read more →

Having the Experience

Which one is more important to you: Having an awesome experience, or recording and documenting it? The new Facebook Timeline feature was no doubt created to help people record and display their experiences. It looks more like a collection to showcase, what I call the "photo opp" in corporate political environment (being seen in the act of doing something), than social gesture. I cannot help but think that it is going to encourage indulging the latent voyeuristic and narcissistic tendencies in people. Who, in an effort to document experiences, will possibly dilute the very moment worth savoring first. The ticker?... Read more →

50 Job Resources for Makers

"I helped make this" [Kickstarter] Do you know who you are? I don't mean your title, that means little here. I mean your craft, your skill, your love and strength. Career vs. job thinking Many make the mistake of looking to others to find the answers. As long as you do that, as long as you depend on others to define you, as long as you wait for the job to tell you who you are, you're not going to be free to become that person. Many wait until the job is no longer there to start thinking about taking... Read more →

Fear as Fuel in Times of Uncertainty

I'd like to think I'm a brave person. To an observer, I look quite collected and confident. Do I have butterflies in my belly? Often. The size of Monarchs. Since a very tender age, every time I spoke in public, I thought my head was going to explode. Everyone surely would see how foolish my ideas were. I had the first opportunity to embarrass myself in front of a couple hundred adults at the tender age of six. It was a school reunion, at my school. I was there with mother, and they were at the point in the meeting... Read more →

The Netflix Redemption

One of the topics in last night's show on The Bean Cast was the recent decision by Netflix to raise prices for its monthly DVD-rental subscriptions by $6, and then to split its business in two due to the different models: DVD-rentals and streaming. Due to the differences in first-sale doctrine applicability, the advantages Netflix had in the DVD-by-mail world go away in the streaming world. This is something the average customer would not know. Action does speak louder than words, however. The plot A few weeks ago, Netflix caught heat for raising the prices of DVD rentals. They tried... Read more →

Do Social Networks Know You?

There's quite a bit of discussion about what social networks like Facebook and Google+ know about you from your browsing habits. Whether you've been cookied or tracked, or followed home by companies, all they can see is a browsing habit, not a preference. For example, I use the Web a lot for work, and the course of a week, I'll visit hundreds of sites that are just research to me, nothing more. Some algorithm somewhere will serve up ads based on this browsing and get is exactly wrong. Relevance requires a couple of key ingredients: connection to intent earned trust... Read more →

To Facebook You're Like an Open Book

After my pre-quel post on the battle for users content with feature additions and the brand promises of Google+ and Facebook respectively last week, here are my thoughts on what the Facebook changes mean. Many users have an emotional connection with their profiles due to sharing about life events -- maybe you know that the fastest growing age group on the social network is the above 55 years of age#. People use the network to reconnect with long lost friends, stay in touch with sons/daughters who moved away, and their grandchildren. Which is why the changes include a new Timeline,... Read more →

Before the Hype

Are you playing the "what if" game with your business? It's not uncommon to want to build hypotheticals, especially on the promotional end of things. Read TechCrunch and Mashable coverage of so many other companies, and you hope that your product will receive its fair share of "buzz." It happens most frequently after you got some coverage of your own -- you're on top of the world. Certainty however is about asking the right questions, or better ones. It's about relevance and the query set. It's in the discipline, structure, and drill of identifying the business model you trade on,... Read more →

Social Networks Face/off

It's been interesting to watch the crescendo of what would Google do, then what would Facebook roll out, and what about Twitter as a trailing third in posts and discussions. To an observer, it does look like a battle of the networks. Actually, no, it is more like a faceoff between Google and Facebook. My first look on Google+ turned out to be fair, given the subsequent developments. I continue to be impressed by the level of interaction and engagement Googlers display right in the stream. Google+ addressed useful network features early on. I have a long history on Facebook... Read more →

In Search of Certainty

The title to this post is the same as one of my short columns in the September Premium Newsletter, which went out yesterday. It was the search issue. Since there have been updates in the last several hours, I wanted to follow up with a couple of thoughts on new developments. A testament to how rapidly technology changes - or at least information about what we think we know. Google+ search Do you have it yet? You will know if you do by looking at what is written on the search bar up top. As I just predicted 24 hours... Read more →