PurpleCar

Employers are vetting out applicants online. The new adage is “Google them.” Some employers are stepping over the line of a simple web search to asking for an applicant’s password to social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace. This may seem like prudent vetting practice, but in fact it’s more troublesome and legally dangerous than it is worth.

After an uproar over privacy laws on the Internet, a Montana city government retracted their policy of asking for applicants’ private passwords for social networking sites. Personally, I think Montana was fortunate it was an uproar on the internet and not an EEOC lawsuit that caused them to rethink their policy. Collecting a mere applicant’s or even an employee’s privacy credentials is not only legally dangerous, but unnecessary.

Let’s think through the logic of this. Say an employer, “BigCompany,” wants to vet potential 17-year-old intern, “Sarah Genius;” they want to ensure she conducts herself in a manner that is becoming to BigCompany. BigCompany’s Human Resources staff, namely low-on-the-totem-pole tech “Pete BadApple,” conducts a simple web search and views what the public can see online about her.

Pete BadApple fancies himself an expert internet searcher. He finds every group Sarah Genius had ever briefly been a member of, every update she posted on MySpace, and every forum she ever lurked on. This is all just public information. Pete BadApple makes a note that Sarah Genius suffers from diabetes and kidney problems (information he assumes based on her group memberships). Pete BadApple uses Sarah’s passwords to log in as Sarah on Facebook. He concludes that Sarah is African-American, based on her family and friend connections. Pete BadApple had met Sarah Genius during the interview process (and found her to be quite cute, actually), and this information is jarring to him.

Still, Pete BadApple continues on, looking through Sarah Genius’s friend lists. Lo and behold, Pete finds that Sarah is a cousin of Huge MovieStar. Huge MovieStar has a private profile and is connected only to friends and family that also have private profiles. They are a tight-knit group and protect Huge MovieStar’s privacy fiercely. Well, Pete BadApple is logged in as Huge MovieStar’s cousin, Sarah Genius, so Pete can thumb through Huge MovieStar’s updates. He finds that Huge MovieStar, who is all over the headlines for being tapped to star as the Next Indiana Spider-Terminator, was newly diagnosed with Leukemia. The headlines have no idea about this, and the movie studio would certainly withdraw the offer if they knew. Pete BadApple is a little short on cash this month, so he calls and sells the story to a tabloid, sending screen shots as proof. Pete BadApple finishes his vetting process of Sarah Genius and emails his report to his boss, and then forwards a copy to his friend, adding pictures of Sarah Genius in a topless bikini, captioning the pictures with “Can you believe this chick is Black? She’s totally hot anyway!”

Lo and behold, somehow Pete BadApple’s report and email wind up in the hands of an EEOC lawyer and the local and federal law authorities that investigate child pornography. BigCompany now has a Big Problem.

Even if Pete BadApple was Pete GoodApple, the mere public web search may have brought up information that although public, should not be part of the vetting process. Pete BadApple should not have included Sarah Genius’s medical-condition support group memberships in his report. This information violates the law. The other concern is that every company has a Pete BadApple. Even Pete GoodApple can “turn bad” when faced with potentially money-making information about an applicant. Why put your employees in that situation and your company at risk?

Nowhere in this process should private interactions come into public view. When you vet a person’s background, you should worry only about what the public can see about that person. Of course, password protection and site security aren’t foolproof and one day private information may become public (although this is a very rare occurrence); we can understand why BigCompany wants to make sure Sarah Genius isn’t a closet freak. But just because the Internet makes it more possible than ever to vet out a person’s background, it doesn’t mean an employer should. Employers got along just fine before Facebook. BigCompany can better predict Sarah’s future performance by looking at her past performance than they can aptly predict her performance based on her private web page. In fact, Sarah’s private web persona is most likely very different than her work or everyday persona. If employers make assumptions based on the content of Facebook Walls, they will be likely passing up qualified candidate after qualified candidate (this is especially true when the hiring manager is a Boomer and the applicant is from Gen X or Y).

An applicant’s privacy is better left intact. If you are an employer, rely on the old-fashioned vetting methods like a credit check and recommendations, and add a regular web search of public pages. Ignore memberships in any public support groups or forums. Keep your company free of legal and civil complications.

What do you think? Have you run into a situation at work where someone’s online privacy was violated? Heard of any lawsuits about this type of thing? Let’s discuss in the comments.

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(If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, hop on over to Common Craft and watch this video.)

How to Start Using Twitter.

So you’ve gone over to Twitter.com and signed up.  Congratulations, you’re a Tweeter!  Now what?  What do you use it for?  How do you find people to follow?  How to get people to follow back?

First things first.  You must do the following 3 things when you sign up to Twitter:

1. Upload a picture (any picture will do, but one of your face is best.  G-rated helps too).
2. Fill out a bio, including Location.
3. Provide a URL, even if it is your MySpace page.

A picture, a bio, and a URL go a long way in making you appear to be someone who wants to join the community.  (I also advise new users to keep away from putting numbers in their username as this tends to look spammy.)

TIP: Don’t be afraid to change your bio sometimes.  I personally change my bio every few weeks.  It gives my followers some variety and a way to learn a little bit more about me with every tweak.  Still, I keep the common elements in the bio field (e.g. “writer” and “techie geek”).

OK, you’re all set up.  Now what?

Now you start following people.  To follow a person means that you subscribe to their feed; you see everything they tweet out in the public timeline.

Hopefully you know a person or two to follow to get you started.  If you don’t know a soul on Twitter, follow me!  If that isn’t enough for you (which, I can’t imagine), then start searching for people who share your interests.  You can do this in a few ways.

Search locally.  An ADOBE AIR application called TwitterLocal will show you tweets from people in whatever area you specify.   It doesn’t work that well but it does work enough for you to find some local people.

TIP: After you’ve downloaded the free AIR application, check out Twhirl and Tweetdeck for great Twitter interfaces.

Search Google with the following syntax to find a bunch of people to follow:  Term location site:twitter.com (replace “term” with “writer” “doctor” “juggler” or whatever you’re looking for, and put your city in the “location” part.  My favorite search is writer philadelphia site:twitter.com).

Twitter Grader allows you to put in your city and see the top Tweeters (I’m usually around #12 for Philly).  Follow a few that sound interesting.  Tweet them (type @ then their username, no spaces.  Type your message, then hit send).  Start conversations.  Most people usually follow back.

Twellow is a service that helps people find niches on Twitter.  There are so many of these types of sites popping up everyday.  Just look for them.

TIP:  Under the Notices tab in your Twitter Settings is the word “@Replies” next to a little pulldown menu.  [See picture].  Until you are very familiar with Twitter, I suggest that you set it to “Show me all @replies.”  This helps you find new people to follow.  If someone sends an @reply to someone else that seems interesting, check out the person they are @replying to.  Do this by clicking on the username or typing http://twitter.com/username in your browser’s URL (replace “username” with whatever came after the @ in the person’s tweet).  You may find that the person on the other side of the conversation may be just the kind of person you’re looking for.  Once you are comfortable with Twitter and have found enough interesting people to follow, then you can change this setting to “Show me @replies to people I’m following.”  Doing so will keep the noise in your stream to a minimum.

How to get people to follow back?

Usually people will follow back once you follow them.  If they don’t, don’t worry about it.  There’s way too much emphasis in the social media world about number of followers.  Follower numbers are not trustworthy; as cool as Twitter is, spammers abound, which send follower rates through the roof but make those rates totally bogus.  Don’t waste your 140 characters per tweet on desperate pleas for followers either.  Just Tweet out things that interest you: links, quotes, musings, etc.

TIP: Under settings at the very bottom of the page is a checkbox next to Protect My Updates.  Don’t check this box.  If you protect your updates right away, you won’t get any followers and it will be nearly impossible for people to have conversations with you.  Private tweeting is more of an advanced Twitter function and requires a little learning curve.

Don’t follow thousands of people.  To start out, try about 20 people on for size.  See how the timeline suits you.  See if people are following back.  One of the biggest mistakes that I see constantly is the Major Follow Move.  Newbies start on Twitter then click follow buttons all up and down the timeline like a squirrel hoarding nuts in November.  DO NOT DO THIS.  That’s a dead give-away for “spammer.”  In fact, the spammer Major Follow Move had gotten to be such a problem that the Twitter.com staff have now put a 2,000 person cap on new follows.  You can’t follow more than 2000 people if your follower::followee ratio is too out of whack.

So, as people follow you back, follow more people.  Grow your network slowly.  You can always watch the humongous public timeline if you’re bored (Japanese kids are writing novels on Twitter, so be forewarned if you want to absorb the world’s public tweets).

Last but not least, the big question:  What the heck do I use this for?

Great question.  Once you are familiar with tweeting, you’ll have learned that the simple answers to “What are you doing?” don’t really elicit intellectually stimulating conversations.  I don’t use that prompt much anymore myself.  Telling my followers “I’m getting my roots done” doesn’t really keep my anyone interested.   As a freelancer and stay-at-home mom, I use Twitter as my water-cooler, my board room, my lunch table, and my happy hour.  I send out questions to the group that sometime roll into heated debates among many users.  Sometimes I retweet a funny link someone else sent me.  Just wing it for now.  You’ll get into the swing of things.

TIP: Search the internet for 3rd party tools that work with Twitter (it’s ok to give your password to the apps, just make sure your Twitter password isn’t the same as your banking or email or any other password).  The Twitter search functions may help you figure out what you want to do with your account and who you may want to follow.  Check out this wiki to get started.

Twitter is one of those litmus tests in life: what you put into it will be what you get out of it.  Find your people.  Start connecting.

And try your hardest to avoid addiction. 

Here’s the Better Philly video segment. It’s definitely a very cursory introduction and it is geared toward stay-at-home moms:

Second video, learn about Joey Fortman’s bubble tweet:

Here is a keyword cloud made from the bios of my 2500+ followers on Twitter.

You all are awesome, people! I love having you as my co-workers!

Click on it to see a bigger version.

Most used words in bios

The top 5 words I’ve tweeted: seesmic, good, know, twitter, thanks.

Tweetclouds are such visual poetry, I love them.  They read like poetry, whether they are arranged in alphabetical order or artistically like above.

Check out your own Wordle (the image above is copyrighted to them).  You may find that you are talking too much about things you’d rather not!  Hopefully you will have a nice surprise, like I did.  “Good” “Know” “Thanks” aren’t bad things to see.  As time goes on, the two apps in the list may fade for “LOVE” and “People.”  Or maybe new terms will take over, like “WRITING” and “BOOK” and “READ.”  I’ll post another Tweetcloud from Wordle when my list morphs.    What does yours look like?

Recently, Twitter user @soluzioni asked me the following question:

“Hi Christine! Since u seem to use Twitter lots, what are ur insights on the in-effectiveness of visualising threaded discussions? ..-)”

Although I love a good academic chat about Twitter, I didn’t understand this question at all. @soluzioni isn’t a native English speaker, and at times foreign users adopt too many buzzwords or odd habits. My first impression was, “What is ineffective about thinking of improving how we look at threading?” My second thought was, “Either threads are there or they aren’t.”

I ran this question and @soluzioni’s next one (“‘Nothing too clever’: a couple of connections / pivot points to who+what to facilitate context.” [-I think he's trying to dumb it down for me]) past my rhetoric-busting husband. He suggested that perhaps @soluzioni, whose bio has references to mind mapping, was trying to create a way to represent visually the links between posts in a threaded discussion.

I can understand that. The “ineffective” part threw me off. Anyway, I’m going to work with the premise that @soluzioni is unhappy with the status quo of conversation mapping on the web.

Basically, a forum thread looks like this:

Main question
—>reply
—>reply
—->reply to a reply
—>reply
—->reply to a reply
—–>reply to the reply to a reply.

The first “main question” post is either at the top or the bottom of the page. Then replies are off-set under the main post. Replies to replies are offset even more. Many times, a user will click the “reply” button under the main question but continue on with a point brought up in one of the already existing replies. This means that if you want to follow the discussion, you have to spend the time viewing every single reply entry embedded under the “main question,” no matter what level of offset they are.

This type of chronological map is the simplest way to “follow” a conversation on-line. Unfortunately, the 140 character limit of Twitter makes it impossible to classify your conversation over multiple users and instances. At times people use hashtags (a # symbol followed by a term that reflects the conversation, e.g., #eaglesfootball) but hashtags still take up space and may not reflect all of the relevant topics in a conversation.

Some 3rd party Twitter API apps have attempted to thread Twitter conversations, and they do a decent job of capturing and offsetting immediate replies. But the more people you “have in your room” the more fragments will occur. Without hashtags (which people forget to add anyway), it’s impossible to capture all of the ideas that swarm during a Twitter conversation.

For businesses or people trying to gather ideas via social-media crowd sourcing, this is devastating. Even 1,000 Google alerts honed in on Twitter won’t bring you the little gem of an idea offered by a small-crowd Twitter user. I propose a different method.

I’d like to see a 3rd party app that can build keyword clouds from Twitter entries. I’d like this app to be highly customizable. I want to be able to mark the first “main topic” Twitter entry (a.k.a. “tweet”), then I’d like to modify the user span from which the app will draw keywords, then I’d like to put a time limit on it.

Here’s an example of using this fantasy application:

I put this entry into Twitter:

“Your company wants to start using Twitter as a business tool. How do you advise the use of social media to them?”

I then fire up my fantasy app. I link to my original entry.
I click the option of “all conversation” (as opposed to “only @replies”).
I put a time limit on it by clicking “in the next hour.”
The app first uses a Twitter search to see replies to me (@PurpleCar).

But, and this is where it gets innovative, the app also takes a catalog of all my followers and all THEIR followers, and makes a keyword cloud out of EVERYTHING they ALL tweet in the next hour. If one of your follower’s followers (3 tiers away from you) has more followers than say, 95% of all Twitter users, then that user’s tweets can be pulled into the keyword cloud (this would address “reach” — like a 6 degrees of separation concept — how far do your ideas reach around the Twitter community). The app, after an hour, would give you a reach score and a keyword cloud based on your choices. If your main topic’s keywords show growth (easier if they are very unique words), you can assume that you’ve started a conversation.

This keyword cloud along with some well planned Google blog search and keyword search over the next few days could lend a pretty reliable picture of what people in your community are talking about.

We are a LONG way away from this fantasy app. For the app to be effective, it would have to automatically abbreviate your words (e.g. “business” to “biz” or “bus”), have serious drive abilities (I have over 2,000 people in my room, most of whom are online when I am, and a lot of my followers have more than a few hundred followers themselves), and have total access to the Twitter API. None of those things is possible right now. It’s almost on the verge of artificial intelligence AND NASA-fast CPU’s AND server health and security at Twitter (the last of which is the most impossible option of all).

But, keyword clouds, twitter search and Google alerts exist, so with a bit of work you can fashion your own keyword cloud for a certain group of users over a certain amount of time. You’d have to work on a very small scale, but sometimes big ideas come from just one small voice. You just need to find a way to hear that tiny peep in the darkness.

I hope @soluzioni wasn’t too insulted, and I hope this answers his question about my insights into the threaded (or lack of threaded) conversations on Twitter.

UPDATE: 19 January 2009:

Erich from the comments reminded me via Twitter of tweetstats.com and wordle.net.  I made a nice “wordle” of my Tweets – it’s a keyword cloud of the most used terms by me.  You can see it here. It is for ALL of my Tweets since I started with the app in 2007.

• Happy New Year everyone! Here’s to a healthy and prosperous 2009 for all of us. And let’s all resolve to be a bit more tolerant. # Read the rest of this entry »

Loic LeMeur has jumped the shark. He has crossed the line into the absurd. Follower rates on Twitter really don’t mean much at all, especially when it comes to the tweeter’s “value.”

So the proverbial poop hit the fan today on Twitter. It started with me calling out a new follower on what I thought was an automatic direct message.

I’m gonna jump on the bandwagon and finally do a “Twitter rant” post. But it isn’t gona go the way you expect.