World Wide You

You shouldn't feel privileged just because a Google search of your name actually results in websites that refer to you, that's what Google's search algorithm is designed to do. However, when you can control the content on those results...that is powerful.

Now don't lie. Surely, somewhere in the corners of a dull afternoon, you typed your name into Google to see what happened. If you did, you're not alone. Millions of people Google themselves every day. This ego phenomenon is so pervasive that a slew of businesses are providing services to help people control how and what comes up during a search for their name (see: Qalias, Reputation Defender, etc.) Recently I came across THIS VIDEO that plays off this aspect of vanity so commonplace for those of us who live online with frequency (Warning: crude language).

The internet has undoubtedly forever altered the way we do business. It used to be that a referral from a trusted source was all that was needed before going into a meeting. Today, before almost every single new meeting I'll perform a quick "due diligence" search based on the person's name. If nothing comes back, I have this knee jerk reaction that the person may not actually exist. I'm certain that other people do the same type of pre-meeting searches that I do.

If you're like me, one of the critical items I look for is number of results that come back in Google. For example, if you Google my name "Lief Larson" you'll find about 250,000 results. If you Google my friend "Dan Schawbel", publisher of the wildly popular Personal Branding Blog, you'll get about 84,000 results. A search on "Michael Arrington", the publisher of TechCrunch, will net you about 700,000 results. Of course this isn't a barometer for your reputation significance on the web, but it does indicate your reach, which may be interpreted as good or bad by those wanting to learn more about you.

More important are the Top 10 search results. Although you could create a bunch of websites, diligently contribute to your blog every day, you may have little if any control over the top results if the other websites that reference you have better search relevancy. This can be a problem when you want to control those Top 10 results to make sure people see you the way you want to be seen.

If you're looking to put some effort into controlling how others see you online, take a gander at Pete Kistler's article "How to Interlink Your Web Presence". Pete does a great job of providing some practical tactics that can be employed over a weekend to ensure you are giving yourself the best shot at having control over the way others see you, and getting those results to take over the Top 10 spots.

Building and Protecting a Professional Reputation

Not all professionals are created equal. One of the most obvious career differentiators available to professionals today is the ability to stand out in a competitive marketplace by calling attention to experience credentials. Another factor that can differentiate you is your professional reputation. Often the two go hand-in-hand, and there is no better place to expose this opportunity than the web.

Have you ever been considering doing business with somebody and decided to look them up in Google or Yahoo!? If so, you're not alone. Hundreds of millions of searches are performed each year based on name alone. Typically the way this works it that you type in "John Doe" into Google, then start looking for results on that person. However, as utilizing search in the due diligence process has increased, potential partners, customers, and even vendors are searching for more in-depth information. In other words, having no web-based identity or reputation is almost worse than have a few pages floating around out there.

Beyond merely entering a name in the search field, many people are also using more advanced tools, such as tracking people with Google News alerts, to stay on top of a search subjects' identity. We all know that you need to be careful what kind of pictures and content you put in sites like Facebook and MySpace, but it's equally important that you can find, understand, and manage what other people have to say about you online; this information also influences how people doing research on you perceive you professionally.

Now that you're ready to start controlling your reputation, I have some good news for you. BusinessCard2 has just released a recommendation system that allows friends, current and former colleagues, clients, and vendors to provide feedback on their experiences with you. We supply this information to the search engine robots to make those recommendations available for indexing in the search engines. What is so novel about this is that you can manage the recommendations from your BusinessCard2 account, thus having a point of control for your professional reputation.

The more positive information and constructive feedback, such as recommendations, that exist online, the better your chances of pounding home the fact that others have had positive experiences with you should influence new searchers' attitudes toward you. In other words, one negative comment online can get buried by 30 positive comments.

Release of BusinessCard2 Widget V. 1.1

Well. It's there, finally. We have released BusinessCard2 web widget v. 1.1. It's a long time in coming and I'd like to give a little public praise to Jereme Allen for his hard work. Before saying what it is, I'd like to describe why we did it. Late last year we started to look at making some modifications to the badges we provide people as a quick link back to their business card. However, were very keen on the idea that interpersonal communications are moving outside of the walled garden. A widget solution seemed a natural fix, but Flex was just in its infancy (which was o.k. because it bought us some time to work on pressing issues with the BusinessCard2 platform). We created the BusinessCard2 widget over the last 45 days to empower our users to move outside of our walled garden.

So what is it? It's basically a tool that takes content, as our users publish it, converts it to flash, and acts as a dynamic means for people to look at that data virtually anywhere on the web. Since this is such an early version I can confirm that we're looking at taking it to the next level, but we're pleased that we have our foot in the door with something that users can implement on their websites (er, virtually any place they want it to go). When the content in BusinessCard2 is updated, the card updates no matter where it is residing on the web.

You can view an example of my widget on the right hand column.

We'll be working through the proper channels to allow users to extend their card widget (for example WordPress does not yet allow for uploading this kind of Flash). Until then, you can log into your account, click on "MyCards" and then click on "Card Widget" if you'd like to see how your card widget appears or if you'd like to code to publish your widget to other web sites.

Musings on Contention in Data and Portability Thereof

If you ever read Master Sun's The Art of War, you'll understand clearly that contention leads to conflict, and conflict leads to war. No clearer is this the case than yesterday's battle about data ownership amongst some of the most prominent technology bloggers. Warning: the following link is to a podcast that contains adult language. You can listen to the discussion here.

At the heart of this heated discussion is the ownership and portability of personal data proceeding the tete-a-tete involving Google and Facebook. The summary scenario goes like this... if you give somebody your business card, the social contract states that you're sharing your information with that person and they'll then own it. However, you trust that the transfer of that data is on a one-to-one basis. Now imagine for a second if that person took your business card and published all of your contact information publicly in a way that any person could gain access to that, but that is not exclusively what you intended with your contact info. Would that be a breach of the social contract?

Of course there would be a penalty in such a scenario. If you did not want your information widely published, you'd hold the party you shared your business card with responsible, right? Well, that's the scenario being faced in the web social networking space. Facebook, through their actions, appears to believe they own any data that you have created on their application. In fact, up until a couple of months ago it was extremely difficult (if not impossible) to delete/remove yourself from their application.

In an effort to make our personal data more portable, groups such as OpenID are working to allow users to carry their personal information with them across the web. But now let's look at the bigger issue. Imagine for a second that you have a friends list, social graph, or contacts data. Should you be able to take that with you too? And if so, does your social contract with all of those people empower you to take their contact data wherever you want?

This is a very challenging issue. BusinessCard2 has been on both sides of this issue; we have allowed for the publishing of contacts' data and have also put full account and data control in the hands of our users. Just in the last week we made the decision to avoid the problem of contacts assigned to a single identity by opposing any functionality in our application from importing a users' contacts. This was a rather simple decision because we felt it was the right thing to do. It may slow our growth, but we think the rewards are that we can sleep at night without concerning ourselves over maintaining data on people who are not or do not want to be a part of our application.

This contention also brings up an even bigger issue, and that is the fact that BusinessCard2 is not purposed as a social network. In fact, I'd say we're the opposite of a social network. A social network is about aggregating contacts and connections, primarily involving those who you have relationships (whether authentic or virtual) with. BusinessCard2, on the other hand, is purposed to help bridge the gap between you and somebody you don't yet know. In our model, it's a solution to uniting two disconnected nodes (you and a customer who doesn't know you yet).

As a commercial connectivity tool, we are providing our application as a means of broadcasting your professional identity to new audiences: potential new customers, potential new partners, etc. This of it as your own personal dynamic website that you own and control, but can go outside of the walled garden of BusinessCard2.com.

The walled gardens of systems like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., are good for Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. At times they're also good for the body of the social network (Facebook may not have grown as large if they didn't have a walled garden). Regardless of personal opinions on the moral and contractual obligations of data and data portability, the simple fact is that people want to and should be able to move freely outside the walled garden, and should be able to terminate their data within a walled garden any time they wish. The leading social networking websites understand this, or portability wouldn't be an issue. From a defensive position, they want to ensure that their application isn't just a fad, so they're willing to talk about things like portability. But, when they say one thing and do another, that is a smoke screen, right?

Launched Beta Today

After several weeks of hard work (special thanks to Jereme) we pushed http://businesscard2.com live today. Still a little buggy, but I really didn't have anything better to be doing at 11pm on a Wednesday night. If you're interested in checking it out......

In or about 1658 in France, during the rule of Louis XIV, the business card was born. More than 350 years later and approximately 140 million of us worldwide are using business cards in almost the same way - a small piece of paper used to transfer contact and commercial information.

Although the business card might have been inspired during the period of Louis XIV, it has matured from a calling card into a necessity preceding business transactions. Several years ago, while talking on the subject of business cards with a colleague, he identified the business card as "the world's tiniest billboard". And isn't that what it really it; a billboard that can be easily passed around?

In 17th Century England, the "trade card" grew roots. In London at the time (a period before GPS) is was often difficult to find merchant shops. Shopkeepers used the trade cards to help potential customers find them more easily. Typically there was a small litho map giving their shop context to the vicinity.

In the 19th Century, business cards begun their use in France by nobility, while at this same time they made their away across the pond to America. Within fifty years business cards were widely used and accepted in commercial transactions.

During the 20th Century business cards reached critical adoption rates. Nearly all types of businesses and professionals used business cards to trade information at the beginning, or end, of meetings. This custom continues to this day. Business cards are most widely used in the Unitied States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Australia. However, due to global westernization, business cards can also be found used with frequency in Eastern Europe, Russia, China, and India.

After the fall of Japan in World War II, the American influence on commerce included business cards. In fact, like many of the post-war developments of Japan, they took the business card and made it better. In Japan the business card is known as "Meishi". If you ever have an opportunity to do business in Japan, you'll do well be reading this information first. Trading business cards in Japan is serious business and if you forget to bow, you might not get the deal.

Back in late 2006 the BusinessCard2.com team was working on a web-based SaaS and discovered several users appreciated the way we helped them to display and manage contact information in the web environment. In March/April of 2007 we launched a new application (called Lyro) to test out our hypothesis that business people may want to share business cards across the internet. Although the service was met with some fanfare and some critical suggestions, we were genuinely the only company putting all our efforts into the concept of a Business Card 2.0.

So here we are in 2008. Thousands of publishers and blog owners continue to hide their contact information behind forms. Hundreds of large e-commerce websites maintain people behind walled gardens of data, making it as difficult as ever to find the right person at a company. And, in the mindset that business is all about two people connecting in a meaningful way, tens of thousands of websites of service provider companies don't even publish information on who their sales reps are. This is likely a turning point in personal branding on the web. More than ever, people want to be easily discoverable.

So what is the future? We believe that future is BusinessCard2.com, and it will launch Summer 2008.