The cat is out of the bag

Well, the cat is officially out of the bag. Minnesota tech blog Minnov8 has broke the fact that we're releasing some substantial enhancements to BusinessCard2™ in just a little over two weeks. I had to confirm this news, although we've been (intentionally) trying to fly under the radar. Although I officially confirm this is true, we're still staying tight-lipped for a while yet. Behind the scenes we have been doing some very interesting and technically challenging work. I've been getting a ton of emails asking what we have planned. I'm asking those who are interested to just take a wait and see approach. We're diligently processing bugs in alpha testing at the moment, but I'm cautiously optimistic about offering up something new and engaging.

If he/she doesn't control the digital self, does the CEO really exist?

Just had the opportunity to read a really insightful article on socially networked CEO's (or lack thereof). The article comes out of my local market, but it really has broader implications. Our own locally-based Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn appears to be one of, if not the most, web networked CEO out there.

Social is good way to communicate with employees, customers, and other constituents. But so little adoption by corporate CEO's begs the question, "Why have they dismissed the graph as a communications channel?" Here are my thoughts:

- For large companies there is tremendous accountability, SOX compliance issues, and potential legal exposure.

- CEO's are busy guys. Using Twitter is a recent phenomenon and I think many are waiting to see the hard and soft ROI from investing the time to use such media.

- Large companies have large marketing/communications department. Every statement (historically speaking) is controlled and polished before flying out the door.

- Most large corporate CEO's (IMHO) are entirely oblivious to how the line between authentic and virtual reputation management has blurred.

- I suspect that many of these CEO's are aware of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, et al. My guess is that they see these platforms as a fad. They will only adopt when they see critical mass. I don't think this will happen anytime soon. Heck, most of these CEO's never created a blog, even when that was so terribly fashionable in 2005.

- There are likely unperceived consequences to appearing so approachable by communicating within the social graph. One that I could anticipate is that people feel spite or neglect if they comment to a communique tag and the CEO doesn't respond. [A happy customer/employee tells three people, a pissed off customer/employee tell 30 people.]

I anticipate that you'll see more use of these new communication vehicles by corporate CEO's, but it will take time and will need to be in a controlled environment. Streaming/real-time communication doesn't yet fit the nature of corporate leaders: strategic, canned, and calculated messaging.

Seeking Alpha Testers

Short blog post here just to let those of you out in cyberspace know that we're entering Alpha testing tomorrow of the new iteration of BusinessCard2™. If you'd like to be a short-term tester between now and beta, please give me a shout out. We're looking for a few people to come in and try to break things.

Unsecured Social Indexing

I just read THIS today on ReadWriteWeb. Basically a new study says an overwhelming percentage of people don't use privacy settings for their social presence. This begs the question, "If so few people do it is the setting really necessary?" Sure, it's great to have the option to control who sees what where, but if so many people don't use it, is it possible that people just don't care?

With BusinessCard2.com, we automatically submit our customer's unique domain link to major search engines for indexing. Not to toot our own horn, but we're really good at it. Over 90% of our users climb up into top search results for their name in about two weeks. Someone might say that since we do this automatically that we're not doing a good job of providing options. But, I'd say our customers call this FREE SEO. In the history of our company I can only think of two instances where people emailed us because the explicitly did not want to show up in search any longer.

What I've found and heard through my many discussions with our users/customers is that they want to have control over the way they appear in search engine results, and we're part of a mix of ways to make that happen. Although I find the data from Webroot interesting, I find it a little suspect that they didn't fully identify WHY people don't use a heightened level of privacy setting. My guess is that most don't care, so long as they have control over what presence they have via the particular social network.