Hacking the Good days…

Have been researching more on the business side of social media due to a recent project and it seems really challenging to wrap the space so I am keen to share with you the thought process.

1. Social media, like all media, is a medium for people to connect
2. Social media is defined as digital medium that allows people to distribute information to one another or to many in a low-cost, parallel distributed way (i.e. once a message is sent, it can easily be cascaded and spread out)
3. Human beings intrinsically connect to satisfy their emotional and social needs, and seek empathy when something elicit their emotional response (e.g. fall in/out of love, winning a competition, had a bad day at work, best friends getting married, stress of moving homes etc)
4. Just like it is comfortable to watch episodes of Friends where it feels like people you knew all along are there with you, Facebook/Twitter or even your old school emails provide you with a digital venue to meet and greet and connect with people that you like (hence interested in what they are up to)
5. Social media, hence, is an extension or convenience for us to connect, just like a community cafe in the town where you read newspaper and get greeted by familiar faces on Sunday mornings
6. Social media also provides ample information for people to compete and distribute their achievements (linkedin profiles) for social capital gain (oh I know this person who can help our company does that), but at the same time can back fire as a medium on ego-stroking oneself (e.g. facebook updates on how someone bought another race car with photos etc..)

Now the business side is what boggles me.

1. Marketing sees that when there’s something that everybody looks at and ‘ENGAGEs’ with, it is a channel (the ‘billboards’ where they can make a lot of money in getting people to notice and buy a product)
2. Marketing sees that ’social media’ is one of these venues
3. Now how does marketing ‘capitalises’ and ‘leverages’ social capital?

Here I hope we can take a step back and look at the human side of social media.  If your product helps me connect and share my feelings/thinking (e.g. Wordpress), I would genuinely really like you and I would spread the word for you when someone asks me what blogging platform I recommend.  Or if my good friend develops an iPhone app that rocks, I would gladly review the app and put some good words (genuine, of course) in the app store, not because I am doing that for you per se, but if I find something useful, I would want to share and help other people find the same thing too.  But if the app sucks, I would help my friend to improve by giving him offline recommendations because I know online reputation counts.

Now what I am not sure is if a big brand comes along and ask me to re-skin my blog to promote their brand so that my visitors would constitute their ‘page impressions’.  This is where traditionally marketing having a hard time to understand.  Social media is NOT a traditional billboard.  It is an intimate part of my daily life.  Imagine if you are a new father/mother, you won’t ‘brand’ your kid with Pampers outfit to promote the brand, but if Pampers works really well for your child’s skin, you would naturally recommend it to other parents (whether via social media or just a simple chat over coffee).

In a nutshell, social media allows users to get their words out fast and more exponentially, but ultimately your product needs to deliver.  Get the product right, then people would do the talking for you.  Social media helps getting the words out faster, but that’s both for good and for the worst.

The ‘World wide web’ is a romantic concept -

• World: belongs to everyone
• Wide: no boundary
• Web: links everyone together.

But my romantic interpretation has been interrupted by the not so romantic everlasting online abuse problem and hence the proposed CAPTCHA feature in a work meeting.  Now here’s my view (supported by some research)…

1. Captcha punishes a vast amount of people

…(and money they make) who deserve extra consideration on web accessibility

Isofarro has helped me dug out some useful stats:

Between 15% and 30% of the population have functional limitations that can affect their ability to use technology products (50 million in US, 750 million worldwide). It is estimated that people with disabilities control a discretionary income of over $175 billion annually in US alone.

US$175 billion discretionary income?? Now accessibility is not a fancy ‘feature’, it matters to your business and you can tell your boss that quoting CSUN, in case they have ‘no time’ for egalitarian beliefs :)

2. All in all – I just see that CAPTCHA should not be a feature requirement

…or at least clear warning should be given to the publisher before they decide to implement for two key reasons: (1) accessibility: it keeps good users away and (2) CAPTCHA is easily solvable by those who want to: it does not stop the evil spirite to contrary to most people’s belief.

(1) Accessibility:

Users hate CAPTCHA. In our user research many told us that they would not bother to comment if they have to go through CAPTCHA. So CAPTCHA essentially turns away the light contributors who are pivotal in enriching the community with a more general, diversified tone of voice, while retaining the more troll/spam-ish users who would do anything to make themselves heard. In all, CAPTCHA turns users away as an extra step to contribute when sometimes your product already requires a sign-in system to comment.

(2) CAPTCHA would NOT help the problem of spam:

Multiple research has demonstrated that CAPTCHA is known to not helping in deterring spam. I am citing two academic research to illustrate.

(I) Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA

http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/

‘It is important to note that, like seemingly every security system that has preceded it, this system can be defeated by those who benefit most from doing so. For example, spammers can pay a programmer to aggregate these images and feed them one by one to a human operator, who could easily verify hundreds of them each hour. The efficacy of visual verification systems is low, and their usefulness is nullified once they are commonly exploited.’

I easily found something is hiring CAPTCHA solving team, http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/NET-Website-Design/fast-captcha-project.439814.html, for instance.

(II) A Low-cost Attack on a Microsoft CAPTCHA

http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/jeff.yan/msn_draft.pdf

‘It took on average ~80 ms for the attack to completely segment a challenge on a desktop computer with a 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 CPU and 2 GB RAM. As a result, we estimate that this Microsoft scheme can be broken with an overall (segmentation and then recognition) success rate of more than 60%. ‘

60% success rate in hacking the system is almost as same as success rate from average users, so again, CAPTCHA does not keep spammer away while making our sites inaccessible to.  My own sucess rate of CAPTCHA is probably 50% haha.  I’m worst than a bot you see.

But What are we gonna do without CAPTCHA??? Recommendations:

Why do we need CAPTCHA? It’s because we want to get rid of spam. With all the research I have put together and discussing with engineers from all cross of life, I’ve distill the following potential routes:

1. We’d need some sort of reputation system that will surface trusted users content (algorithm based, factoring in variables such as membership length, history of abuse/content removed, human-filters such as community manager assigning special reputation levels).  Askimet does this rather well and they offer both commercial and free to use API for private use.
2. Comments with similar syntax and semantics should be analysed with a variable confidence level for spam filtering

Of course this is a filtered version that I can share openly.  At work I have been documenting everything to a point where I am called the ‘abuse lady’.  How I love my job! :)

Okay finally I have noticed new strands of suspected Wordpress spam:

‘Dear there! how are you?
thanx for such opportunities to readers.They are with very appriciable advantage in changing readers mind and makes them wise-men.at the same time I want to appriciate for the one who gave comment in no3 above.I hope such persons stand to be globalistic and fully rational.
Thanx once again’

‘Hi there !how are you ? are you fine? I hope so .Here below is the comment I want to give for your advise shared me>these words of the wisemen shared to readers are realy valuable.They are just like daily shool room concepts like a good teacher giving you course in the class.I understand this in such a way that i am happily saying you are realy great men and make this your custom to share us as daily breakfast so that we can have global concepts.’

It took me a few serious moments to consider if they are actual comments or not, but my conclusion is that they look too much like machine generated text based on my blog content, similar to those generated by Dada Engine (created by Andrew C. Bulhak at the Monash University)* – an engine that randomise phrases to create post-modernist text.

Hmm.. now that get me into thinking how an open source, global, scalable solution would be like…. /headache

*Nassim Nicholas Taleb. (2004) Fooled by Randomness. p73. Penguin Press

Blogs are great for asynchronous communications and documenting your streams of thoughts.  But when everything is within a few clicks from search, your blogs are who you are to many.  Recently I have been struggling to assess what I want to do with this blog.  So i’ve done some research – what blogs are for to you guys?

1. A professional window to share your knowledge and join the conversation

Social Media Gurus like Jeremiah Owyang use blogs as his professional medium for outreach and aggregates information as well as shares knowledge.  By opening up his blogs on various topics, he manages to attract a critical audience of the social media industry while also puts himself in the spot light among the social media practitioners.

To me it’s a bit like what Chris Rock says about relationship, ‘For the first three months, you are not you.  You are a representative of you.’  Probably blogs are not an ideal medium to fully represent who you are (i.e. no drunk photos, please), but blogs are much better medium as the representation of one’s professional self.  Great for networking, industrial visibility, connection with the like-minded.

2. A scrapbook on what you are reading and interested in

Christian Heilman (aka CodePo8, Yahoo! Developer Network’s EU evangelist) sees blogs as a place where he tosses all the pieces he thinks of in one place where he may have to refer back to. Blogs to him are his scrapbook (and obviously the world is his playground). :)  Umber lady geek DivineMissN (who dearly saves delicious bookmarks for me, literally thanks!) is definitely a queen in blog-cious-streaming. Whoops.  Did I just create a new word?

3. A platform for you to keep in touch with people that works better with pull information rather than push

Remember those friends that call you at 11:30 pm and keep on rambling about how their lives are (completely disregard of whether you are busy or, dare to say, care or not)?  Blogs are great medium to share what you are up to, especially for geeks on the go – you might not have the time or enough drives to call someone up and talk about BarCamp London and how it’d go – but once you blog about it, people who care will find you and will keep in the loop on what you do.  And better yet – it only takes them 2’secs to leave you a comment, or track-back if they’re blogging anyway.  Great for keeping in touch with people that you kinda care, but not enough to pick up the phone.  (Note: I am not saying that calling someone or meeting someone for a coffee is bad – but there are friends that you do truly care while you just really want to know that they do well, and you are perfectly aware that they work 14 hours a day!).  However, it seems that Facebook does serve very well for this purpose for the non-bloggers in this world… So does Twitter.

4. An alternative medium outside emails and phone that helps open communications and reduce correspondence volume

Luis Suarez, the star of IBM social software branch, is known for his say-no-to-email initiative that inspired my last blog post.  Although I get mixed feedbacks from you guys, it is hard to refute the idea that we save time to build information on top of existing one, rather than to create information from scratch.  Wikipedia is a good example.  Documenting information about Hong Kong on Wikipedia is likely to benefit thousands of internet users, as opposed to those junior highschool projects where you start from scratch and only your parents and your teachers get to see what you’ve accomplished.  Not to mention no one else can build on top of you brilliant work.  Because of the hypertext-trackable nature of blogs, it is obviously a great medium for knowledge to be documented and grow on one and others while benefiting anyone who care enough to check out the strain of information.

5. A personal yet paradoxically open space for you to share emotions that you might not share with your mom, but in a form of poems with people you may never meet

Are you ready for this?  I’m getting contentious, as usual.  Blogs can be an environment similar to the Alcoholic Anonymous clubs – where you meet people that you never knew, but who are going through the same kind of issues at the same time as you do and would really love to hear about your emotions, experience and feedbacks, vice versa.  A good use of blogs in this context is MacMillan’s use of blogs for cancer patients and their family to share what they go through.  Just like [hypothetically example, totally] your highschool best friend might take no interests in your stress in planning for a Bali holiday when she’s about to be sacked from her investment bank (and hence you go to tripadvisor instead of calling her), blogs become this paradoxically open space for people to share their most intimate reflections, thoughts, doubts and dreams.

Now, what is your blog? Probably this question is much easier to be answered in retrospect than when you set out to start a blog.  For me (yup it’s all about me me me here, I’m sorry), I am stuck because my blog has always been my personal playground, scrapbooks, and thinking pads to share some very naunced reflections.  But working in the social media industries, gathering all the insights and learnings, I feel bad not sharing those with a wider audience outside my firm.

You might ask, what’s stopping me?  Well, being a keen observer on the sociology of collaboration, and as someone who is hyper risk adverse (which makes me a good social policy paranoid), I have, frankly, no appetitte for unfriendly strangers.  Let me give you an example. Kathy Sierra, an amazing techkie lady who founded the Creating Passionate Users blog, attracted an amazing crowd of followers and supporters, and I was truly very inspired and concurred with her observations and learnt a lot from her.  Sadly she stopped her blog at the peak if its development due to malicious personal threats.  Why?  In Chinese, we say that ‘Being at the peak also brings you frosty chills’.  It’s great to have the attention of the people that think alike, who care about the future of technologies, pursuing our passions, being people closers.  But we must not forget that there are those who are hurt, angry, and frustrated.  The more prominent you are, the more likely you attract those attention as well.

All in all, I feel comfortable enough back to blogging now.  And probably there is no point about pre-determining and risk-assessing everything you do.  Or perhap there is?  Don’t have the answers here.  Thanks for bearing with this long post.  Hope you have a great time blogging, sharing, and learning from one another.

Okay my uni’s programme manager has asked me a while ago to share my ‘tips’ on internship hunting. Although I’m in no expert in this, it’s probably worth a blog on my top 6 tips that focus less on the details (e.g. the internship letter) but more on a personal developmental perspective (feel free to comment/add tips):

Step 1: Know who you are, and who you want to become.

This is usually the hardest step and try not be led by opportunities open out there but create your own. My internship with an architecture firm, Fluid, was not included into my programme’s database but I know I am interested in deploying new media in public engagement, which is this company’s expertise.

Step 2: Look for contacts in your network to see who can give you advice on who to approach

‘It’s not who you are, it’s who you know’ – cliche but probably true. I started looking up my own contacts, and asked an architecture professor at my former University for ‘advice’. Never say ‘Oh what do you think I can do?’ because other people are not responsible for your business. Be prepared. Only when you have precise, carefully formulated question then you you get concrete answer, ‘hey i’d like to intern at a company that drives new media technologies in public consultation, will you happen to know any given your previous experience?’

‘come to think of it I know a firm in London that does this!’

Step 3: Don’t wait for someone to initiate the conversation – get the contacts and make it happen!

Instead of waiting for the professor to get back to me with the director’s email (I did wait for a few weeks and then assumed that he must have been buried under an avalanches of work), I google-d and found the company’s email. I mentioned the professor’s title and where they met, and the director eventually got back to me.

Step 4: Persistence, Persistence, Persistence

Eventually over almost 4-5 months of email correspondence, there were frustrating moments of waiting because the company does not know how to postion me (they are all architects and I am sociology/psychology/journalism/new media ‘thing’ by training). I had to push them again until we had a face to face meeting, and they agreed for a ‘testing period’.

Step 5: Back-up plan

During the painful months of waiting, I have been bouncing off emails to other companies. Eventually two got back to me, including the British Urban Regeneration Association and Yahoo! EU. I decided to step out of Fluid at the end of the Internship and check what’s going on in big corporation like Yahoo!. When I left, Fluid offered me a potential position to be their associate, great news, but you never know what’s out there until you venture.

Step 6: Time management

Some of you might want to just work enough to fulfill your course requirement, but if you aim to start a career at the end of the course, it makes sense to do a few internships because this is the only time you can ’shop’ around for different industries. Once you formally start a proper position you will not enjoy the freedom to jot from jobs to jobs. I did my leap in Yahoo! EU and eventually they hired me as their EU Community Manager, where I am now. And I love my work. Moreover, I see this more than just work but also as my career.

Finally don’t forget to deploy online networks if you’re looking for opportunities out there – I got quite a few contacts from linkedin.com and even facebook.

Did i miss any big tips?

When I was a little girl I thought the coolest job ever was to be the person who serves ice-cream in Hong Kong’s convenient stores; it always mesmerizes me seeing the landing of swirls of soft ice-cream and that really stuck with me for a while. And I would secretly fancy adding an extra swirl to everyone who visits my store.

When I was about 12 I decided that being a psychologist was my true sense of vocation. It sounds wrong but I was very fascinated by the typography of personalities, as well as what makes people loveable and loathe-able. Working in a psychiatric hospital as a young intern, the idea that you can’t make everyone happy started rooting in me… as devastating as it may seem, I started gradually realizing that there are people who would never be happy. If you want to be sane, you better leave them alone.

This realization doesn’t come conscious though, probably until when I was about 19, things started to change. As lame as it sounds, it was the internet that changed me… the first thing I remember that truly shocks my world (sorry, Yahoo!), it’s google search – imagine all information (well I know it’s not all information) around the world at your finger tip! Then I became more aware of all the interesting cultural movements, such as Open Source *slash* open initiatives from Firefox to Wikipedia, where people seem to enjoy the luxury of being super altruistic, or egoistic, and present themselves in a way that *they* want.

Apart from the Wikipedian vision that drives ‘the sum of all human knowledge’ to even the most under-privileged population, to less well-know grass root movement as little as bringing one extra kilo of goodies to poor kids in China, the internet never ceases to amaze me.

Starting my career as a community manager in Yahoo! Europe seems to be the best place I can be. It wasn’t as easy as I thought, and there are hurdles for me (and fella geeks), such as occasional needs to push through layers of ‘corporate membranes’ to get things done, but somehow by remembering that it’s passion that matters, everything seems to be fine. After all, job is just what we do to exist, but passion is what we believe in to live. As my cool colleague, Farhan, told his story – there is no excuse for lack of passion…

What is your passion?

The geek in us…

Emuishere Peliculas’s photo on Flickr

• geeks are often disorganized or have a twisted skein of attention-deficit issues
• geeks love assessing, classifying, and defining the objects in their world
• geeks crave actionable items and roll their eyes at “mission statements” and lofty management patois
• geeks like things that work with technology-agnostic and lofi tools
• geeks like frameworks but tend to ignore rules
• geeks are unusually open to change (if it can be demonstrated to work better than what they’re currently using)
• geeks like fixing things on their own terms
• geeks have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff

From 43Folders

*running to pick up the book

So – I finally did the leap.  From free-lancing/full-time studying mode to being a pin in a corporate world.  It is fun, but at the same time lots of new challenges.  Everyone has a different coping strategy.  I opted for talking to the wisemen – and here is what I distill and would love to share with you all.

1.    Look for your objectives

Be it taking more personality tests, reading the biographies of your heros, or talking to your best friends – you might have your own style.  But for me and for the harsh reality of London’s commuting – I prefer to spend some reflective time in the tube not sniffing someone’s sweaty armpits, but to think of what I have done that day and what does that mean to me in a larger scheme.

Of course, me comes first.

And of course, at times sweaty armpits are unavoidable.

It is also a time to think of what I want to become at the end of the year, at the end of five years, as I am ten years older and when I retire, who do I want to be?  A billionaire?  Someone who travels around the world?  Be part of the believers and supporters of microfinancing or MIT’s $100 laptop per child?

Whoever told you that you could find the answer is complete bullock.  But it is worthwhile to gain some perspectives into who you can become and more importantly, who you want to become.  Then that’s the time you can better prioritise where your energy goes.  The amazing side effect is that all petty things around you become minuscule, really.

2.    Be strong

Men or women – we are living in the world of doubts.  Am I too fat?  Do I earn enough?  Is my car cool?  How much money I have left this month?  Should I enroll in pension schemes?  Oh, or MBA?  The list goes on…

The truth is, people love judging you. Either you choose to have the lowest profile or you feel overwhelmed.  The best advice I got is to believe in what you can achieve, and do think of how you can contribute to a larger scheme in life.  Tossing your ego out of the window does not make you weak, but brings you new strengths because it reminds you of your beliefs – how you can contribute to the greater good.  It does take more strength to do that than to hold on to your ego.  It’s a constant battle.

3.    Remember what makes you happy

My friends told me the Centre of Buddhist Studies in Asia actually attracts more investment bankers than the usual suspects, aka the new age folks.  Making money is important, but only if it makes it easier for you so that you can make the most out of your lives.  Sometimes it doesn’t take much – be it a long distance call to your parents, taking your best mate out for a dinner, or bringing a rose to your spouse (god knows what’s next).  We have the power to be happy, and sometimes it comes from making other happy.  Whatever it is, don’t forget you soul.

4.    Speak less, Listen more

Haha – this is hard for the extroverts.  Listening doesn’t mean just nodding your head and listen to anyone, but to go out, finding those who are with it, learn how they become who they are, conceptualise their ‘dots’, and draw a line through the dots the way you like it – and share.  That’s reflexive listening.  As much as a cliché it is, the sum can be bigger than the whole.

5.    Respect

Respect others.  Don’t gossip.  It might be okay to listen to gossips (they are fun and we are human, after all) – but don’t pass them around.  You never know what are the bigger intentions someone has when passing along gossips to you.

Also, respect other people’s time.  If you do need to invite someone to a meeting – show them you have done your homework and be precise what you need from them.  Follow up.  I know it’s been written all over the internet but respecting other people’s time is an art.  And the best piece of advice I got is, ‘It’s ABSOLUTELY legitimate to ask why you are invited to a meeting and what you are expected to contribute’.  And be ready to answer your attendees that question as well.

6.    Don’t stop learning

Happiness comes from learning something new and breaking routines.  Learning also lets you hop from jobs to jobs and realize your dreams.  But more importantly, when you learn something and become a mini-expert in the area you are passionate about, not only can you glow and grow in the area, you also gain respect from other passionistas – and there’s nothing that beat the feeling.  (again, I’ve assumed that you’re also an extrovert) ;)

7.    Learn to say ‘I don’t know’

Don’t bluff.  If you know enough of the area, no one expect you to know everything.  But if you bluff it, you loose respect, because PEOPLE KNOW!

8.    Assume good faith

Yes, of course there are people who piss you off at work.  Here I’m nicking Wikipedia’s top two core ‘norms’.  I love ‘Assume good faith’ and ‘Neural Point of View’, with a bit of my own twist.  How much time we spent suspecting other people’s motives?  If you assume good faith from the others, you actually go and communicate and dispel a lot of myths or accumulated anger/frustration – which goes back to point 5 – it’s a big respect to people you work with as well.

9.    Neutral Point of View (at times)

Don’t jump to conclusion and be a judge of what’s work and what’s not, who’s good and who’s bad.  Life is parallel to work in a sense there’s usually no black or white, right or wrong in simplistic terms.  This is not to say you should be the one without opinion – it goes back to points 2&6 – don’t stop learning, be strong, but make INFORMED opinion instead.  And that’s a bloody huge difference between annoying your colleagues and being someone whom everyone loves to work with.  A main lesson I learnt from Wikipedia – it’s not who you are, but it’s what you say and what sources you are citing.

10.    Believe in yourself, but research, research, research

All in all – it is never easy to believe in yourself, but when you do, keep on learning and listening to others and research – everything would just all seem to be in better place.  And of course, this list is not exhaustible.  Feel free to pass along or add stuff on and share that with me.

Thanks to all the wisemen!