Web Worker Daily

Gmail. LinkedIn. Facebook. Your phone’s address book. Your contacts may live in many places online, yet there’s always the possibility one of these places will disappear or crash, taking your information with it for good. Or perhaps you simply decide to close your account with the network.

You should consider importing the contacts from these networks into your main address book app. We use these services to connect with people, update our statuses and play with whatever features they contain, but we don’t always remember that these resources have contacts that belong in our primary address book. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Darrell wrote that he is discontinuing his personal web site. Yes, designing and maintaining an attractive and effective web site takes time and money, but even in today’s environment where most of us leave our footprints on the web through social networks, Twitter and the like, there are still lots of good reasons for maintaining a professional web site.

A personal site can — and should — be the hub of your other web activities. Your site should have links to the other places where you’re active on the web, and more importantly, those other locations should have links to your professional site. Having your own site gives you flexibility and control that you can’t rely on anywhere else. Twitter limits how much you can write. LinkedIn has a fairly rigid format. Facebook Pages can be fairly flexible, but customizing them requires a fair amount of programming. It’s difficult to use such sites to show off a professional portfolio. And while these sites are free right now, they could charge fees at some future date.

Content is king. Darrell’s right that it takes time and energy to maintain an updated, relevant site. But almost any modern, well-designed site will include some sort of content management system that makes updates easy.

I don’t update my company’s site all that often. And our blog rarely gets a new entry, now that most of my blogging efforts are concentrated here at WWD. But I make a point of announcing when we post new web sites for clients — a process that only takes a couple of minutes. And I’ve put my Twitter and Facebook feeds on the site as well, which I use to share information that I think may be of interest to clients, as well as announcing any technical issues that may affect them.

As a side note, it’s worth remembering that domain names can also be used for email. Professionals should always use email addresses with their own domain names. That way, it’s not necessary to change your email address if you change providers.

These days, hosting and domain registrations are cheap. And if you’re not a designer, and you don’t want to spend money to hire someone like me to produce a custom site, there are lots of “build-it-yourself” options for creating sites. So even in this era of social networks, there’s really no excuse for not having a professional site.

Do you maintain a web site for your professional activities? How often do you update it?

Web workers who use LinkedIn have been known to be creative with their names. Instead of just listing themselves as “Jane Doe,” for example, one often sees “Jane Doe (jane-doe@domain_name.com)”. LinkedIn for Marketing is reporting that accounts with such additional information are being suspended.

I’ve been unable to find where these rules are spelled out in LinkedIn’s help files, but it’s probably a good idea to keep name information to a minimum. You can, if you wish, get creative in the “Professional Headline” field that appears below your name.

LinkedIn is an excellent tool for networking, but it’s a private enterprise that has the right to make its own rules. I think that it provides sufficient opportunities for profile creativity without trying to sneak additional information into the first and last name fields.

How do you get creative with your LinkedIn profile?

It’s easier to admit something to your computer screen than to a person’s face. The anonymous world out there behind the monitor can lead us to reveal much more about ourselves than we should. But how much is too much? As you might have guessed, the answer is “It depends.”

Look at Penelope Trunk. She talks about abortion, sex, divorce, bulimia, mental wards and dating on her blog, even though its primary focus is careers. She also says her blog is about her. “But each of you has a list of things in your life similar to that, it’s just a list you don’t want to talk about. I’m not special — I don’t have more stuff that is difficult to talk about. I just have more difficulty not talking about difficult stuff,” she says.

But she is special. She succeeds in revealing everything about herself because she has a solid brand and career that works for her. For most of us, being open and revealing such stories might not go as well. They could affect future jobs, gigs and relationships. Read the rest of this entry »

Lately, I’ve gotten a lot of my clients contacting me through Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites. I got a direct message from one of my clients, saying that she has a new project she wants to start on. I received a LinkedIn message from a prospective client interested in working with me. It isn’t just clients, either. I sent a direct message to a designer I’m working with in order to get a quote for a project myself.

But are there any problems that can arise from conducting business conversations through social media? Read the rest of this entry »

Many organizations block access to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social networks. NutshellMail can deliver your friends’ updates to you in an email digest, which neatly sidesteps corporate blocking software, and could also useful if you just prefer keeping tabs on your social networks via email. Additionally, it can pull messages from other email accounts via POP or IMAP. NutshellMail collects the updates and messages into a digest and emails it to you.

Setting up the service is simple. NutshellMail connects directly to Facebook, Twitter and MySpace using their authorization schemes; you’ll need to provide usernames and passwords for LinkedIn and for email accounts. Read the rest of this entry »

Not too long ago, I had a major scare: I went to log into my Twitter account, only to be informed that my page no longer existed. Considering that I rely pretty heavily on Twitter in my work, I had a bit of a panic. After a few minutes, everything was back to working as normal, but it was enough to get me thinking about how important different social-networking sites are to my ability to work online — and how I could back up all the information I have on those sites. Read the rest of this entry »

Managing the flood of electronic communication — phone, voicemail, email, SMS, IM, micro-blogging and status updates on sites like Facebook — is an increasingly difficult task. It’s being reported that Bill Gates recently left Facebook due to a surfeit of friend requests. I’ve struggled to manage these communications, and like most businesspeople I’ve talked to, my system is based on having different voice, email, IM and social network accounts for personal and professional uses. I can thus give real-time access to clients during business hours, while after-hours access is limited to friends, family and emergencies.

Several upcoming products (Google Wave, for example) want to make every communication channel available in one place in real time and should, in theory, help to make all these communications easier to manage. But will these apps actually make it harder to separate business and personal lives? Will real-time access to all electronic messages make it more difficult for us to provide effective customer service while maintaining personal lives? As Mashable asks: are we ready for the walls between email, messaging and related technologies to come a-tumbling down? Read the rest of this entry »