Changing your Twitter profile = creating a new identity

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Yesterday I updated my Twitter profile after not having changed it for well over a year. The image and words are now:

Futurist/ Entrepreneur/ Keynote Speaker/ Author and contributor to global brain. A visual slice of my neural activity: https://bit.ly/AHTGpBizModel

In my keynotes on social media and success in a connected world I tell the audience that how you are seen online IS your identity. In our social media profiles we can select just an image and a few words that many will use to form their views of you.
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On my 3rd Twitter birthday: 7 reasons Twitter is central to my life

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Earlier today I noticed it’s three years since my life on Twitter began. At the time I wrote about my belated entry to Twitterland.

It now seems strange to me that I was such a late starter compared to many other connected folk, given that Twitter is now so central to my life.

The primary reason I held off getting started on Twitter was that I felt that my blog was my primary space for content sharing, and I didn’t want to divide my limited spare attention across platforms. I now know that blogs and Twitter are highly complementary. Yes Twitter can be time-consuming. But the rewards are absolutely worthwhile.

Here are 7 reasons why Twitter has become central to my life.
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Seeking talent in Sydney: Amazing Content and Web Project Managers – Part-time

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We have just placed an ad on Seek for Amazing Content and Web Project Managers – Part-time.

Here is the ad below. At this point, we are looking for people who will be part of our local team in Sydney. A bit later we will extend our search for similar talent globally. We’d love to hear from you if you think it’s a fit, or please pass it on if you think there are others who would be interested – thanks!

Amazing Content and Web Project Managers – Part-time

* Drive cutting-edge content projects with global visibility
* Looking for skills in high-value reports, web publishing and communities, web apps, iPad apps, events and more
* Apply your talents within exciting new business models
* Part-time/ flexible hours – work in Surry Hills and remotely
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Keynote: Social Media in Fashion Retailing

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Tomorrow morning I am giving a keynote to the managers of a national shopping center group about the power of social media in retail, focused on fashion.

Here are the slides for my keynote. As always, the slides are not intended to stand alone, but to provide visual support for my presentation.

The Power of Social Media in Retail

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The presentation covers three domains:
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A story about Connected: The Film and why you must see it

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I saw Connected: The Film by Tiffany Shlain last night at its Australian premiere, organized by Annalie Killian.

The first thing I have to say is that the film is absolutely fantastic. It nails how we as humans live an intensely interdependent world, and how our recognition of and response to that will determine our future. I think the more people that see it the better, so I dearly hope it will get a healthy – or even massive – audience.

I have to say I am not an independent reviewer, and that in itself is a highly relevant story.
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Keynote slides: Building Success in a Connected World

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Tomorrow morning I give the breakfast keynote at Think Business 2011, making it my third keynote this week.

For those attending the breakfast, here are my slides, which go through and flesh out our recent Success in a Connected World framework and also touch on related issues such as personal branding. The usual disclaimers apply: these slides are designed to accompany my presentation and not to stand alone. However you may still find them useful!

Serendipity is at the heart of today’s emerging society

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Serendipity is for me a deeply meaningful word.

The more than dozen posts discussing serendipity on my blog include how we created “enhanced serendipity” at an event I ran in 2003 in New York, more details on the story of the word serendipity and how to enhance it, the importance of the “serendipity dial” and far more.

One of the reasons I love Twitter so much is that it provides a rich substrate for serendipitous connections. A majority of the worthwhile connections I make these days come from Twitter. One of those connections is @AnaDataGirl. We have followed each other and had some conversations for a good while. So I heard multiple times that she did a gem of a presentation at SwitchConf in Oporto, Portugal last week.

Here are her lovely slides – while I’m sure they don’t do justice to the presentation itself they are well worth going through, as they capture some of the key concepts of serendipity and provide some delightful examples.

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What is the future of the Learning & Development department?

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Last Friday I gave the keynote for the first breakfast seminar run by CADRE, a leading elearning design company, for senior executives of its clients. The topic of my presentation was The Future of Learning, giving a big picture view to kick off their series.

This is a brief description of my presentation:

Challenges for organizations are mounting from intense global competition, empowered consumers, and generational shifts. At the same time, building more effective learning is becoming central to achieving organizational success. This session will use a rich array of examples to look at:
• The driving forces shaping learning in organizations
• What the successful organizations of the future will look like
• Learning in a social network world: the new opportunities
• The context of learning: personalized, mobile, relevant
• Creating the future of learning: key action steps

At the conclusion of my presentation I got the audience to break into groups of 5-6 and assigned them discussion questions.

One of the questions I posed was ‘What is the future of the L&D department?’
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Keynote: Building Business in a Connected World

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Tomorrow morning I am giving the keynote at City of Port Phillip’s inaugural Breakfast Briefing session for the year in St Kilda, Melbourne, on the topic of Building Business in a Connected World. Here are event details and registration.

Below are my slides for the presentation, which is almost entirely based on our Success in a Connected World visual framework launched earlier today.

The usual caveats apply – the slides are NOT intended to stand alone but to provide a visual accompaniment to my presentation, so these are shared primarily for those who attended my keynote. However others may still find them useful or interesting.

Note that the presentation is intended primarily for individuals and smaller businesses. It’s a completely different presentation for large enterprise.

Building Business in a Connected World

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Reflections on the early days of social networking as LinkedIn reaches 100 million users

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Last week LinkedIn reached a significant milestone: 100 million users. On the occasion LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman sent out an email to the first 100,000 users thanking them for being early adopters.

The email included the recipient’s member number, which are given in order of signing up. You can look it up yourself in your LinkedIn profile URL; it is the number after “id=”. I had no idea, but it turned out I am member 9,822, in the first 0.01% of users.

While I closely followed the social networking space at the time, I didn’t join many. LinkedIn seemed to me to be one of the most promising newcomers.

When I was writing Living Networks in 2002 there were no true social networking applications in existence. I had eagerly joined SixDegrees.com, the very first social networking application, not long after it was founded in 1997, highly excited by its potential. The basic principle was inviting friends to connect, and using that to find the quickest social path to people you wanted to meet. As it happens this model closer to LinkedIn than any of the other major social networking platforms of today.
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