Thomas Weber of the Wall Street Journal writes
today about Backpack, a joint web-based to-do list. He also mentions several personal productivity blogs, along the same lines as Brain Food, and many of them inspired in part by Getting Things Done. These are worth checking out:

- Lifehacker
- 43 Folders
- To-Done!

I recently had a conversation with someone who wants to create buzz around his business, but for certain reasons, he doesn’t want to be seen to be proactively seeking buzz.

The question: how can he use online networks to achieve that goal?

I had a few ideas:

- Post comments on some prominent blogs, with links back to a password-protected website.

- Post job listings in industry discussion boards which indicate the firm’s seriousness (because of the high salary, seniority of positions sought, etc.)

- Post queries seeking certain types of assistance (”how do I balance the demands among three new SVPs that I’m hiring simultaneously?”) on selected industry discussion boards.

What do you think? How else can he achieve this indirect goal?

We are seeking interns who would like to work on the marketing campaign for our new book, The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, and for our resource website, TheVirtualHandshake.com. This is ideal for a MBA or college student interested in a full-time or part-time internship, working from wherever you like. Ideally, you are based in either New York or Houston.

Here’s the elevator pitch:

On August 30, 2005, the American Management Association will release The Virtual Handshake. This is the first mass market book on building business relationships online, and specifically social software. Extensive information on the book, including a blog and detailed site guide, is at www.TheVirtualHandshake.com . In particular, the book discusses such companies as LinkedIn, Ecademy, Ryze, Skype, Tribe.net, Craigslist, Friendster, Myspace, TheFaceBook, and so on. Our publisher, the American Management Association, is a global not-for-profit, membership-based association that provides a full range of management development and educational services to individuals, companies and government agencies worldwide, including 486 of the Fortune 500 companies.

BENEFITS TO YOU
+ Learn about blogs, social network sites, and social software in general.
+ Learn about viral marketing, public relations, and the publishing industry.
+ Work with many thought leaders/industry leaders in social software.
+ Build a powerful personal network.
+ Significant creative input and flexibility .
+ Very positive references (if merited).
+ Opportunity to work with mentoring-oriented authors.
+ Contribute and grow up to and beyond the level of your abilities.

YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES
+ Learn about blogs, social software, and online social networks and how businesspeople are using these new technologies
+ Contribute to the marketing plan for the book.
+ Contact bloggers and recruit them to review the book and participate in our affiliate program.
+ Contact newspapers/ magazines and recruit them to review the book.
+ Network with opinion leaders.

QUALIFICATIONS
+ Experience with blogs, the publishing industry, internet marketing, and online social networks highly desirable.
+ Excitement about being part of the team producing an innovative book.
+ Highly motivated self-starter who has sales/client relationship experience, and a track record of continuous self-improvement, high achievement, and aggressiveness.
+ Strong interpersonal communication skills, adept writing, editing, and presentation skills.
+ Poised, professional demeanor.

INCLUDE WITH DETAILED RESUME
+ Dates/hours of availability.
+ Evidence of writing/communication/editing skills, including writing samples (e.g., articles you have written for a mass market, non-academic audience)
+ Location. You can do all of the work on this project remotely. However, if you are in the New York or Houston area, that is very preferable.

COMPENSATION
+ Through the Amazon affiliate program. Please see http://thevirtualhandshake.com/affiliate-amazon.htm .

HOW TO APPLY
Contact via e-mail only; do not call. Save your resume in Microsoft Word format with the name “Last Name_First Name_Year.doc”, e.g., “Smith_John_2005.doc”. Please make sure that you include all of the information that we request above, or we will not be able to consider your application.

Please send resume and cover letter to Resumes(at)Teten.com with “Book Marketing” and your name in the subject line. For example, write “Book Marketing–Smith John”.

One of the most important skills in interpersonal relations, whether business, romance, or social, is listening. In building online relationships, the equivalent is reading – not just skimming, but actually absorbing what the person said.

I recently joined LinkedInnovators, a Yahoo Group for people who are passionate about the use of LinkedIn. Last week, the group’s creator, Jonathan Meath, asked the members to introduce themselves, in a sort of “virtual cocktail party”. So I did, but some of the people don’t “listen” very well. A number of people apparently didn’t make it all the way through my introductory message before they decided, “Oh, Scott looks interesting – I’ll connect with him on LinkedIn.”

You see, directly under the link to my LinkedIn profile, I wrote:

PLEASE NOTE: I use LinkedIn for trusted referrals, not just to increase my exposure. I accept most contact requests, but I generally DO NOT accept connection requests until I’ve actually done some sort of collaboration/work with someone. If we haven’t worked together on something, please request contact, not a connection.

But several people must have just stopped at the link to my LinkedIn profile – they got what they were looking for and didn’t read any further. I have already received three requests to connect from people on the list who I’ve never met, never spoken to one-on-one, never worked with, etc. Now admittedly, they’re all three people I would probably like to meet, but making a connection on LinkedIn when we don’t know anything about each other simply isn’t the way to do it. They don’t know enough about me and I don’t know enough about them to be able to add any value when passing along referrals, or to be able to know even what kind of referrals to pass along and which not to. We don’t have to connect on LinkedIn to start a relationship!

Most importantly, by inviting me (or anyone else you haven’t really gotten to know yet), they put me in a really awkward spot. I don’t want to accept the connection invitation because then LinkedIn doesn’t work for me the way I want it to (and, by the way, the way LinkedIn recommends). Yet if I reject the connection, that may come across to you as a rejection of the relationship, which it isn’t.

You really put people in an awkward social situation when you request a connection with someone you don’t know. So most people, out of fear of offending the requester, accept the requests even when they don’t want to, and then that degrades the quality of the relationship chains, making referrals beyond two degrees much less effective.

So please, think carefully before requesting a connection and make sure that you either know the other person well, or they have indicated a willingness to accept any and all connection requests, as some people have done. Also, if you want to build relationships effectively, you have to learn to listen well – to read all of what the other person really says, not just skim it to get the information you’re looking for.

Imagine, if you will, this conversation at a local networking meeting:

Mary: “Hi, I’m Mary. I’m new here, and just kind of getting the feel for this group to see if I might like to participate more.”

John: “I’m John. What do you do for a living, Mary?”

Mary: “I’m an accountant for small businesses.”

John: “Great! I’m a computer consultant for small businesses. Are any of your clients in need of computer consulting? Would you please send me your client list so I can contact them and see if they are? And of course, you can contact all my clients too.”

Mary: “Excuse me, I’m going to go get another drink.”

Get the picture?

Online tools are great at accelerating the process of identifying and building relationships with relevant people, but there’s still such a thing as just moving too fast. Listen first. Build a relationship. Then figure out how you can be of service to each other. You can’t possibly know until you start listening.

Are you interested in sex? Would you say that publicly? There are at least a few Silicon Valley executives who readily admit this in their profiles on Tribe.net, or demonstrate it by the tribes of which they are members.

While some people are comfortable with a seamless blend of their business and personal lives, most people have some kind of boundaries between these aspects of their lives, a sort of faceted identity, as danah boyd calls it.

In our latest FastCompany.com column, Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, we take a look at three dominant behavior modes in networks: social networks, knowledge networks, and business networks. While these rarely exist in isolation, any given community tends to have one dominant mode. Recognizing and respecting the dominant mode within a given group will make the group more receptive to your participation, and ultimately make you more effective in your interaction with the group. Read more…

Venture capitalist Christian Mayaud, like Scott Allen and me (new Technorati Profile) a follower of the Getting Things Done philosophy, posts his dream system for high-volume email management, , using technologies available today.

Many different researchers are taking different approaches to bringing PacMan into the streets. See:

After years of video games providing some benefit in your hand-eye coordination and hopefully your multiprocessing ability, I’m glad to see technologies like these and ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ bringing some fitness benefit to video game players. Of course, being a soldier today also bears some similarities to playing one of these games. (The Singapore project was backed by military funding.)

Dave Pollard discusses at How to Save the World five handy tools:

Open Media Network
MoonEdit
Browster
YouSendIt
IHMC ConceptMap

Although I can’t agree with some of Dave’s political thoughts—my wife grew up under communism and we have a certain healthy skepticism of idealistic views of human nature and the state–he does say a lot of things worth reading.

The NY Times profiles legendary entertainment lawyer Bert Fields: Telling Hollywood It’s Out of Order. Fields has never lost a case.

My favorite part:

Even with the 35-minute commute from Malibu to his office in Century City, Mr. Fields says he still bills more hours than any of the 100 lawyers at his firm, Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman Machtinger & Kinsella, and he still returns home daily to Malibu to make lunch. A key to his efficiency is that he doesn’t “do lunch,” he said, nor dinner, drinks or breakfasts with clients.

“I made a deal with myself many years ago that I would never socialize to get business,” he said. “And I never have. Lawyers should get business because people think they’re good lawyers.”

Mr. Fields is truly a salesman after my own heart. Keith Ferrazzi/Tahl Raz in their book, “Never Eat Alone”, emphasize the importance of getting business in large part because people like you and you are charming. Charm helps, charm counts, but Character and Competence trump mere charm every time.

From Mobile Pipeline, via Arieanna Foley:

Basically, the new phishing model will start with a log-in page for a public WiFi network. What you’d expect at any hotspot, really. …
Without realizing it, the user will enter personal information to the logon page, whereupon the hacker will proceed to put 45 or so viruses onto the computer.

The attack is specifically targeted at business people - it will typically take place at a tradeshow, airport or conference.

What can you do? Use a firewall. Use only those websites that have SSL security (watch for the logo and click on it). Try to use a VPN (virtual private network). Don’t stay connected to the wireless network if you don’t need to be.