Alexander Chalkidis

Blog

  • The empty LinkedIn profile results

    By way of an experiment, I removed absolutely everything from my profile on LinkedIn. It made absolutely no difference to the number of people visiting it (20 per week on average) or the number of people clicking through to my personal website.  So at http://gr.linkedin.com/in/alexanderchalkidis you can only see a very brief description of my studies.   All my recommendations have disappeared as LinkedIn considers them “unassigned”.

    The data I have to assess the situation is limited as I refuse to pay for a premium LinkedIn subscription.   A “senior manager” or “someone in the management function” has been looking at my profile.   Quite often I can figure out who it was in relation to what I have been doing or writing.   I may have found LinkedIn extremely useful on several occasions, particularly setting up new business in a new country or region, but it is not worth paying for in order to know more.   I don’t do recruiting that often and even if I did, there are plenty other tools around.   Spending anymore time with LinkedIn other than the once a week I do now would demote it to Facebook timewasting status!   (Or Branchout – the latest of Facebook’s advertised LinkedIn killers…)

    A couple of years back I wrote that “the social media profile is a particularly bad way of making an impression” and now I just put my money where my mouth was!   I suppose for junior positions it may make sense but any headhunter worth his or her salt will find me through my 1500 contacts and what they think about the results I can bring to a business; no fancy or empty resume is of any use at this level.

  • Personal Communications Advisor: better than golf

    Yes, yet another acronym.   I am now officially a PE.C.A.   I coined the term because it is going to become a popular profession.   Not for me personally.   I only got involved and am developing the know how in order to assist corporate clients.   The problem is that the personal branding of their top brass is important.   Really important.   And they have no clue how to properly use their social media.

    Top CEO easily accessible via Facebook?   Not a good idea.   His or her personal information available?   Most high flying execs have no idea just where and how the stuff they post online might be accessible.   So, most of them avoid it all together.   Also not a good idea for many.   (Depends what business you are in and what your overall company communications plan is.)

    So, they need to be online, trendy and creating buzz but aren’t sure what exactly the latest Google, Facebook or LinkedIn policy change means.  In comes the PE.C.A.!   Setting targets, measuring results, checking what the reactions are.   Somebody has to be online to check that a storm isn’t brewing.   The CEO isn’t going to be signing in every five minutes…

    For many up and coming entrepreneurs or other business people social media is a valuable way of getting up in life in terms of connections.   I was once advised to take up golf in order to meet “the right people”.   Unfortunately it is true that many a major business deal has taken place between swings.   (And – in my experience – this nonchalance often leads to catastrophic results.)  But by projecting the right message, the CEO can get the equivelant of golfing contacts online.

    Take your best swing!

  • VISA, Google and racism

    “We would like you to confirm a transaction made yesterday in San Fransisco.”   A few years back I used to get a lot of calls from my bank.   Customers that travelled as much as me and shopped a lot online were obviously an extreme rarity in Greece.   So I had hardly hit an airport shop or finished buying something on the web and my cell phone rang…

    Their logic was algorythmic:  an individual buying a lot of stuff with a credit card in widely different parts of the world is likely to be a fraudster.  But imagine getting a call like this:   “Mr Chalkidis, we know you are an illiterate schmuck so are you sure you bought all those high brow books from Amazon today?”    It would be similar to the British banks that denied me a credit card when I landed to study in England because of my Greek decent.  (Too many Greeks before me had ran enormous bills and then skipped the country!)  

    I fought (and won) the banks then, like the European Union lawyers can fight Google now.   Racism!   Forget complex tech talk about algorythms, focus on human rights.   Google cleverly has tried to make their search contextual.   Based on past searches and other customer data.   ie hazy enough to confuse provability.   So get several brand new computers in different locations and build carricatured profiles on them.   Log what they surf and what they fill in as a profile.   Then do a web search.   Any differences in search results and you can yell “racism!” “sexism!” “nationalism!” or any other “ism” you like.

    It is easy mainly because this language of rights makes no sense really.   It is however extremely succesful in the court.   Especially if you manage to find a difference, no matter how trivial, between different races or ethnic groups; anything that affects an underpriviliged group.   If one personae has declared he or she is crippled in any way and they don’t get as many sports results for example.  

    It may sound ridiculous but imagine actually been cripple and getting a telephone call like this:  “we notice three charges for fancy running shoes on your credit card this week.   Can you please confirm them?”

  • Skype phone dating, Android intelligence and the media player that deletes stuff

    It was some years ago that I saw a media player that finally did what I always wanted:  it let you delete songs as you listened to them!  It was of course for anyone listening to pirated music which is why Apple wasn’t busy copying the feature.   All those songs a friend left for you on a USB stick, or that huge compilation you downloaded; you just listened to it, deleted anything you didn’t like and what was left, like a gold digger of the past, was your nuggets of stuff that you like.

    Now it is 4.40 AM as I write, which happens to be one of the times of day (barely day!) when I get a lot of bright ideas.   It is also the time of day or night when I hope to catch my friend James on Skype.    He currently works in New Zealand, so the logistics of us actually talking are complex.   Especially since he work entails travelling around saving animals and filming in remote locations and neither of us are religiously connected to our cell phones.   What I really want Skype to do for us is to set up an appointment.   A Skype meeting which figures out time differences and pings of an alarm for both of us.  Adding Facebook isn’t a social layer.  Figuring out when I want to be interrupted and by whom is!  

    And the same applies to my mobile phone.   I left it in my brother’s car last weekend.  What bliss to be without it for two days; heck, I didn’t even go out of my way to pick it up!   For anyone thinking up clever things as a business, lack of interruptions dramatically improves the quality of your work. 

    And there it is, the solution.   A social intelligence layer on my contacts application.   No, I don’t want to wade through all my contacts putting them in groups; I want the software to figure it out!   All it needs is some input from me but – here is the sneaky bit – as the call ends.

    “Was that phone call worth the two minutes you spent on it?” it can ask just after I hang up and look at the device before putting it back in my pocket.   A number of options:

    1. Yes, this person is always worth talking to.  (ie VIP in my category system)

    2. Yes, but I would rather we talked during work hours (work related, shouldn’t be calling at this time of day).

    3. Sort of worth talking to.  Could probably do the information transaction better via email.   (Enter fancy ways of not answering this number next time but automatically sending an SMS or email that I am busy.)

    And the list could continue with a number of variations.   The phone would very quickly figure out which contacts go into which category, and I would waste less time and get far less interruptions.   In fact over time the menu when the phone rings could have other options other than “Answer” and “Reject”.

    James got the time difference wrong and called in the middle of the night last week.   I have probably done the same.  Right now my cell phone is switched off.   Guess I will just email him as usual.   Somebody please implement all of these ideas quickly!

  • Corporate psychoanalysis through the company blog

    My friend is a damn good designer.  He has worked for the biggest furniture manufacturer’s and other luminary positions that an industrial designer can achieve including his own lab.   Anything from unique desk systems, to an incredible invention that helps the Athens Hilton fold their tables more efficiently or a sea kayak.  But what exactly is he?

    You could call it a mid life crisis.   Too vague and emotionally laden for me.   In corporate terms he is in danger of becoming a jack of all trades.  In his own mind. He needs to focus on less to achieve more.   I have seen companies do this at fancy retreats, with or without gurus like me to assist them.   They run around an assault course, dive backwards into the teams arms, raft down the river, party like maniacs and somehow reinvigorate their common idea of what the enterprise is all about.

    Blogging is like all that only better.   OK, I am a blogging junky.   It is not so much that I have a compulsive need to blog all the time so much.   It is more that I see blogging as the solution to more and more corporate ails. I threw www.benakis.info at my friend with some sample content.   Like most companies, he wasn’t sure what to do with it.   Then, some time later, the phone calls started:   “How can I change that?”, “do you think we should add this?” and “how would Twitter fit into all of it?”

    I haven’t yet seen his first post.   That, to me, is the “bingo” moment of triumph.   Because it means that he has found his public voice.   He has imagined an audience and spoken to it.   For anyone that is an expert in their own field, the content is easy once you achieve this first step.   An excellent example is www.yalosbranding.com which I am proud to say I didn’t write a single word of.   OK, they are branding specialists, it is their job to know what to project.   But I simply enabled the technology for them to transfer this know-how to a new medium.   I was just watching  and applauding, reassuring  as much as possible when necessary.   Through this process they are rediscovering their relevance to an international market.

    Google, customers and everything else will fall into place.

  • A practical way to sell services

    I realized that the way I chose to help publicize a service is a rather good model to follow in many cases.   www.qualia.gr is a company that does reputation monitoring.   It is a great service, heck, it is the only service that works in Greek really!  (Best voice recognition in this language matched with good interface and intelligence.)

    You can try and buy some Google Adwords around the topic.  So, assuming someone searches for you via Google, they will find your website.   Which may, or may not be the best sales pitch.   That seems a rather small and ineffective net to throw into the ocean of potential customers to me.

    So instead, I am using the technology to do something you couldn’t do without it.   Case in point a blog about media coverage of the local elections in Greece.   More particularly Thessaloníki.   Because if it was too broad a topic you couldn’t explore the depth of the interactions between TV, radio, blogs, social media and the web.   Is this the best way to find customers?  I think so.   I will be most impressed if at the end of the two month project most major and minor league politicians haven’t heard of reputation monitoring.   Better still they will have understood many of it’s elements.   And even better they will be familiar with the particular product and predisposed to assume that the particular company is a market leader.

    We can do another project after this for marketing executives, though many have already figured out that politicians are simply products with unusual parameters most of the time.   Maybe another one for an international audience.   It works with Google too of course because it produces a cluster of knowledge around a particular topic.   No SEO required!   (Though I do optimize the content sometimes or pay attention to cross referencing from other sources to help this along.)

    Good, relevant content, provided for free to a particular audience.  State of the art return to simple principles!

  • Last night a dj saved my life with her soup

    “Mageiritsa” is a traditional Greek soup, usually served on the Saturday evening before Easter Sunday.   The idea is that after fourty days of fasting, you break yourself in gently before the monster feast the next day.   My mother, being English, does a version of this dish which in many ways is better than the original.   Like with her mousaka, it is less spicy and not so heavy on your system.   Like with her dolmades she takes all the shortcuts in order to get the job done faster.   And more importantly – she doesn’t wait for Easter to make it.   The slaughter of two goats provided the reason this time.   While visiting them on Sunday I had heard about that.   I just hadn’t made the connection.

    Thursday.   It was a typical meal, the sort you try to get used to when you have three very young children.   One was climbing a cupboard in order to get to something he shouldn’t be.   Another was falling to the floor.   The third was loudly objecting to something. For some stupid reason the radio was also blasting at us.   Enough to drive my wife to a screaming fit, thought it didn’t seem to be helping much as the chaos continued.  The flu had finally caught up with me with gusto, blocked nose, sore throat and all.  It had taken all my strength to go out shopping and I was ready to collapse.

    But not now, I was mesmerised.   Everything else faded in the background, the way the background fades when you photograph a flower with a macro lens, the way everything goes quiet before your ears pop on a flight.

    She must have brought it around while I was out.  The dish was full to the brim.   The lemon juice I squeezed on could barely fit.   No bread, no salad, no nothing.   Just me and my mageiritsa.   I think I offered the kids a taste but I didn’t insist.   The commotion was still at a high but the bond between me and the food was unshakeable.   A river runs through it.   Meanderings of soup like cosmic string theory connecting me to my mum and probably to her mum ad infinitum.

    Life tastes good.

    I love you mum.

  • Dawkins, not Hawkins: choosing the right communication paradigm

    The recent review of Stephen Hawkins’ latest book by the Economist had in me tears of laughter.  Not “rolling on the floor” type merriment but rather “looking in the sunset – feeling pleased with myself” type of laughter.   “God played no part in the book, which was renowned for being bought by everyone and understood by few.”   Couldn’t have said it better myself!

    I need to clarify something.  I read a lot of popular science books.   Before they came along in such quality and frequency I had to resort to University first year text books to quickly understand a topic I am interested in.  But precisely because I read a lot of them, I know very well what I am looking for.    The problem with the Hawkins’ book is that “whenever the going threatens to get tough, the authors retreat into hand-waving, and move briskly on to the next awe-inspiring notion.”

    Contrast this type of book with the works of Richard Dawkins, even much older ones and there is a lot to learn, useful for communicating even simple business messages:

    1. Passion helps.  Meandering aimlessly around the Universe really lacks the kind of story that Dawkins pulls together in “The Blind Watchmaker” or even “Climbing Mount Improbable”.  If the story tellers has no sense of purpose, it is impossible to hide it though “facts”, “experiments” or “data”.

    2. It is not about the particular subject matter.   Genes are not inherently more interesting than photons or black holes.  In fact I would argue that most of science is exactly the same once you get to the bottom of it, ie simultaneously practical and infinitely philosophical.

    3. Inviting feedback is an art.  The main thesis has to be broken down to a size for everyone to get involved.   It is no coincidence that Richard Dawkins has caused such furore.   He is not the first to remind us that we are descendants of monkeys.   Yet he is No1 on many fanatics’ hit lists!

    4. Open lines of communication.  Dawkins’ books are fun to read even from the opening as he answers Gould or any other critic since the previous edition.  He takes on tough assignments like standing in front of Christians explaining his ideas and he never backs down from a chance to defend his views.  (Search for “Dawkins” + “debate” for an idea of how much he uses this tool.)

    Granted, some topics are better than others.   It is easy to get lost in numbers and theories while star gazing.   The molecular biology paradigm is infinitely superior to physics because it is easier to relate to examples from the animal kingdom and the hard reality of the need for ecological thinking is dawning on the entire planet.   “While perhaps offering great tanning opportunities, any solar system with multiple suns would probably never allow life to develop” (Hawkins’ book excerpt) is funny but surely lacks impact in a world pondering global warming and sunburn.

    Dawkins spells this out beautifully in a book which I believe should be taught to everyone attending University.  Unweaving the Rainbow takes aim at the question of science vs art and demolishes the barriers by following the rules I laid out above.   It is a tear jerker for anyone that loves science.   And while the poets won’t be far behind in line for their hankies, maybe they will all get a good discussion going.

    And that is what I call great communication.

  • How to really beat Facebook or Twitter either as a competitor or as a legislator

    The whole privacy debate around Facebook is a joke. I mean literally, Zuckenberg must be laughing privately about it. While it avoids the real issue, he rests assured that legislators have no idea what Facebook is really about: lulling you into a false sense of security so that you will unwittingly give away private information in the wrong context. If that sounds too devious to you then you probably don’t use Facebook a lot. Or you use it and don’t think. Which is exactly what it wants you to be like.

    Www.Personaldna.com was a great idea and it offers an intelligent, possibly automated solution to this privacy problem. I used it at work to build teams’ awareness of the different characters, strengths and weaknesses and team dynamics. It is a shame it hasn’t developed at all but this is probably because the people that made it have been hired by Google. Which is the only company that understands what this article is about. Personal DNA built a psychographic profile of you based on multiple questions. It is accurate and, better still, you can invite someone to take the test and see what he or she think you are like. This is also very accurate and offers valuable insights. And it is a million times more useful than trying to clump your friends into categories like Facebook pretends to suggest we should do.

    When you post a status update, you can select that “Everyone” sees it. Or “Friends” or some category of friends. Only the first two make any sense. If you select “everyone” or you have forgotten status update in “everyone mode” Google and various tools we social engineers use be able to easily see what you are up to in real time privately. If you select “friends only” Facebook has fooled you. Because what sort of homogenous bunch of friends is the correct forum for this message you are about to deliver? That picture of you in a swimsuit on the beach. You want your uncle to see it? Might your ex boyfriend take it the wrong way? And what about that ex co worker who now works at a company you are hoping to get a job but is a bit conservative? Think before you post it.

    “No, don’t think.” Facebook’s interface is like the little cartoon devil that sits on your shoulder to make you forget all these complicating factors. Privacy is either on or off. “Don’t think” it echoes like a ghostly voice. “We want the world to be more open” says Mark as if privacy is like piracy. “Information wants to be free” and other mindless, out of context slogans are catchy.

    Privacy, the ability to choose which contact see which information is in fact the basis of all human interaction, probably the reason our brains are as big as they are in our social state of being homo sapiens. And this is how I, a bunch of psychologists, sociologists, programmers and enough funding, can beat Facebook within two years.

    All it takes is a few Facebook apps that we will sneak past them. One will monitor everything you post and make a double check for you by throwing random people in front of you as a pop up window. “Before you post that status are you sure Mary Johnson is someone you want to see this?” followed by a few possible reasons. Based on this information it will build the intelligence of PersonalDna over time. PersonalDna actually exists on Facebook as an app but it is way to much like hard work to spend half an hour filling it in.

    We would have to invent smarter interface tweaks to keep you interested while getting useful psychographic information off you. I won’t give them all away here. But every time you do something on Facebook, every “like”, every comment, every YouTube video you post, we will be intentionally collecting data about you. Facebook can’t stop me doing this because if worse comes to worse, I can do this as a virtual friend. You will befriend my personal psychologist and I will send you my advice.

    The whole thing will hinge on the presentation of the information to you and I will borrow know how from the astrology industry. We will tell you how likely you are to score with that boy or girl you are poking, before you actually poke. We will tell you who in your network to try and impress to get a job. Other applications will tell you which groups to join or leave to improve how your profile looks to specific friends. We will make it all fun, free and cheerful. And accurate.

    If it is too accurate it will be scary. That is the whole point of Facebook’s deception in it’s current design. So we will make it accurate enough and fun enough at the initial level of contact. If you want to go to the next level you will have to read a lot and think a lot, so you probably won’t go there unless you are serious.

    Of course this platform I will build is much, much better than either Facebook or Google at serving advertising content. Because I will not just know what your are interested in. I will know how you like content served. And which of your friends are likely to buy the product or service too. With much much greater degrees of accuracy.

    The accuracy of a self respecting homo sapiens in 2010 and true human development.

  • Spam, spam, spam in my Domino’s pizza

    Real Beauty in Domino’s pizza campaign in Greece is lost in execution

    When I first started getting emails about a free Domino’s pizza some time ago I tried to ignore them. As they persisted and went well past the major spam level I retorted to complain about it in my blog. Added a twist of something more interesting as I usually do. Got it out of my system and forgot about it. Hey that’s what blogs are for!

    But the emails persisted. I have lost count but it is very close to fifty separate, identical emails from the same two senders with exactly the same email content. This is probably the worse spamming in Greek internet history. And to make it worse I actually signed up for their damn offer to try and make it stop. I ate it and once again hoped the emails would stop. After all, I signed up with the same email they were spamming.

    But like Chinese water torture it dripped on.

    So when Domino’s launched their “real beauty” campaign, I was ready for flame wars! I have infinite admiration for the way they are refreshing the entire concept of pizza marketing. Pizzas without any retouching of any sort. And this doesn’t mean they will just pay for better photographers. http://www.showusyourpizza.com/ encourages you to upload your own pizza pictures. (http://www.thisiswhyyourefat.com/ is much more interesting and “really real” by the way…) Chipotle is also trying this line of “intelligent” advertising by emphasizing the lack of typical images in their ads: “We wanted to have farmers in our ads, but what sells are big burritos, not lessons in farming.”

    Please, you wonderful and creative people at Domino’s pizza marketing, please check up on local execution. Not even a free pizza a day can save you in my mind now! My waistline can’t afford it and every time I see your logo I connect it with spam…