What are criminals and stalkers up to these days? What state-of-the-art strategies are being used by the really bad guys?

To answer those questions, we decided to ask novelists Michael Connelly and George Dawes Green. But, darn. Neither of those authors was in our Outlook phone directory. Go figure.

Amazon’s Sneak Peek

So, we had to turn to Amazon.com’s special feature called “Search Inside This Book” (also known sometimes as “Look Inside This Book,” but we digress):

For instance, let’s use this Amazon search feature on Mr. Connelly’s super-scary book, The Scarecrow. Type in the word “LinkedIn” and it will make you more than pause:

What did Michael Connelly’s stalker find out about his young prey by visiting her LinkedIn page? He learned her dog’s name, her favorite band and the name of her favorite pizza hangout. Indeed, here’s this exceedingly dangerous criminal musing on the naïveté of his victim:

“They believed they could bare their souls on the Internet, post photos and information at will, and not expect any consequences.”

We won’t tell you what happens or what other dangers lurk in this masterful mystery. But we will tell you that:

“He was circling her and she didn’t even know it.”

…by Mr. Green, with a MySpace, on the Internet

Use Amazon.com’s “Search Inside” method to get inside George Dawes Green’s compelling new book, Ravens, and a chillingly similar message unfolds.

In this case, Green’s stalker finds his prey’s pictures (and more) on MySpace. Those pages reveal that his intended victim has a very close relationship with her grandmother – closer even than with her mother. He also learns the victim’s age, devotion to Johnny Depp and her favorite bands. Using that information he…. but, we promise not to ruin the story.

The Friends of Your Friends

If you read either of these two books, my guess is you’ll head right to your privacy settings on MySpace (or Facebook, or LinkedIn).

Better yet, buy both of these books for the young people in your life. No, young people don’t know everything about the Internet. You just think they do.

If you’re younger, buy both of these books for the old codgers in your life. They’re on Facebook and LinkedIn these days even more than you are – but they usually have no idea how vulnerable they are.

Sure, your friends are all wonderful folks. But, what about the friends of their friends? Can they see the photos and private information that you post? Usually, unless you’ve been very careful – the answer is “yes.”

Are you and your family at risk when you post information to social networking sites? Just ask George Dawes Green and Michael Connelly. Or, better yet, read these books – and then decide for yourself.

Yes, Cinde Dolphin might make it big in her new endeavor, chronicled in that NY Times article, The Job You Make. But, what happens to those entrepreneurs, store owners, consultants, speakers, inventors and other risk takers when they don’t make it big – and have to (ugh) get a job again?

Yesterday I got a text message from an old friend who is nearing retirement. After working in corporate America for about 13 centuries, he told me he’s now ready to branch out on his own and “find my passion.” My response was simply, “I’d rather find my paycheck again.”

It’s in the Water

What happens when you follow your dream, and then find out that your dream didn’t follow you back? Too often (and these stories never make the New York Times), you squander your 401K, max-out your impossibly high interest rate credit cards and pay millions of dollars supporting your health care coverage habit. Don’t ask us how we know.

I don’t know if he invented the term, but UC Santa Cruz professor Robert W. Fairlie points out that there are a lot more “necessity entrepreneurs” when the economy is bad. (Dr. Fairlie sort of wrote the book (or at least the PDF) about individuals creating businesses in his “Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity.”) 

“Necessity entrepreneurs,” then, are those folks who get laid off of often high-paying jobs and then decide to try speaking, consulting, stand-up comedy or other death-defying gambits.

But, as you can see in the screen shot above, some necessity entrepreneurs now find themselves looking longingly at those regular paychecks of yore.

Who You Gonna’ Call?

You know what comes next, right? Yes, we thought we’d do a little research, send some emails and place a few phone calls to try to find out what’s going on – and then report it faithfully here.

We thought we’d follow some current job searchers and report on their tactics, strategies and mental breakdowns. Our interview line-up looks something like this (we reserve the right to change it without notification):

• New Job Searchers
• Frustrated Job Searchers
• Internet Job Experts
• Old-Fashioned Job Experts
• A Recruiter (or two)
• Some HR Big Wigs
• And anyone else we choose….

Where You Gonna’ Look?

Along the way, we’ll reach out and try to separate the truth from the bunk about how Internet and social networking sites can help your job search, what kinds of strategies are best and what you can do to keep from jumping off a bridge if you don’t find employment right away.

We won’t, of course, be able to resist showing you a few Internet research tricks that might help:

But, that’s just what we do. It’s called Internet research and we’re pretty sure it will lead us to some interesting people and great ideas along the way.

Recently Facebook asked us (actually they told us) to change our privacy settings, or else. It was an “Important Message” that read something like this:

“We’re making you change your privacy settings. And, since we know that 99% percent of you are too busy to doodle around with our impossibly complicated and arcane instructions, we’re going to suggest some to you. These will end up risking your bank account, expose you to viruses and endanger your personal safety, but what the heck.”

The problem is that, as many people have pointed out, Facebook’s suggested “privacy” settings would open-up your most private information, allow the juice-will-save-your life folks to accost you and expose your kids to muggers and rapists.

No big deal. Heck, what really got to me was the way they did it. They forced all of us to change our settings at that very moment. Not even banks do that!

That’s right. Here’s the screen – and good luck to you if you’d like an answer to the question, “Well, Ok Facebook, what were my old privacy settings?” Forget it – there was no way to check. You were locked out of your FB account until you filled out their form.

Let’s just take that first one, the “About me” section. Here’s what Facebook suggests for your “About me” profile – make it accessible to everyone.

Go to your Facebook profile right now and see if you can find “About me.” Do it. Good freaking luck.

I looked for 20 minutes and decided that the time I waste deciphering social networking sites would be better spent watching paint dry.

Maybe I’m missing something somewhere, but that’s why I’m ticked off. Oh, and that little bit about your privacy and safety being in jeopardy. That too.

Now, off to see if I can find someone, anyone, at Facebook who cares.

We bumped into Charlotte’s Stallings again this week out on the speaking trail. We hadn’t seen her for some months and it has been almost 11 months now since we wrote about her in Run, Charlotte, Run!!

We chatted for a short time before she zipped off to the airport. We didn’t have the heart to tell her that the valuable information she had learned from her trusted fellow speakers in the National Speakers Association Linkedin Group had been washed down the drain.

Discussions Held Hostage by LinkedIn

Here’s the problem. Smart, savvy speakers are asking their group (in this case the National Speakers Association Group on LinkedIn) if they know anything about a company called the International Speakers Network.

Again this week, another speaker, Shawn Kershaw, asked – “International  Speakers Network – Anybody had experience, positive or negative, with them?”

What Shawn didn’t know is that there have already been two major discussions within the NSA LinkedIn Group about the International Speakers Network.

Yes, Charlotte Stallings asked the same question 11 months ago. The responses added up to the most comments ever up to that point. Almost 100% of the comments were explicit warnings, a few of which we listed in Run, Charlotte, Run!!

Then, just a couple of weeks ago, Orvel Ray Wilson asked the NSA Group about a sister company of ISN, with the same results – tons of warnings about the business practices of ISN and its ilk:

“Let’s call it like it is — Both Brenda and her last employer ISN are scam artists and we’ve all lost way too much money to them.”

“I think you get the message: Stay away. Period. Many of us learned the hard way. “

“She promised me lots of stuff at her last job, took my money and I never heard from her again.”

These two discussions are a treasure trove of warnings about this questionable company. But, they are more than that. They are not just warnings from anyone. They are warnings from current NSA members who have had first hand experience and know what they are talking about.

Poor Shawn, however, might never see these warnings. Isn’t the search function of any web site what really provides its power by saving you time? Instead, LinkedIn’s pathetic search system is keeping this information from the very group members who need it the most.

Try This at Home

Try this yourself if you are a member of the National Speakers Association LinkedIn Group (or try similar searches within the LinkedIn Groups you belong to).

To properly search within a LinkedIn Group, you must be signed in to LinkedIn and be in the “Discussion Section” of your particular group.

Take a look what happens when Shawn does her most likely search for International Speakers Network.

She gets absolutely nothing about ISN. Nada. She does get 5 results that have nothing to do with the International Speakers Network. And, it doesn’t even matter if she puts her search terms in quotation marks.

After such a search, Shawn would have no idea that at least two speakers have already asked her question – and received tons of emphatic warnings.

Oddly, if Shawn were lucky enough to do a search for the initials “ISN,” she would connect to the two most relevant results in the NSA Discussion Section that we have shown above.

This is not just odd or unfortunate. It’s a huge problem.

In order to be effective, group sites such as this need to be searchable – and effectively so. Otherwise, the same questions and the same answers will continue to recycle, and who’s going to waste their valuable time doing that?

Editors Note: We have not linked to the International Speakers Network for obvious reasons. Go there are your own peril. We have also not linked to any of the Group Discussions in LinkedIn because they will not work unless you are a member of LinkedIn (and sometimes even a member of a specific group).

As we said in our last post about shortened URL’s -”Twitter Spam: the Long and the Short.ly of It,” – that’s not the worst of it when it comes to your safety.

Nope, it’s your friends you have to watch out for. But, it’s not their fault at all. Take a look:

We’ve followed Gene Leganza (@gleganza) for some time now. He just happens to be a mucky-muck analyst over at Forrester Research – not exactly the type of guy you’d think would send you an unsolicited invitation to his Mafia Wars family.

But, as you can see from the screen shot above, he did send me just such a private “Direct Message” message, asking me to click and join.

Not a Good Idea to Click

Just one small point. Gene never sent the message. Some sort of auto-bot did. And, there are scads of other such messages, inspiring a torrent of complaints and anger on Twitter itself (just do a search for “twitter spam” on seach.twitter.com if you doubt us).

Here’s another example of the kind that may be filling your Twitter private messages. Again, looks can be deceiving:

The Worst Thing About It

Here’s what really hurts. What do the most of the folks conclude who get these types of private messages from their followers? Yup, they blame the messenger. That’s what Twitter expert Laura Fitton  thought, before she took a second look, (screen shot at the beginning of this article).

But, Gene never did send it. And, Kim never did send it. Gene doesn’t play Mafia Wars. Kim works for the Four Seasons, not some sort of online money making scheme. But, both links will infect your computer and start sending out similar messages to your followers, without your knowledge.

Gene and Kim (and thousands of others) have had to re-jigger their Twitter accounts and send out apologies to their followers. Gene says he took the time to connect to each one privately. He told us:

What really bugs me about it is that it made me an unwitting agent of spam. It impacted my followers’ trust in me.

Complicity and Duplicity

It’s clearly time for Twitter to get serious about these sorts of scams. Thankfully, more and more conscientious and brave folks are bringing up the topic. Michael Arrington’s series of articles about the complicity of the gaming industry and social media sites should make your hair stand on end.

And a simple search on any major search engine will return thousands of results for things like “twitter spam” and “mafia wars spam.” The same searches in the News sections of those search engines will give you the latest stories – and there are many.

The same searches in the “News” sections of those search engines will give you the latest stories – and there are many.

What’s to be Done?

Wish to heck we knew. But, it’s frightening. And, it’s keeping us from clicking on most anything anymore.

Do your own research. Write your own blog posts. Become part of the discussion. This sort of nonsense has the power to bring down not just Twitter, but our entire trust in the online world.

Those fake followers are almost more of a nuisance than anything, taking up your time as you evaluate whether they’re worth it.

Diving Off the Diving Board

While those idiots and swindlers are doing their best to ruin your Twitter experience, perhaps the bigger threat to you and your computer comes in the form of those shortened URL’s.

Think about it. Does it really make sense that the bad guys know how to send spam on email but don’t know how to send it out on Twitter? In fact, the URL shortening company Bit.ly flags 2 to 3 million untrustworthy messages of its own per week!

Clicking on one of these shortened links is like diving into a swimming pool without checking first to see if it has any water.

The Future Looks Dim

Twitter says that it’s going to start testing those shortened URL’s to make sure they are safe. If they do as good a job at that as they do at getting rid of pornographers, swindlers and multi-level marketers, things sure don’t look good for the home team.

Sure, there are technical additions available that offer some extent of protection. Firefox and other browsers offer add-on’s and plug-in’s that will give you a preview of the longer links. However, those don’t assure the link is not malicious.

One of the best overviews of this topic is from Brian Krebs’ Security Fix blog in the Washington Post, “Spammers, Virus Writers Abusing URL Shortening Services.”

What it comes down to is this – Twitter has the potential to be a true national resource, acting as an ingenious social meeting place and an invaluable public square.

But, the assault on it by the by the online version of drug dealers, pimps and criminals is simply not being taken seriously enough. Right now, as I write this, you can follow the carnage by doing your own search for “twitter spam” on search.twitter.com.

With Friends Like That

But, hang on to your hats, folks, because that’s not the worst of it. It’s actually your friends you need to watch out for on Twitter – not just the spammers and the URL sleaze balls.

More about that in our next post.

Want to find out how to keep up with what’s being said about you? Head straight to a cool new Internet resource called Filtrbox.com. But first, we’d like to tell you the story behind the Filtrbox story, and why you should care.

Broadcast News

The Internet has brought vast change at lightning speed to the business world. But, perhaps the biggest and least understood is the change from “broadcast” to “conversation.”

Without going all philosophical on you, whether you like it or not, you and your business are now part of an ongoing conversation. This conversation is multifaceted and it’s happening in a multitude of online locations.

The conversation is about the changes in your industry and the latest developments in the kinds of products you sell. But, it’s more than that. Now, folks are “conversing” about you, your brand and even your own (and your employees’) performance.

This new conversation also has a dark side. Whether you are famous for your inventions, ideas, products or services more and more people want to steal them from you – or just “borrow” them for a while without your knowledge. People want your trademark, your newest product release and even your turn of phrase. Increasingly, they don’t even think of it as stealing.

Location, Location, Location

Where is all of this going on? They’re writing web articles and blogs that use your own thoughts, ideas and exact words. They’re selling rip-offs of your stuff on their web sites and copying your good ideas on their blogs. And, they’re often slamming and damning your customer service on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

How can you keep track of all this? And do you even need to? For an answer to that, just ask any company who has ignored the bloggers and Twitterers. As they can testify, conversations can grow, get out of hand and turn into firestorms.

Are the Solutions Worse than the Problem?

But, how can you keep up? How can you tune in to the first whispers of discontent? How can you know that someone is using your trademarked phrase? How can you track your competitor so closely you’ll know when they burp? Will you see them hawking your products on their web site?

Well, let’s see, you could cobble together some Google News alerts,  a sprinkling of RSS feeds, dozens of blog subscriptions, a few web site change alarms, and top it off with a smattering of newsletters. If you do this, however, you’ll have a control panel about as complex as a fighter jet. And, you’ll spend more time manning the controls than you will evaluating the information you gather.

But, what if there was one solution? And, what if the controls for all of this were simple and accessible?

1 if by Air, 2 if by Land, 3 if by Sea

The place to try out that “one-stop Internet information shop” is at Filtrbox.com. What these guys can do with their Internet listening devices should make the FBI and the CIA a little green with envy.

Unlike a lot of other forms of web and news alerts, Filtrbox covers virtually all the bases AND acts as both a search resource and an alert tool.

You can receive Filtrbox alerts in your favorite RSS reader or in your email. Or, you can ignore these types of constant notifications, go on vacation for a month, and then fiddle with the Filtrbox controls so that you quickly catch up on only the most important stuff you missed.

Tracking your company name and intellectual property? You’ll probably want to monitor all sources – mainstream news, the blog world and Twitter. Tracking a topic in your industry? You may just want to keep up with the mainstream news sources.

At the Controls

So, why is Filtrbox different? Because in one place, you can view and adjust your different topics, time frames, sources and the relative importance of those conversations in one place.

Here’s what I mean. When it comes to your company name, your own name and your trademarked phrases, I’m sure you’d like to know whenever someone says anything – both good and bad.

When it comes to keeping up on your industry’s hot topics and issues, you likely might want to know only when more important or trusted sources have something to say. In the screen shot below we’re only picking up mainstream press articles for a very, very popular term, “information overload“:

And, for all of your terms and phrases you can adjust the amount of time you’re looking at – longer for obscure topics and shorter for popular ones:

Here’s the thing, though. You’ve got to try this. There’s a free version and a free trial – giving you a chance to kick the tires and look under the hood of this remarkable tool.

Why do you even need to try? Because, as the Rolling Stones sang way back in 1965, people really are “talkin’ about you.”

Editors Note: We do not accept referral fees or payments for any sites mentioned in our blogs, speeches or workshops. We do accept “review copies” and “press passes” in order to be able to demonstrate resources and sites.

Who is Dominic? Is he one of your LinkedIn connections? Nope. In fact, Dominic has the sum total of four (yes, count them, 1, 2, 3, 4) connections. Poor souls.

But, even though he has few friends (no wonder), he has joined something like 40 LinkedIn Groups. And, yes, he happened to join one of the groups you belong to – which is how he got entrée to your inbox.

So, you say, no problem. There must be a privacy setting on LinkedIn that would keep Dominic out of your life. You know “privacy settings.” Those are the adjustments social networking sites don’t publicize at all and that you never have time to fiddle with even if you do discover them.

But, this is a problem. The only privacy setting that would keep Mr. Spam out of your inbox would also keep the legitimate members of that group from communicating with you.

There Goes the Neighborhood

And, that’s the problem. I do want to “Allow members of this group to send me messages via LinkedIn.” I just don’t want zeroes like this guy to have access to me.

In fact, I want LinkedIn to throw his sorry behind out the door – now. If they don’t, their once verdant social networking neighborhood will turn into a slum of social nitwits. And, that’s when we’ll all leave. I’m just leading the way, leaving now unless LinkedIn begins to eject Dominic Spam and his ilk swiftly and summarily.

Tell LinkedIn you feel the same way, or Dominic and his friends will soon be cramming your inbox with a ton of this kind of garbage, too.

Elli St. George Godfrey (@3keyscoach) pointed out that Shakespeare had already written about Twitter – “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” She then went on to say:

This blog post is part of a theme I’ve been experiencing this week. There is the on-going discussion about transparency. This past week , at the NAWBO Boston chapter event, we had a great discussion about humility and self-promotion.

They discuss things like that in Boston?!! Makes us want to move there.

The “I’s” Have It

That topic of “humility and self-promotion” got us doing our “search” thing (hey, it’s what we do). We wondered just how much discussion is there on the web about the topic of humility and self-promotion? So, we started a search at the source, on Search.Twitter.com, of course:

humility “self promotion”

Not surprisingly, there was only one tweet and it wasn’t quotable verbatim. The lone tweet suggested: “Humility will get you ‘bleeping’ nowhere.” So much for intelligent discussion (and humility) on Twitter.

Then we tried Google with the exact same search:

humility “self promotion”

Ozymandius

Among the varied results there was an article titled “Getting Ahead without Tooting Your Own Horn” by Ray Blunt. He’s the Associate Director and Fellow of The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation & Culture. In his article, Ray even quotes Percy Bysshe Shelley. It’s amazing, really, how many poets wrote about Twitter.

We’ll let you read his article for yourself, but one of the points Ray makes references Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great, and the research behind what Collins calls Level 4 and Level 5 leaders. Blunt writes:

What they found rather amazed them. Many of the companies that actually had the best sustained results over time … …were actually somewhat obscure. One reason they were obscure was that their CEOs were people who shunned the limelight and tended to talk in terms of “we” not “me.”

Hmm… not a lot of “we” on Twitter.

The Good Book Says

We also found David Maister’s 2007 blog entry “Self-Promotion.” David is currently taking a break from blogging, but like Rosanne Cash says, “god I hope he comes back soon.”

Again, you have to read this honest and thoughtful (and humble) piece for yourself, but here’s a taste:

Like many other professionals, I’m comfortable with showing my material and saying “Let the work speak for itself” but I’ve been around long enough to know that more than that is required. I’m just not comfortable doing it.

The humility and self-promotion discussions remind us of that verse from Matthew:

Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.

The current crowd of Twitter barkers and hawkers don’t just put their messages on candlesticks; they explode them all over the universe with rocket flares. Amazing how well they can do that in just 140 characters.

Seems to us that folks like Ray Blunt and David Maister have bushels more to offer.

Ian Percy happens to be a successful speaker, organizational psychologist, corporate consultant, art aficionado and even horse reining expert. Not satisfied with those successes, however, he’s started a new initiative that is being branded around the term “Infinite Possibilities.”

That brand will also include a web site for Infinite Possibilities Jewelry. The jewelry is simple, gorgeous and symbolic – “the real magic is in your limitless potential to make your dreams reality.”

Let’s leave the trademark questions to the professionals and instead search for those folks who are already using “infinite possibilities” in various ways. They just might become potential partners for Ian’s new initiatives.

The Singer and the Song

We’ll start with a search for the infinite possibilities that Google can find for “infinite possibilities.”

The top Google result goes to the lovely and talented Ms. Amel Larrieux. Her CD, “Infinite Possibilities,” even takes home the bacon for that term in Wikipedia!

We had not heard of Amel, but believe me, the folks on Twitter have. A search of search.Twitter.com for “Amel Larrieux” shows that people are Tweeting away about her lovely music virtually every hour – adding up to at least 15 or 20 Twitter messages per day, and almost all of them complimentary.

(By the way, if you want to listen to Ms. Larrieux just go to Rhapsody.com. You can listen to 25 songs for free, without signing up and without paying for a Rhapsody account. Or, log on to her MySpace page for a few samples).

The Adventurer

The second Google result for “infinite possibilities” is for a CD called “Infinite Possibilities: The Art of Living Your Dreams.” Not music this time, but an audio book about connecting to your own possibilities. The author’s name is Mike Dooley, who is the curator of an amazing web site called Tut’s Adventurers Club.

Tut stands for “Totally Unique Thoughts” and the site is:

A philosophical club of like-minded thinkers who believe that life is the ultimate adventure… because thoughts become things, dreams come true, and all things remain forever possible!

We wondered if Mike’s site had much traffic, so we got out “The Baloney Detector” again (AKA Compete.com) and tested his site’s traffic. Turns out, his single site has more visitors than many much-ballyhooed national sites.

The Connector – Information Age Style

Now, we have no idea if either the singer or the adventurer would want to connect their infinite possibilities with Ian’s Infinite Possibilities Jewelry.

But, it is possible that they might want to partner in some way, participate in an affiliate program or become a reseller. He won’t know until he asks.

It’s up to Ian to reach out. Perhaps he could follow Amel Larrieux on Twitter @amellarrieux before he came right out and contacted her. Maybe he could contact Mike Dooley on Facebook. Or, he might just call or email both of them.

This kind of search is, however, a powerful example of something that we rarely think about. 99 times out of 100 we would turn over our trademark concerns to the professionals. They would then come back with a “yes” or a “no” to our brand name ideas.

Instead (or in addition), in today’s information economy, the information and networking explosions have created new opportunities there for the asking – possibly even in infinite ways, with endless possibilities.