Creative Class

Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, announced his resignation via Twitter, deploying haiku to boot. His message:

Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more

This illustrated his frustration surrounding the acquisition by Oracle.

Normally, I recommend (especially to young people) to resist the urge to be cheeky and keep it to the point and be professional. This article suggests that Conan O’Brien should have been more diplomatic, although his détente final words may have cleared things up.

What was your most creative quitting story? What quitting fantasies have you had?

The one and only Yoko Ono (@yokoono) is now following Richard on Twitter.

Become privy to Richard’s thought-provoking Tweets today: @Richard_Florida.

Who are your favorite folks to follow on Twitter?

Check out today’s Tweets focusing on SAS, one of the largest software companies in the world:

• SAS Institute tops list of best places to work

• Managing for Creativity, me and SAS CEO Jim Goodnight on SAS model in HBR

• Video of Goodnight and me on SAS model

Not following Richard on Twitter? Join the club: @Richard_Florida

Every year, Computerworld asks people in the geek community for their New Year’s predictions. The full article is here.

My responses included:

We will see social networking fatigue, but savvy users will continue to use platforms to build their personal brands. For most people, updating Facebook gets tedious, and your “friends” really don’t care which Hogwarts faculty member you are. Twitter takes a lot of work, although it can be a great personal brand-builder, with enough effort. LinkedIn is improving, mostly because of its Answers section; users can become well-regarded authorities in their subject areas by investing an hour or two per week posting thoughtful questions and responses. Plaxo? Please stop pestering me. You’re too far down my social networking depth chart for me to spend any time with you.

And

While the concept of a social networking guru might seem quaint by 2013 (do you have a photocopier guru in your office?), there is an opportunity in 2010 for people who really understand how to make social networking happen within the enterprise. While there are still a lot of carpetbaggers and “gee-whiz” cheerleaders playing in this market, I still find that there are a lot of people who don’t have a basic understanding of social networking and are reluctant to ask for help.

What are your thoughts? What will 2010 have in store for social networking?

There were some interesting comments on my last Creative Class post about the value of one’s social media presence and possible positive and negative effects on a career. One of the readers suggested that having two Twitter accounts makes sense – one that publishes professional material and the other is more personal and restricted to family and close friends.

When I deliver speeches on social media, I often explain the difference between social media platforms in terms of your closet. LinkedIn is a grey flannel suit and Facebook is a Hawaiian shirt. It’s important to have both, but if you show up in a boardroom in a Hawaiian shirt you look like a goof and if you show up on a boathouse roof in a grey flannel suit, you look like an ass. As a side note, several people have pointed out that often the guy wearing a bright floral shirt in a boardroom often owns the place, but that might be the exception that proves the rule.

Generally, LinkedIn should have the reserved, dignified tone of a resume but with fewer restrictions on format and length. Good profiles provide lots of search terms and plenty of recommendations. Although my personal profile might have gone too far in this respect. Beyond 50 recommendations takes someone a few exits past “let’s hire this guy”  and is careening towards “desperately insecure attention seeker”-ville.

Facebook allows more leeway for frivolity in the form of cheeky update status, personal photos, and non-business links (although, trust me… people aren’t interested in what Hogwarts faculty member you are). There are some downsides to inviting colleagues as Facebook friends. For example:

• Violating work-life separation.
• Constantly have to monitor content to make sure others aren’t tagging you in the vacation pictures you don’t want the guy in accounts receivable to see.
• Appearances of favoritism – why did my boss friend my colleagues and not me?
• “Banter competition” – if Facebook walls become the water cooler, am I putting myself at a disadvantage by not showing up?
• Offending people (maybe a customer or your boss) by not accepting them or putting them on limited profile (if they are paying attention, it’s easy to tell).

What are your guidelines for friending colleagues?

Richard Florida’s Twitter feed has been named on the list of “100 Best Twitter Feeds for Savvy Business Students” by AssociateDegree.org.

Follow Richard on Twitter at Richard_Florida!

Who are your favorites to follow on Twitter?

OK, so that explains why I’ve been spending so much time there lately. Quote is from Tom Wilson (on Huffington Post), author of this new book on Twitter.

Sometimes, it’s nice to be small. The City of Nanaimo has been pushing the envelope on open data and open government for a number of years now.

Recently, I was directed to their new Council Agendas and Minutes webpage. I recommend you check it out.

Here’s why.

At first blush the site seems normal. There is the standard video of the council meeting (queue cheesy local cable access public service announcement), but the meeting minutes underneath are actually broken down by the second and by clicking on them you can jump straight to that moment in the meeting.

As anyone who’s ever attended a City Council meeting (or the legislature, or parliament) knows, the 80/20 rule is basically always in effect. About 80 percent of the time the proceedings are either dead boring and about 20 percent (often much less) of the time the proceedings are exciting, or more importantly, pertinent to you. One challenge with getting citizens engaged on the local level is that they often encounter a noise to signal problem. The ratio of “noise” (issues a given citizen doesn’t care about) drowns out the “signal” (the relatively fewer issues they do care about).

The City of Nanaimo’s website helps address this problem. It enables citizens to find what matters to them without having to watch or scroll through a long and dry council meeting. Better still, they are given a number of options by which to share that relevant moment with friends, neighbors, allies, or colleagues via Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, or any other number of social media tools.

One might be wondering: Can my city afford such a wiz-bang setup?

Excellent question.

Given Nanaimo’s modest size (it has 78,692 citizens) suggests they have a modest IT budget. So I asked Chris McLuckie, a City of Nanaimo public servant who worked on the project. He informed me that the system was built in-house by him and another city staff member; it uses off-the-shelf hardware and software and so cost under $2,000 and it took two weeks to code up.

Two weeks?

No million dollar contract? No eight-month timeline? No expensive new software?

No, if you’re smart, a couple of creative hackers can put something together in no time at all.

You know what’s more – because Chris and the City of Nanaimo want to help more cities learn how to think like the web, I bet if the IT director from any city (or legislative body) asked nicely, they would just give them the code.

So how Open is your city? And if not, do they have $2,000 lying around to change that?

On the What’s Happening section of the blog on RyanSeacrest.com, Richard Florida’s singles map from Who’s Your City? is front and center. Ryan Tweeted about it as well.

What do you consider the best city for singles?

I’m part of the team filling in this week for the amazing Andrew Sullivan over at the Daily Dish at The Atlantic Online. Here’s what Andrew has to say:

I’m due for a break from the web for a week. Aides de blog Patrick Appel and Chris Bodenner will keep the Dish al dente in my absence. I’m working on an essay for the magazine and catching up on some reading – things I cannot seem to get done when I’m blogging twelve hours a day. Atlantic Correspondents Richard Posner, Richard Florida, and Lane Wallace have also agreed to contribute this coming week. Usually when I try to take a breather, some epic events occur – popes die, icons are shot, etc – so look busy.

I’m grateful to Andrew and my Atlantic online editor Bob Cohn for the opportunity, and humbled to be in such esteemed company. I want to thank my online CCE editor Elizabeth McGolerick and my MPI and CCG teams, especially Patrick Adler and Charlotta Mellander, for supporting my blogging.

Come visit here.

Creative Class Exchange will continue life as usual. My posts for the The Daily Dish and otherwise, along with my Twitter feed, will continue to appear here. And our other bloggers will be posting usual.