Owning your Relationships

Happy Tuesday to all 198 of you! If you’re taking the time to read this, mind telling us how we’re doing? If you have any topics you think we should cover, just hit that reply button in your inbox. And as always, the best gift is sharing this with someone you love… or hate, we’re not picky. 

There is something we need to talk about this week.

We had a great post lined up for this week. Actually, we have a few already in the hopper. Our goal is to give you evergreen and timely insights and drop tactics that you can put in place today.

Relationships - professional *and* personal-  are our most important asset. It guides everything I build, teach, and write. If you're here, you've bought into that. Welcome.

For that reason, I'm calling an audible* and talking about something else this week.

What's happened recently

Many of us here consider Twitter to be a crucial channel for us to engage and be engaged with. I celebrated my 15-year anniversary on the platform a month ago.

New ownership has come in and made some - interesting - changes. Championing free speech while deplatforming journalists. Scaring off it's core revenue sources, while oscillating wildly on new subscription models. Even temporarily blocking the mention of other social platforms.

I'm not going to play Monday morning quarterback** and drop insights on the past & future of Twitter.

Except to say that the future and reliability of a global town square are increasingly in question.

And if our relationships truly are our most important asset, then we need to calmly step back and take note that our asset is at risk.

I'm not saying that you and I can't be friends just because a single platform goes away. Relationships transcend any one platform or context.

(I remember the first time my daughter saw one of her teachers at a grocery store. She didn't realize that the teacher existed outside of preschool.)

If we are only talking on one platform, and you leave, that's a problem.

If you cut off the primary way we communicate, that's a problem.

If you lose access to information on relationships - friend or follower lists - that's another problem.

I've seen this before.

Rewind back to summer 2015.

Put this throwback on while you're reading this, as you likely heard it a thousand times that summer.

Up until then, Facebook and LinkedIn both gave you the ability to bring your contacts to other platforms. You could sign into, say, Foursquare (yep, another throwback!) and instantly find all of your Facebook friends. You could connect LinkedIn to your CRM, and it would tell you which of your past clients had changed jobs recently.

It was awesome.

Until some product managers woke up and realized that if you can take your data with you, you could easily switch to a competitor. And if the only way to access your contacts was on their site, then you might stick around longer.

So over that summer in 2015, the two leading social networks decided to put an end to the party, and shut down access.

LinkedIn now gives you a spreadsheet, after attempting to disable even that. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp?  They provide nothing, leaving you with shady third-party apps to get something out. The information is still there, as long as you - and the people you are connected with - are active, compliant subscribers.

Your most important asset deserves a little bit more security than that.

What's the big deal?

If our relationships are independent of any one social network or tool, why worry if we lose access to our information?

One of the core concepts in effective relationship building is to have a digital record, usually a CRM or at least a spreadsheet.

If the hardware between our two ears can barely remember what we had for breakfast two weeks ago, how on earth is it going to remember who we met?

And if we lose access to that digital record, problems happen.

Now I'm not advocating for full data sovereignty. Nor am I evangelizing an off-the-grid compound in California with our own police force***. Entrusting other platforms with our information to gain value is good. 

A five-minute action

What I am advocating, as I do for everyone who uses Relatable and its predecessors, is to ensure that you have a copy.

It takes a few minutes to go to Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other tool you use, and grab a backup. Copy it to a few trusted and private places (e.g. Dropbox, thumb drive under the mattress), and forget about it. Hopefully, you never need it.

Moving forward, whenever investing in a new platform, ask the right questions. Realistically, most of us will never read the fifteen-page privacy policy or terms. We can at least ensure there's a decent exit door for the information we care about. And if your employer is footing the bill, it's worth understanding who owns what. A selling point of the CRM we built was that someone could, with two clicks, unplug from the company's payment account and use it independently.

Stay safe out there.

BTW, I made it this far without mentioning "not your keys, not your crypto" - we'll leave that bit about FTX/Luna/etc on the chopping room floor.

Happy Tuesday.

* I know, Zvi a sportsball analogy. Lol. Does he even know what sport that's from?

** seriously, twice?

*** Wild Wild Country on Netflix was awesome, though