The Digital You

Last week, I started to discuss how you appear to others online, that is, the online personality you might think of as the "digital you".

What's fascinating is that your digital personality as you perceive it (which assumes that you have actually thought about the topic at all, which most of us haven't) can be very different from how others see it.

This lack of understanding, particularly in a business environment, can lead you into all sorts of problems ranging from simply being misunderstood, through being seen as "weak", to being considered as someone who others would rather not engage because you appear unfriendly or even aggressive.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Last week, I started to discuss how you appear to others online, that is, the online personality you might think of as the "digital you".

What's fascinating is that your digital personality as you perceive it (which assumes that you have actually thought about the topic at all, which most of us haven't) can be very different from how others see it.

This lack of understanding, particularly in a business environment, can lead you into all sorts of problems ranging from simply being misunderstood, through being seen as "weak", to being considered as someone who others would rather not engage because you appear unfriendly or even aggressive.

To analyze your "Digital You", a company called Cataphora has published a software utility called Digital Mirror.

Digital Mirror, which is free and currently at the proof of concept stage, delves into your Outlook e-mail and analyzes each item. It looks for the parties involved in the messages and searches for linguistic signals that indicate attitudes and intentions.

After much grinding and sieving (large e-mail stores can take hours to process), Digital Mirror produces a number of views of your interactions and relationships as defined by your messaging.

For example, there's the Quality Time analysis which shows a breakdown of who you have exchanged messages with, while the Social Universe analysis shows a related view but focuses on the intimacy of your messaging (thus "Dear Mr. Gates" isn't scored as high as "Yo, Billy, wazzup?").

Who? What? When? shows the top five topics and the top five people you interacted with on those topics, while the Blow-Off Score Board visualizes the top five people you interact with. There's also Pecking Order, Buck Passing, Loud Talking, Temperature Gauge and finally the Stressful Topics analysis.

Now before you get too excited, this is, as I noted, early in the life cycle of this product. It only produces analyses for the top five people and topics or categories in any analysis and, by only examining your Outlook e-mail, it is intrinsically limited in its view of the Digital You. Integration of your social media accounts would make for a more accurate picture.

What I like about this tool is that it starts to show you how your digital world looks and works. It makes you aware of where the real stress is in your online relationships and where those relationships aren't working in your favor.

Now, imagine this tool extended to integrate the personal results of all employees into a unified picture of the enterprise. Then we could see the hot topics that drive our businesses. We could also see who is cooperative, who causes friction, and who stands out in their engagement with others.

Should we worry about such an in-depth view of the enterprise? Absolutely! There are all sorts of assumptions and unknowns in these analyses so the results could be misleading if taken too literally or assumed to be accurate when they are really just indicative. Acting on the results would take a lot of skill and finesse.