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HOME & DIGITAL
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SPORTS D6
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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
© 2014 Dow Jones & Company. All Rights Reserved.
Wednesday, August 6, 2014 | D1
Strategies
To Outfox
Facebook’s
Tracking
The Charisma Boot Camp
Anyone Can Learn to Project Personal Presence; Be Consistent in Work, Play, Online
TALK
LOOK
FIVE.
STEPS.
TO.
BUILDING.
YOUR.
PRESENCE.
[ Personal Technology ]
BY GEOFFREY A. FOWLER
AT WORK
AFTER HOURS
PREP
TEST
SMILE
ONLINE
Look
polished,
wrinklefree.
A signature style helps
leave a mark. Think Anna
Wintour’s bob.
Social-media
profile photo and
background
should represent
your aesthetic.
Make eye contact. Find a
low and clear vocal tone.
Before a party,
think of some
conversation topics
among likely guests.
Couch bragging
in a greater
purpose to make
it tolerable.
Walk the room when you
arrive at a party. Raise
your presence level for
bigger locations.
Your audience on
social media is much
bigger than any reallife conversation. So be
careful.
Prepare bullet points,
not a script. Drop the
props, especially the
PowerPoint.
Everyone loves to
gripe about privacy
on Facebook. Like me,
you may have even
threatened to quit.
But let’s be honest—
we’re not going to break up with a
social network filled with people we
care about.
Instead, let’s do something real:
Get a grip on Facebook’s 9,000-word
privacy policy and take concrete
steps to control our information.
I’m raising the issue because privacy on Facebook just took two steps
forward and one step back. These relate to digital tracking, one of the
creepiest and most confusing aspects
of the social network.
Facebook is following you. It now
can use what you do outside its network—when you surf the Web and
use other apps on your smartphone—
to target ads at you. Facebook says it
needs the extra data to make its ads
better.
At the same time, the company is
starting to be more transparent. In a
first for any major Internet company,
it’s offering to explain exactly why
you’re getting every ad you see and
to let you control what kind of ads
you will see in the future. They don’t
Ask for honest feedback
from your boss or
colleagues. It can build
powerful allies.
Solicit constructive
criticism from your
spouse, your family and
friends.
The more senior you are,
the more consistency
matters. Master ‘grace
under fire.’
You might run into
someone annoying.
Prepare some
disarming
remarks.
People should know these
hard realities about the social
network’s privacy policy.
There are ways to take
control of targeted ads.
Ask a few trusted
followers what they
like and dislike about
you.
make these options very easy to find,
however.
How should we feel about that?
It’s classic Mark Zuckerberg, forcing
us to accept more tracking of our
lives in exchange for some degree of
control. Though its Web and app
tracking aren’t any worse than what
we tolerate from other companies
like Google, Facebook will end up
knowing more about us than ever.
Exasperating as it is, it’s a good
reminder that Facebook isn’t really
free. It’s an exchange, and you need
to know what you’re trading. Here
are four cold, hard realities of Facebook’s privacy policies—and what
you can do about them right now:
The reality: Facebook doesn't sell
your personal data. But it does make
money from it—about $7 per member in revenue last year. Its main
business is selling marketers access
to you, but it does this without telling them who you are.
If the ads you see on Facebook
sometimes seem eerily specific to
you, that’s because Facebook is constantly building out a dossier of your
interests, derived from everything
you do on Facebook, and (increasingly) things you do off it.
Please turn to the next page
No response
can sometimes
be the best
one.
Source: Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Peggy Klaus, Muriel Maignan Wilkins, Amy Jen Su
There is one in every office—the person who
gets the attention of senior managers and interns alike at the morning meeting, who sends
out witty tweets in the afternoon and who glides
effortlessly through the after-work cocktail
party, never at a loss for words.
What is this person’s secret? It boils down to
presence, a magical mix of confidence, charm
and communication skills that exerts an outsize
impact on one’s social stature and ability to
climb the ranks, experts say.
With blurring work-home boundaries, the rise
of social media and our 24/7 lifestyle, it’s harder
than ever to find and maintain personal presence
on the job, on weekends and online. The number
of people you reach has been “magnified far
more than the one-on-one conversations you are
used to having,” says Muriel Maignan Wilkins,
managing partner and co-founder at Isis Associates, an executive coaching and leadership-development consulting firm in McLean, Va. “With
that power comes much bigger consequences.”
The executive coaching world offers myriad
ways to define presence—finding your signature
voice, presenting your authentic self, combining
strength and warmth. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founding president of the Center for Talent Innovation, a New York City think tank, says it comes
down to just three elements—“how you behave,
how you speak and how you look.”
The behavioral part, sometimes called gravitas or intellectual heft, is most important, Ms.
Hewlett says, basing her conclusions on her research, including a survey of nearly 4,000 managers and executives, 40 focus groups and dozens of interviews, all of which are the basis for
Please turn to page D3
PC, MacBook, Chromebook:The Best Laptops to Buy Now
I can rely on a few
things in life. The sun
rising in the east, my
overpriced morning
Starbucks latte, and
people asking me,
“What laptop should I buy?” as summer winds down. I can also rely on
my usual four-word answer: Get a
MacBook Air.
No other laptop in its price range
has yet to beat Apple’s masterful
mixture of speed, endurance and design. In fact, a few months ago when
Apple lowered the starting price to
$900, I declared it the best laptop
ever made.
But that would be a very short,
not to mention narrow-minded, laptop buying guide.
A MacBook Air is not the answer
for everyone. For some, a Windows
laptop is a necessity and, let’s face it,
$900—or really $1,000 by the time I
recommend the larger 13-inch MacBook Air—is potentially far more
than some hope to spend on a computer.
That narrows the list to about a
bajillion other Windows laptops,
most available for less than the price
of the Air.
I’ve spent the last few weeks
weeding through the crop, so you
don’t have to.
Alternatives to MacBook Air
No PC maker has yet matched the
Air’s balance of beauty and brawn,
but you’ll find many capable Windows thin and light laptops—called
ultrabooks—with tricks that make
Apple’s laptop look behind the times.
Lenovo’s IdeaPad Yoga 2 Pro backflips into a tablet, Acer’s Aspire S7’s
lid is covered in Gorilla Glass and
HP’s Spectre 13 x2 has a detachable
HD screen.
You’ll get power, too. Ultrabooks
generally range from $850 to $1,300,
and even the base models include Intel’s latest Core i5 processor, 8GB of
RAM, a 128GB solid-state drive and a
touch screen.
That touch screen is a must for
Windows 8, no matter what price
range you’re in. Despite Microsoft’s
improvements to the OS’s mouse and
keyboard features, switching apps
and navigating the Start Screen feel
more natural with the flick of a finger. And in one of tech’s greatest unsolved mysteries, PC makers still
struggle to make trackpads that consistently respond to gestures and
swipes. (If you prefer Windows 7, you
can still find a variety of laptops in
the business or enterprise section of
Drew Evans/The Wall Street Journal
BY JOANNA STERN
For $600, you can’t beat the Asus VivoBook, with a fast chip and lots of RAM.
various PC maker websites.)
After testing ultrabooks from all
the major PC makers, factoring in everything from performance to keyboard comfort to display quality,
Acer and Lenovo’s options ranked the
highest in my assessment.
What, no Surface Pro 3? When I
tested Microsoft’s tablet PC a few
months ago I found that it was a
powerful machine, but its cramped
trackpad and keyboard still make it
frustrating to use as a laptop.
For a thin and light ultrabook that
also morphs into a tablet by flipping
backwards, it’s better to go with Lenovo’s Yoga 2 Pro, now starting at
$1,050. It’s got a whopping
3200x1800-pixel display and a good
trackpad and keyboard, too, beating
out options from Asus, HP and
Toshiba.
The Acer Aspire S7’s touch screen
doesn’t flip like the Yoga, but it is
just a half-inch thick, has a backlit
blue keyboard, and still ekes out six
hours of battery life. The $950 model
on sale at Microsoft stores has a
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Illustrations by Peter Hoey
BY ELIZABETH HOLMES
2560x1440-pixel display, and it promises to be crapware free. That’s a
plus, as I had to battle so many annoying software pop-ups on Acer’s
loaner model that I almost didn’t recommend it.
If you are looking for the Windows ultrabook with the longest battery life, the Dell XPS 13 beat out all
the others, lasting over seven hours
on my live-streaming battery-torture
test. The Microsoft Store sells that
one, too, for $950, and like all the
PCs the store sells, it comes crapware
free.
The Best for $600 or Less
As I was writing this story, one of
my editors asked about the best laptop at $600 or less for his collegebound daughter. That’s the price
range where things get even more interesting, and complicated.
In this bracket, you’ll sacrifice
build quality and some specs: You’ll
be looking at mainly Core i3 or Pentium processors, 4GB of RAM and
slower spinning hard drives instead
of more durable, solid-state storage.
That said, there are plenty of deals to
be had.
Again, I tested various models
from the top PC makers. (Yes, I’ve
spent more time with laptops than
Please turn to the next page