Since our existence as NozomiRo and NozomiUK we helped few people to set up their online professional profiles.
The work was delicate and requested a lot of creativity in finding the right solutions for them. The challenges we faced each time when working on such cases raised the bar for our team and we keep talking about different approaches over and over until the last detail created our internal “best practices”.
Project timeline
December 2021 – we decided to support one of our colleagues on a special research project. The catchy phrase ”Can you be completely undercover in online? Can you become a total anonymous individual on the internet?” raised so many spirited debates inside our team and divided us into defending so many theories.
But finally, the “digital detox” of an individual is a very interesting way to call what we decided to do along 2022. We acknowledged that it should be a necessary step for anybody over 30 years old, ready for their full professional maturity.
We have pin-point some milestones for this project and we will are setting up a list of steps and accomplishments to be researched and solved throughout 2022. The odds, at this point and after our team brainstorming, looks good. We can estimate the outputs but we had so many opinions on the matter that we couldn’t draw a clear line for the final output.
We hope that in 2023, when the final steps of this project will be concluded, we will have a new set of best practices to apply for this kind of requests.
Our Persona Of Interest (POI) background: middle aged former journalist, experienced investigation reporter; business owner and Facebook addict; content creator and strong voice on different social platforms; mentor and coach for an online community.
January 2022: For this month we planned the “information gathering” step.
We will cover not only the software used by our subject but also the hardware and equipment (smart watch, smart TV and appliances, digital devices with sign in, etc). This was the most creative and “out of the box” thinking part of the project.
The approach we used came from 2 perspectives: the one from a common unexperienced user and the other from an experienced professional (researcher). This way we will check and test our internal processes in collecting information. We will check and see if a common individual with little knowledge of how these systems works would be able to manage the challenges and solve the issues raised from this kind of actions.
Publicly, for professional and privacy reasons, we will release only the information we had from “the common, unexperienced user”.
We set up so many lists and mind maps during this project chapter and we were close so many times to chaos, and we acknowledged that a lot of other information will arise during the project, from our actions. Remember: we are doing all this for just ONE person.
February 2022: Starting of Social platforms digital detox – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, Youtube.
Facebook was one of the most challenging issues we faced. Although our Person of Interest (POI) had an erratically presence on those platforms in regards to the timeline, our POI partner was quite a social butterfly. This was the first “dramatic” obstacle we had to tackle: tags from friends and FoF’s.
We observed thoroughly the platforms and the actions taken and we realised that there are too many issues arising after each post and it looks like this step will be an ongoing work thought the whole project timeline.
March 2022: Starting of Professional platforms digital detox – this was quite an easy part as our POI was active only on LinkedIn. Further more, we had to search and verify over 30 job offering pages, where our POI listed a Resume (CV)
April 2022: Managing Sites, Subscriptions and other type of accounts – this is a mission impossible task. There are thousands of subscriptions that we can extract from the emails, newsletters, browser bookmarks and other notifications received by POI.
Most important acknowledgement: some of these subscriptions, where the POI has given the real name, address and other personal information are contained in sites and so old that we have to recover the accounts first… There are also the sites that “disappeared” in time, or sites that morphed into something else. We discover our first roadblocks.
May 2022: Governmental, utilities and other “in persona” sites
June 2022: Half project milestone – first conclusions