Li-lian has been invited to a cocktail party that is being organised by the alumni association of the business school she attended five years ago. In this “reunion” a professor of the business school is going to present on the subject of personal branding, or how to manage your personal information and project a good image of yourself in a business world, having made information checking a preliminary of any business relationship. Well actually, when Li-lian thinks about it, this “probing” happens now for almost any domain: colleagues are using the internet to know more about you (what you are currently working on, and in particular who you are working with); the company is using it to form teams (being sure that the members of the team have the right competence, motivation, and are complementary); and people are using it to find dates (nice to know for instance the movies to which the other person goes or the group this person belongs to) or to know more about the friends of their children (although in this case it is always difficult to be sure with them, given they use any imaginable trick to fool their parents). Finally, in her particular case, Li-lian is using it on a regular basis in her job as the security director of a big hotel chain to screen suspicious clients or to make enquiries about the staff of the hotel. She is even relatively proud of being able, with the help of a couple of ‘bots’ she has to admit, to have a high success rate at detecting in advance people that represent a risk for the hotel. Practically, this is just a matter of detecting some particular behavioural patterns and finding a match in the customer database (hotel chains have been pretty good at constructing client databases in order to better serve their clients, but also, something that is rarely put forward, at sorting-out the good clients that are bringing revenues from the ones bringing trouble).
Anyway, this reunion will only be about application of managing the way you are perceived in the business world, knowing that it is increasingly difficult keep track of all the traces that you leave in an “information space” that is mined by a variety of bots that are only too quick at identifying and exposing your weaknesses. To tell the truth, these same bots can also be very useful by helping to get the attention of business partners or head hunters. Of particularly importance now are people’s relationships with others, since these relationships have appeared to represent first class information about the real person, and in particular represents a much more reliable means than the information that people declare about themselves. You have therefore now to be careful who you declare you are working and interacting with (bots are good at discovering hidden relationships), and be sure that they will be positively perceived outside. Hiding information is not really an option, first because it is now increasingly difficult to accomplish. Second because it makes you easily appear as the “usual suspect” if the “bots” are not able to find enough information about you. Consequently, only the more “adventurous” people, or only other “usual suspects” then accept to deal with you if you appear to originate from nowhere and in particular if you can not be connected to people having a good reputation.  “Luring services”, allowing you to literally “buy” your relationships, look nice (some people are even “trading” their friendliness) and can be helpful, but they can be expensive and they often do not resist to very in-depth investigation (data-mining tools are difficult to fool).

Li-lian knows that this event has all the chances to be valuable for her since chance actually has very little to do with its organisation. Indeed the alumni association organising this event has become very professional, and makes all efforts to guarantee that it will be a success. AlumniNet, the online platform of the alumni is very instrumental to this success:
Firstly, this platform is used to identify the topics that are likely to attract the most interest from members of the community. Bots in the platform are continuously mining people’s activities, and sources of external personal information that people have made available to them to identify the “hot topics”. The topics include the interests that people have expressly indicated, but also include all the more implicit interests or needs that people may not want to declare or are not aware of, and that can be extracted from an analysis of their digital traces. Indeed, the idea of relying only on explicit information to know about a person has been abandoned for a long time: people do not necessary know what they like or what they need (and often they do not want to know), but more importantly they have more useful ways of using their time than entering them in a profile.
Secondly, this platform is also used to help the forming of a group of alumni that could participate in this reunion. Since this is a physical reunion (people still like to meet in physical spaces), location based information (that can be retrieved via access to people’s personal agendas) is very useful to be sure not to bother people that will not be able to physically attend. Many other elements are also used to make the reunion a success, and in particular finding the good balance of profiles of the participants: it is usually good to have some homogeneity in the group, but not too much since it can lead to dull reunions. Besides, people also attend these meetings to meet faces from other horizons, since it is more likely to generate high added business value: if a person is too much like you, you may not learn a lot from her, or she may be your most direct competitor with whom you may not want to have any relationship. The platform is also very good at raising the attention of people potentially interested in this event. For instance personalisation of the notification can be helpful: some people like to be informed via their mobile MyComm devices, while others prefer to be informed only via their big information hub (which has huge display devices with haptic capabilities). In all these cases, the exploitation of member’s personal information is critical.
Thirdly, and as the groups are being formed, AlumniNet also provides a useful way to get information about people that are going to attend, and therefore getting the most out of the reunion. Looking at their profile and looking at who they know can be useful for this. Actually, the access to who they know is only partial, since people are now being careful in the way they are directly exposing their really important relationships (the relationships that are easily available are usually the ones that make them look good, but are of minor importance). On the other hand people are more likely to give access to their “real” relationships indirectly, by allowing only the AlumniNet bots and matching applications to access this data. These bots are for instance “authorised” to mine people’s contacts, and to expose them indirectly, for instance by displaying in the person’s profile what the types of people this person knows are (bankers, business developers, consultants, venture capitalists, and so on). Matching applications are also very convenient. For instance Li-lian is able to use a matching application to identify participants that are most likely to be valuable to her and that will be worth having a chat with at this reunion. This is something that she can add to her mobile MyComm device, so that later at the reunion she will be reminded when she is physically close to the person. This is a function provided by the BusiNessAccelerator(c) service to which she has registered on her MyComm device. This same service will also allow her to indicate a social relationship (in the old days it would have meant exchanging business cards), but more importantly to instantly associate additional information such as her first impression of the person via some annotation or some voice or video recording (some people are even known to hide cameras, but shooting videos at the end of a meeting is a practice that is now largely accepted).
Well, now time to go and listen to this professor. Li-lian will wear her new “gadget”: a “smart” scarf that manages to get access to some of her brain waves and displays some information about her mood. Li-lian will have to try controlling her feelings, but this promises to be a lot of fun, in particular since she knows (from AlumniNet) that other participants will wear similar gadgets (for instance men will wear a “smart” tie). No doubt that these will be a good opportunity to add new people, and have her profile look even better. Why not have more private bankers in her network or a management guru? Certainly to this end the professor appears to rank fairly well in the “people that count” service available on the Wall Street Journal.