Numbers never lie - but they change how we behave

Full disclaimer: I am not much of a fan/user of Facebook. I check it very infrequently, almost never see things like messages or friend requests in a timely manner, and really only keep my account active for HR Happy Hour Show page purposes. So take that for what it is worth and as preface to what I want to talk about today.

I caught a really interesting piece on The Atlantic titled 'How Numbers on Facebook Change Behavior', a review of a study conducted by Ben Grosser that attempted to understand just how much that Facebook metrics like the number of people that 'liked' a piece of content or the number of friends that a Facebook user has goes on to influence user behavior on the site.

I recommend reading the entire piece, particularly if you are a big Facebook user, but I can give you the short (and maybe kind of obvious) conclusion in one sentence: You (and most everyone else) are more likely to 'like' something on Facebook if lots of other people have 'liked' that same thing. 

From the Atlantic piece:

To keep its 1.3 billion users clicking and posting (and stalking), Facebook scatters numbers everywhere. While it collects many metrics that users never see, it tells users plenty of others, too. Facebook tells you the number of friends you have, the number of likes you receive, the number of messages you get, and even tracks the timestamp to show how recently an item entered the news feed.

And these numbers, programmer and artist Ben Grosser argues, directly influence user behavior by being the root of Facebook addiction. In October 2012, he set out to find exactly what Facebook's metrics were doing to users after noticing how much he depended on them.

He did this by creating a browser extension, that when activated, 'hides' the numbers from Facebook. Instead of seeing the little red number alerting you to the count of notifications you have, you are just informed that you have notifications. And you won't see the that '18 people like this' but rather that 'people like this', that kind of thing.

Grosser then examined what happened and recorded the observations from some of the 5,000 or so people that installed the tested the 'numbers hiding' extension.

And again, the findings were probably not terribly surprising. People tended to report (and demonstrate) that when visible the Facebook numbers fostered more competition, (more likes the better), manipulation (removing posts that did not have enough or any likes), and probably most importantly, homogenization, (liking posts that many of your friends had already liked).

Why am I writing about this, as a self-declared non-user (essentially) of Facebook?

Well because everyone else uses Facebook, so what happens there sort of matters in a big-picture sense and I find that important to keep in mind. But also, for what these kinds of findings might mean for the systems and tools that we use in the workplace as well.

Wouldn't it make sense for savvy (and admittedly unscrupulous) organizational communicators to not just message their workforces, but to imbue in these messages a sense of importance and value by gaming the system with additional 'likes' or upvotes or 5-star ratings - you get the idea? The kind of activity that gets restaurant owners in trouble on Yelp for example.

It really is not that much of a stretch, and I am sure this happens all the time, for companies to post on their blog or in their LinkedIn Group and then have a few dozen employees immediately 'like' the post, this setting off what they hope will be a snowball effect once other readers observe all of these 'likes.' And note, I am not talking about scammy 'like farms' or purchased Twitter followers or YouTube plays. I am talking about real people taking actions and reacting the actions of others.

Is that really a bad thing or not, I suppose I am not sure.

But we have always known, even in the age of Facebook that popular doesn't necessarily equal quality.

I wonder though, even in the communications from our friends and colleagues, if we should also realize that popular doesn't always equal popular as well.

Happy Tuesday.

Minecraft for the Enterprise

You probably have over the years heard various business-focused collaboration and knowledge-sharing software solutions like Yammer or Jive described as 'Facebook for the Enterprise.' The comparison was almost always more about the way that many of these business tools resembled Facebook in that they had a similar news or activity feed, had concepts like 'friending' or following, and possessed other features similar to Facebook like groups and in-app messaging. Over time these comparisons, and even that descriptive 'Facebook for the Enterprise' phrase seems to have fallen out of fashion.

There are at lease two reasons I think for that, one being that the market for these enterprise collaboration tools has matured to the point where most corporate prospects understand the basics of what they do without having to invoke Facebook as a point of comparison or reference. The other reason, and this is totally my opinion, is that most of us have realized that almost nothing truly productive (in the classic organizational collaboration context) ever gets done on Facebook. By continuing to compare their much more serious minded tools to Facebook, the providers of these tools are basically saying 'Take a look at our software solution that will remind you of the single biggest distraction and time suck that has ever existed.' And that probably is not good for business in the long term.

So since 'Facebook for the Enterprise' is seemingly drifting out to sea, I'd like to offer up an almost equally interesting and unexpected replacement - how about 'Minecraft for the Enterprise?'

You probably are familiar with Minecraft from its massive popularity, and if you have children between the ages of about 8 and 18, it’s almost certain that they have at least experimented with the game. If you are not familiar, the simplest way is to think of the fame as a kind of virtual Lego, an open-ended world where the player can build, create their own worlds, engage in battle, and even farm. Minecraft is a true worldwide phenomenon, and part of its appeal to more serious players is the ability to modify (‘mod’) the game, adding new materials, monsters, and other elements to the basic game.

These player developed (and shared) mods extend and enhance the game in many ways, and perhaps one of the most unusual, (and the one that could intrigue folks that design and develop enterprise systems), is the mod described in this post on the Salesforce developerForce blog titled Visualizing Salesforce Data... In Minecraft?

In the piece the author and developer of a mod that essentially connects the classic Salesforce CRM system to a new Minecraft world, describes just how (and seemingly how simple), it was to not only visualize sales, accounts, contacts, and other classic CRM data inside the familiar to just about every 11 year old world of Minecraft.

Check the video below, (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through) to see how your sales and sales funnel data looks rendered in Minecraft, and I will have a couple of comments afterwards.

Pretty cool right?

Re-set a sales status in Salesforce and boom - the corresponding lever in the Minecraft world that represents that status flips from up to down. Make the same type of change in Minecraft and the CRM is updated as well. Lose the sale and suddenly in Minecraft it gets dark and starts to rain. 

You get the idea. And while it is a pretty basic kind of interface at least at first glance, I think what it suggests about the potential future of enterprise systems, gamification, and the eventual personalization of user experience is what is really interesting.

Take the average Minecraft enthusiast and plop him or her in front of a Salesforce CRM screen and I am sure their eyes will begin to glaze over in about 30 seconds. In addition to the fact that it (and most other enterprise tools) just don't look very appealing to anyone, much less the generation that is growing up playing (and modding) Minecraft, the enterprise systems tend to be one size fits all. Beyond some simple personalizations like moving or renaming fields, significant modding is just not possible. And lastly like most mass appeal video games, playing Minecraft is simply fun. You can create, win rewards, defeat the bad guys, etc. Is 'playing' Salesforce ever fun?

I love the idea of one day having the abiltiy to welcome a new user of an Enterprise system to the organization and giving them the option to engage with and interact with the system in the way that they feel most comfortable, productuive, and even fun.

And I bet, most Salesforce admins would say they would be for anything that would encourage their users to keep their account information more up to date. 

If updating the customer account status was as fun as playing Minecraft, I bet more of them would.

And last thing, if you think the concept of 'Minecraft for the Enterprise' is silly, well, all I will say is that 'Facebook for the Enterprise' also seemed silly initially. Now, being social and collaborating on Facebook-like platforms is pretty mainstream. And we don't like that phrase any longer.

Perhaps playing Minecraft as a proxy for interacting with HR, CRM, or Finance systems will be too be pretty mainstream one day.

Have a great week!

What if there was a Yelp for HR Software?

I'm a little late on this since some of the big tech news sites like TechCrunch and CIO.com covered this back in February, but over the weekend I finally got around to checking out a site called G2Crowd, and the simplest way to describe it is as a 'Yelp for Enterprise Software.'

By now we are all familiar and possibly reliant on the crowdsourced reviews and ratings paradigm popularized by sites like Yelp for restaurants and bars, TripAdvisor for travel destinations, and certainly Amazon.com for books, music, heck just about everything. There continues to be tremendous popularity and value for sites to gather, interpret, and categorized real live customer experiences with products and services for just about anything that can be purchased. But while consumers and users love these sites, as they generally provide neutral, unbiased, and sometimes massive amounts of information about the quality and value of a product/service, many suppliers have come to fear and loathe these sites, as one or two poor reviews can sometimes cause serious damage to a business' reputation and sales.

HR Software Comparison

But for whatever reason despite there existing a 'Yelp' equivalent for seemingly just about everything, there really isn't a large, successful manifestation of the crowdsourced review and ratings site for Enterprise Software. That is the gap that G@Crowd is trying to fill, providing a platform and frameworks for enterprise customers and users of technologies like CRM, ERP, Accounting, and yes HR Technology as well, to enter product reviews and ratings just as people do for the local BBQ joint on Yelp.

The process to create a software product review on G2Crowd is familiar to anyone who has used Yelp or TripAdvisor, but with one important difference - G2Crowd requires the reviewer to log in with their LinkedIn credentials, which serves a few important ends. One, (with limited exceptions), reviewers identities are not anonymous; two, G2Crowd 'knows' based on the LinkedIn profile, at what company and in what role the reviewer was working in at the time of the review; and three, G2Works can police phony reviews left by people working for or against any of the software companies themselves.

The idea is simple really, a set of unbiased ratings and reviews of enterprise software solutions like Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, etc., that can be aggregated, (over time, and if enough scale is achieved), produce a valuable and previously unavailable resource for organizations that are evaluating software for themselves. In addition to the individual product reviews, G2Crowd has started to create, based on the review data, their own version of the 'analyst grid', positioning competing firms in a given market segment in comparison to each other, the most famous of which is the Gartner Magic Quadrant. But rather than a Magic Quadrant that represents, in the end, the opinions of one or a few analysts, the G2Crowd grid would reflect the collective experience and opinion of potentially thousands of users. In theory not necessarily a 'better' way to compare vendors, but certainly a different one, and one that if G2Crowd can continue to keep the reviews clean, would potentially be more important, (and accessible), than what the traditional analyst firms create.

Will G2Crowd catch on with enough users and customers to generate the kind of scale it needs to be a truly valuable resource to the enterprise software buyer?

Hard to say. It is a new site, and there seems to be some decent traction and volume on the CRM market. If you spend some time checking out the HR software reviews you will see they are a little thin.

But how about this? How about if everyone who reads this blog and is a current user of one of the big HR software solutions heads over to G2Crowd this week and drops a product review?

That might be a way to get this kind of endeavor a little more attention for the HR market, and perhaps also show how all of you as users of these solutions really do have the power to influence the market.

What do you think - would a site like G2Crowd be helpful to you and your organization?

Google Reader: The shelf-life of formerly good advice

I've been having a instructive and fun time this week out at Ultimate Software's annual user conference called Ultimate Connections. It is always great to learn more about what one of the major technology providers in HR space is doing, to hear from and meet some real customers and practitioners, and even attempt to share some of my own ideas with the attendees.

Yesterday I had that chance, along with the great John Sumser from HRexaminer and Ed Frauenheim from Workforce.com (and perhaps more famously of the Frauenheim Disclosure), in a conference session titled 'How to Stay Current on HR Trends'. The session was meant to be a kind or survey of tools, sources of information, time management approaches, and overall recommendations for the busy HR pro on how he or she can try to keep up and remain informed about the industry when faced with the simultaneous crush of mountains of content combined with a 'day job' that gets more time-crunched by the week.

In the session, which was yesterday at 1:45PM Pacific Time, both John and I sung the praises of feed readers, specifically Google Reader, as a fantastic tool for the busy HR pro to try and sort, filter, scan, and consume professional content. I even tool it a step further, calling out smartphone apps like Flipboard and Zite, (my personal favorite), that help curate news and information and package it up attractively for on-the-go reading. Both of these apps are much more valuable and relevant when they have a Google Reader integration to provide a rich source of content that these apps find ways to make much user-friendly and provide a great interface.

At 1:45 PM I was advocating for the HR pros in the room to give Google Reader a chance. At 5PM when I got back to my room, turned on the laptop, and IMMEDIATELY fired up Google Reader and BOOM - this message smacks me in the chops -

Clicking 'Learn more' took me to a short blog post on the the Google support site that basically said Reader is being shut down on July 1, and had a link to another Google post that cited a decline in Reader usage and the company's desire to focus more energy on fewer products as the drivers behind the decision to kill off Reader.

Reader has been around a really long time by Web standards, since 2005 or so, but (and as we saw in our session at the conference where very few attendees said they used Reader), never really caught on with the mainstream web users. And with the incredible growth of Facebook and Twitter, (and more and more LinkedIn), as sources of news and information, setting up and maintaining a deep, diverse, and relevant set of Reader subscriptions probably seemed like to big a chore for most users, and really boring for others.

Either way, Google Reader is going away, and probably at least a few of the apps and services that had come to rely on a user's Reader subscriptions for the bulk of their content. Sure, there are other feed reading tools around - and perhaps even some new innovation will hit the space that Google is leaving, but make no mistake even in decline, Google Reader was the 500 pound gorilla in the space.

I feel bad about the impending loss of my favorite tool on the web.

I feel even worse that about 3 hours prior to the announcement, I advocated in the most strident way possible for a room full of hard working HR pros to get their Google Reader set up.

That was good advice at the time I gave it.

Now it's just formerly good advice.

I hope the rest of the things I said in the session will stay relevant a little longer.

If you're not sure who the customer is, then it probably isn't you

I don't really care about the Olympics, with the exception of a couple of Men's Basketball games I'm looking forward to catching. For some reason I find it a little odd that so many people suddenly fake interest about things like archery or air rifle or synchronized diving for one day every four years just because we hope our 17 year old kid can defeat the 17 year old kid from some other country.That looks like a fun game, I must admit

But even in my state of extreme Olympic apathy, I have caught, as I am sure you have as well, the ridiculous amount of complaints about the USA TV coverage of these Olympic games, being brought to US TV's, (and smart phones, and tablets, and computers), by NBC.

The chief complaint?  Tape delayed TV coverage, i.e., not televising certain marquee events as they happen live, (mostly in the morning or early afternoon in the USA), and 'saving' them for Prime time broadcast later that evening when TV audiences are at their peak, and in the only part of this that matters, when advertisers pay a hefty premium for commercial time.

Of course in the modern, social age, where everyone is a critic/pundit/expert, the Tape Delay strategy has resulted in what has been branded a colossal #NBCFail, with Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the more traditional news outlets results of the actual competition outcomes are just about impossible to avoid for the five or six or seven hours lag until NBC deems it appropriate, (and most profitable), to air on TV.

So what many Olympics fans are left with (at least here in the USA), is what amounts to a set of pretty poor options - watch events live on a computer or smart phone (in the middle of the day, not always possible or convenient), try and avoid news or social media reports of event outcomes all day and watch the prime time broadcast (not really feasible for most), or give in to curiosity or inevitability and learn the event outcomes ahead of time, and watch the prime time tape delayed broadcast anyway, (you know, to get all the 'human drama' stuff). 

All three options kind of stink, and if you really cared about this stuff, I can understand your frustration.

But here's the thing, NBC doesn't care about you. NBC is delivering what the customers demand, and they ain't you. The customers are the advertisers, and what they demand - lots and lots of eyeballs on its prime time broadcasts, is definitely being delivered despite the tape delay #NBCFail approach.

You want to know how you can get over your anger and frustration with NBC's Olympic coverage?

Just keep reminding yourself that you're not the customer, you're the product. Say it with me again, you're not the customer, you're the product.

And file the NBC Olympics broadcast coverage into the file along with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, foursquare - and wherever else you waste spend your time these days.

Now I have to get back to watching my new favorite sport, Team Handball.