PageRank for People

Last night on the HR Happy Hour Show we had an interesting discussion with Megan Berry from Klout, Jennifer McClure, and Dawn Hrdlica-Burke about online or digital influence, and its potential effect and use in the recruiting and hiring process. We also talked about some of the implications that relying on these kinds of new algorithms might have in the future. It was a fascinating conversation, and I encourage you to check out the replay of the show here, (or drop it into your fancy iPad, just search the iTunes store for 'HR Happy Hour').

My favorite line of the night was from Megan, when she described one of Klout's goals is to have the Klout score be perceived as the 'PageRank for people', a comparison to the famous search breakthrough invented at Stanford by the founders of Google, which sorted and presented web search results not simply by the amount and location of keywords in web page content, but rather by an evaluation of the number and quality of other sites that linked to the site in question. More simply put, if lots of other sites on the web, that were judged to be of good quality linked back to a particular site, then that destination site was assessed at a higher relative quality, and thus its 'PageRank' would improve.  

It is a concept as simple and as fundamental to any evaluation we'd make of the quality, reliability, and trustworthiness of any person, business, or service - if enough (or even just one if it is the 'right' person), people that we respect and value their judgment indicate that Candidate 'X' would make a good hire for a specific role, or that Jimbo's Plumbing Service can be trusted not to rip you off, then we are far more likely to heed that advice than we would from simply doing a cursory analysis of online 'presence' or marketing material.

So when Megan from Klout told us on the show last night that Klout's new '+K' feature, where users can log in to Klout.com to 'award' other users a '+K' to indicate their explicit agreement to the Klout assessment of topical influence, did not directly factor into the person's actual score due to concerns about potential gaming of this process, I was a little surprised. Because to me, at least once Klout can sort out the correct way to control to remove the element of potential gaming the system, then the +K component would stand to be a fundamental aspect that would support the 'PageRank for People' idea. 

It's really not that not different from Angie's List, or Amazon book reviews, or the consumer product ratings that pop up on pretty much every electronics retailer website.  For some reason we don't seem to worry too much about Jimbo the plumber 'gaming' the system, but when we get to discussing Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, and such, the conversation about 'influence' starts to get a little funky.

Again, I am not sure Klout has the answer to all this yet, or if some one else will figure out a better way to come up with that just right blend of algorithm, evaluation, and personal touch that will result in a measurement or score that will become more universally accepted, but I am fairly confident someone will.

And I am also fairly confident that soon after some other disruptive technology will emerge that will make us reconsider 'influence' once again.

Anyway, I am done talking/writing about this for a while, unless my Klout score keeps tanking!

Have a great weekend!

Can you give a brother a +K?

Tonight on the HR Happy Hour Show (8PM ET/ 5PM PT, rest of the country you are on your own), we'll be talking about Klout, and other measures of online or digital influence in the context of sourcing, recruiting, and career management. Can tools like Klout accurately measure a concept to ambiguous as 'influence?'  Does the Klout score and others of its like, have any role at all in the recruiting process?  How about some +K action?

You can listen live at 8PM ET tonight on the show page here, or on the call in line at 646-378-1086.

Before you jump to the high and mighty ground and declare that Klout, and other lists of digital influence, whether created using proprietary algorithms or hand-curated by actual people, have no place in professional recruiting processes, you might want to ask yourself if you've ever researched a candidate on LinkedIn, and made some kind of subtle evaluation of said candidate simply on the number of connections they have.

Recently, none other than my friend Kris Dunn, on the HR Capitalist blog offered this observation, in the context of candidate evaluation for a sales position:

My client in that search forwarded me a profile of a Salesforce candidate from LinkedIn.  "Have you talked to this guy?".  I looked at the candidate, which remember, was for a hunting sales pro.  43 contacts in LinkedIn.

43 Contacts.  For a hunting sales pro.  I could hear "I need some leads if I'm going to close business" in the background.  Your cost of customer acquisition just tripled by hiring that guy."

For better or worse, the (lack of) LinkedIn contacts factored into an instant perception being formed about the guy. He could be carrying around a tattered, 25 year old Fil-o-fax (Gen Y'ers, Google it), stuffed with all the names and contact information of the key decision makers and influencers in his industry, but chances are the paltry 43 connections on LinkedIn were not going to let anyone find out.

And here's one more, from the marketing space taken from a post by Mark Schaefer on the Business Grow site:

Let me relate a few of my experiences this week …

• A very talented friend told me he was rejected for a job at a major ad agency because his Klout score was too low.
• A B2B marketing agency Managing Director told me he chose between two qualified candidates based on their Klout score.
• A friend in D.C is creating a Klout 50 Club exclusive to people with high Klout scores. Why? He wants to find good hires for social media marketing.
• A woman told me her boyfriend was accepted to a prestigious conference based on his Klout score alone.

These experiences occurred in the span of 72 hours

Sure, I know what you are thinking - those jobs are all in digital marketing and PR, and therefore using Klout as a screening tool might make some sense, but out here in the real world, where 99.3% of people don't even know what Klout is, it really does not matter. Possibly.

But on the show tonight, while talking about Klout, the discussion is really a bit more expansive than that, and I hope we can avoid getting caught up in the nuances of algorithms, and talk about online and digital influence at a more fundamental level. I think it will make for an interesting show.

Our guests will be Megan Berry from Klout, and Jennifer McClure, aka CincyRecruiter, and the feisty Dawn Hrdlica-Burke, aka DawnHrRocks will be along for the ride as well. 

I hope you can join us tonight at 8PM, and if you listen and enjoy the show can you share the love with a little +K action on Klout my way? My score has been tanking lately.

Packaging and Disincentives

One of my favorite 'non-HR' reads is a blog called Box Vox, which is dedicated to the art and craft of product packaging design. It is a really interesting site to learn more about innovations in packaging science and to understand a bit more about how the package design attempts to influence buying behavior. Almost invariably, the package designers attempt to balance design, function, the physical requirements imposed on the package composition by the product itself, as well as the branding and promotional elements that often contribute significantly to the ultimate purchase decision.

Packaging design is big business, and in particular package re-designs of existing products can be very risky, take a look at this story from 2009 about a colossally botched re-design by Tropicana orange juice. A few seemingly simple changes to the graphics and type on the Tropicana carton sent long-time customers into a rage, eventually causing the company to revert to its time-tested and likely way more important to customers than they ever realized package design.

But since consumer product packaging, and even the more ethereal messaging, digital content, or even simple verbal conversations that pass for a kind of 'packaging' that we place around our projects in the workplace are mostly centered around positive actions - we want to incent people to do something, we sometimes don't have a great handle on how to communicate or package something for circumstances where we want to stop or at least reduce a behavior or the use of a certain product or practice.

We are all familiar with the printed warnings that have been places on cigarette packaging here in the USA for many years, but the sense we get from those is that while true and sobering, they really don't make the habit and practice of smoking significantly more difficult than if there were no warnings on the packages.  I bet long time smokers don't even notice these warnings any more. But what if the packaging itself could dis-incent smokers from the actual action of smoking?  Again from the Box Vox site, take a look at this re-imagined cigarette package:

Image from Boxvox.net

Sure the tired old warning message still appears, but when you examine the packaging a little more closely, you'll notice the non-traditional shape, a very intentional design that has some interesting implications. According to the package designers Jennifer Noon and Sarah Shaw:

'Our primary aim was to change the structure of the pack making it less ergonomic. The pack was developed to be difficult to use and carry, it is hard to fit into pockets due to its triangular shape and the angled inner means the cigarettes are hard to get out. The lid is designed so that it closes efficiently but after a few uses it becomes weak,meaning the cigarettes can fall out if being stored in a ladies handbag.' 

Boom. By going beyond simply advising cigarette customers about the potentially disastrous health outcomes from their habit, this new package makes the practice of the habit itself much more unpleasant and difficult than before, and at least theoretically places an additional burden on the smoker that perhaps some of them will not want to deal with.

Telling smokers, or really anyone that is doing something in a way that the manager, the organization, or even society would like to see stopped is often not as effective as we'd like it to be. Employees, partners, kids, whomever - keep doing silly things. Even when they have been told not to. But making the practice and exercise of these undesirable behaviors much more difficult and unpleasant via packaging or design or through use of physical space can often offer us more opportunities to promote change and to achieve the desired outcomes.

What do you think? What else can we do when simply telling people to behave differently is not enough?

Socialcast: Collaboration Beyond the Enterprise

Today the enterprise collaboration solutions provider Socialcast (a VMWare company), announced a set of new features to augment and extend the capability in their already impressive collaboration solution. For readers that might not be familiar with Socialcast's solution, it primarily serves as an internal enterprise activity and interest stream, where colleagues can share status updates, links to relevant content, share files, and easily create internal groups organized along organizational or project lines. More recently, Socialcast launched a product called Reach, which gives customers the ability to easily embed and include the core collaboration platform in any number of enterprise systems like ERP, CRM, or other knowledge management platforms, thus taking 'collaboration' closer to the places and systems where the work gets done.

Today's announcement of the new capability that allows enterprises to dynamically create external collaboration groups, and that extends the collaboration platform to an organizations' partners, customers, or even social media fans and followers; is a natural extension of the Reach tool, taking the collaboration environment beyond the walled garden of the internal enterprise, to wherever and with whomever leveraging the platform makes sense.

External Group View - image provided by Socialcast

Beginning today, users of Socialcast can create dynamic groups to invite contractors or suppliers to collaborate on projects, connect more effectively with joint venture partners, or even conduct on the fly customer and follower focus group discussions by simply sharing a link to an external group on Facebook or Twitter, and invite followers to participate. It is a great piece of functionality, and one that attempts to begin to address the more flexible and fluid ways that organizations, teams, and individuals are getting work accomplished today.  

The other interesting feature that Socialcast announced today is a new organizational charting feature that not only can graphically depict the traditional organizational relationships and hierarchy (automatically generated from Active Directory or LDAP), but also can include insight into the external relationships with customers, suppliers, etc. that the organization's employees have developed over time.  This new and hybrid type of an 'extended organization chart' is a novel idea, and one that over time in many organizations could prove to be just as valuable as the traditional, internally facing org. chart.

These new features continue to strengthen Socialcast's position in the enterprise collaboration technology space, an increasingly crowded market where Socialcast competes with offerings from Yammer, Salesforce Chatter, Socialtext, and others.  Where Socialcast appears to have an edge, is in their realization and reaction to the changing ways of task and resource organization in many enterprises, the need for a collaboration solution to support much more flexible methods of collaboration beyond a separate and isolated tool, and with the ease of deployment and administration that allows the solution to take hold rapidly across and outside the enterprise.

I don't write too many 'new product announcement' type posts, because frankly, most of them are not all that interesting. But I have been a fan of the Socialcast platform for a while, have used the collaboration tool in some of my HR Technology classes, and do feel that in a crowded space that Socialcast has consistently had intelligent approaches and ideas to better enable enterprise (and beyond) forms of collaboration.

More and more, success for many organizations will be at least in part determined by how they can best manage and extract value from a disparate, diverse, and fluid ecosystem of internal and external resources, and products and solutions that can help manage and support this new framework offer organizations some clear opportunities and advantages.

You can learn more about Socialcast and today's announcement at www.socialcast.com.

A Pocketful of Zen Lessons

Many years ago a former colleague gave me the book you see in the picture on the right, it is called 'Zen Lessons: The Art of Leadership', a small (so small fits in your pocket), book of Zen stories and tales meant to be a guide to 'enlightened conduct for people in positions of authority, based on the teachings of several great Zen masters of China.' It is kind of an interesting little book, and while I don't claim to understand all that much about Zen, seeing as my entire education in Zen has been this pocket book and close and repeated examinations of the 'putting lesson' scene in Caddyshack, I have managed to keep this book with me through several moves, jobs, and life changes.

To get an idea of the kinds of Leadership Lessons encompassed in the tiny book, check out some of the wise sayings from the Zen lessons:

On not ignoring small problems in hopes they will just disappear or remedy themselves: 'Even dripping water, if it does not stop, can turn an orchard into a lake'.

On selecting a mentor : 'You should always follow a leader that is a little better than you, to be alerted to what you have not yet reached.'

And lastly, on seeking and accepting feedback from peer and from followers: 'Only the foolish dislike to hear how they are wrong and only expect unquestioning obedience from their communities.'

I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea. Actually I couldn't go on and on very long, it is only a pocket book of Zen Leadership Lessons after all, certainly not meant to serve as anything more than reminders or examples of more universal kinds of truths that I imagine would take years and years to master. Which takes us to another question entirely - how much of something do you need to know in order to know enough of what you need to know?

But regardless for some reason this little pocket book has stuck with me though the years, and while I can't necessarily point to any specific occasions where I have applied the lessons in business or leadership situations, I can be sure the lessons have served me well. Simply having the book around is kind of comforting in a way. I suppose it is the equivalent of a good luck charm or even my version of the 'red stapler' from Office Space. No matter what jobs, projects, challenges that have come the Zen Lessons have always been there, available to assist if needed.

What about you guys? Do you have your own version of the pocket book of Zen? What little guides or good luck charms do you make sure travel with you as you move through your careers? 

I can't be the only weird one.

Right?