Being Peter Kim

Applying game mechanics to social media

In my last post, I talked about falling into the ego trap.  So what happened?  I got caught up in watching the numbers, becoming a full participant in the game mechanics underlying social media.

Everyone likes games - your preference might be for the simple, like Solitare, or complex, like World of Warcraft.  If you think games are frivolous, think again - they help us accomplish the simple, like getting an infant to eat, and the complex, like warming up surgeons or disaster response.  But as in all things, moderation is key and some people have died when taking games too far.

People fall into the ego trap when they take social media gaming too far, focusing on the aspects of the game instead of the content and purpose of their activities.

Here's how game mechanics work.  My friend Max Kalehoff blogged about five keys of successful game design as communicated by expert Amy Jo Kim (no relation to me).  I'll apply her framework here:

1. Collecting things. Humans have a primal instinct to collect and display.  Offline, think about boy scout badges or Olympic pins. My old housemate used to collect commemorative Coca-Cola bottles.  Online, we have our Twitter widgets, Facebook fan pages, and Flickr photo albums.
2. Earning points. These define achievement and translate into social standing.  Offline, it's how NASCAR champions are crowned and how you earn a free airplane flight.  Online, it's the number of fans, friends, followers, or subscribers to your content.  World-leading PR firms advise their clients to pay attention to individuals with "influence" and "authority" based on points.  We reinforce the credibility of points by watching lists of top blogs, top tweeters, even top egos.
3. System feedback. Offline, it's the experience of shopping at an Apple store or your car accelerating when you press the gas.  Online, it's not comments, replies, or trackbacks (those feed into points & exchanges), but response from the system itself.  How complete is your LinkedIn profile?  How much Plurk karma do you have?  Do you have Facebook for Blackberry installed yet?
4. Value exchanges.  Successful interactions.  Offline, it's us inviting each other's kids to their birthday parties, or paying it forward to strangers.  Online, it's the process of interactions:  Posting wall-to-wall. Sending a mini-ninja or martini glass.  People "liking" your FriendFeed items. Twitter's @ messages.
5. Customization and personalization.  User-created barriers to exit.  Offline, it's the color you chose to paint your house, the case for your iPhone, the stickers on your laptop.  Online, it's the extensive profile information you entered, the photos you uploaded, or the background picture that says something about your interests.

The ego trap lies in wait around the points issue.  When a user is blindly amassing points, their collections become spammy.  Feedback overwhelms.  Exchanges aren't worth participation. 

From a business, i.e. the application owner's, perspective - these are all good.  They pave the way to monetization - display ads, sponsorships, brand participation, and more.

From a participant's perspective, these are only good up to a certain point after which there are only diminishing returns.  The numbers are all relative.  For example, I'm comfortable right now with about 500 in my Facebook network.  Jeremiah seems ok with almost 2,500. 

Focus is the key to steering clear of the ego trap.  Play the game with an end goal in mind.  Social media games never end, because they're part of life.  Ultimately, winning and losing become states of being instead of static points in time.

 

Social networking and the ego trap

My first business card 
Originally uploaded by Pete Kim.

I received my first "real" business card during an Arthur Andersen internship.  I didn't have many people to exchange them with, but I did have hundreds of embossed heavy-weight scraps of paper that made me feel important.

Last week, I was sorting through handfuls of business cards collected over the past five years or so.  Most of them could be discarded for one of two reasons - either the contact was irrelevant (e.g. Swedish online payment processing) or I have better information via other means.  LinkedIn and  Facebook are today's new business cards, delivering profiles with rich content and dynamic means of maintaining connections.

However, I've fallen into the social media "ego trap" not once, but twice.  Two summers ago I had to prune my LinkedIn network to regain usefulness, removing 700 connections. I made the mistake again and recently had to prune Twitter of 800+ "friends" as well.  Maybe that's even the third time - the first being my stack of old paper cards.

I should've known better.  Social networks are valuable for building and maintaining relationships.  Updates and status feeds preserve the signal strength of current ties and boost the signal of weak ones.  But adding connections with low relevance and connection result in static, increasing in annoyance as one's network grows.  Useful social networks require a high signal-to-noise ratio.

I have an idea on why I fell into the trap, which I'll explain in another post.  But for now...

Is it just me, or have you ever found yourself caught in the social media ego trap too?

The five-tool employee

Before I get into this post, first of all - thank you. I'm flattered by the reaction to my last post about making a career transition and your well wishes.

Part of what I've been doing for the last week has been speaking with people about jobs. Some are looking to join me. Others are looking to join Forrester. A few just want to leave their current roles for a change of scenery. However, the majority of people I've spoken with are more invested in the "what if" possibilities of a job switch and not ready to actually put some money on the table to make things happen. There's nothing wrong with that - sometimes, what someone really needs is a vacation. Or a hobby, like gardening or video games. Or an open ear for venting.

But then there are the people who are ready to change. And the ones I want to work with are the five-tool players. In fact, I think every hiring manager wants these players, whether it's a role in a startup or a Fortune 50 organization. You see, in baseball a five-tool player is someone who can hit for average, hit for power, run the bases shrewdly and quickly, throw, and field.

In a corporation, the five-tool employee is one who:

1) gets things done with results to show for their effort - no excuses for failure
2) accomplishes things that are remarkable - above and beyond what's expected
3) exercises sound decision-making skills, acting quickly and decisively
4) communicates well and can convince others to act
5) deals well with ambiguity, makes order where others see confusion

Let's take this analogy further. Baseball's five-tool players are most often outfielders, sometimes infielders, and almost never catchers or pitchers. Likewise, corporate five-tool employees are most often in management, strategy, and marketing roles, can be found in IT and finance, but rarely appear in other areas.

If you're looking, or looking to hire - think about the tools you possess or want to have on staff. The five-tool employee is difficult to find and worth retaining once on board...and will have many chances to succeed, because they naturally create value for their companies and opportunities for themselves.

And if you're a five-tool player - drop me a line...!

Now's the time, the time is now

Today is my last day at Forrester Research.

On Monday, I'll officially be joining Jeffrey Dachis to build a new company focused on enterprise social computing.  You may have heard about this venture a few months ago.

Why am I leaving?  Because I believe this new company offers both professional and personal growth opportunities.  I've learned a lot at Forrester over the past 2.5 years about effective writing and public speaking/presenting; along the way, I've won internal "Best Research" and "Top Keynote" awards.  And there are other skills I've acquired elsewhere that will now be put back into play, e.g. strategy formulation, project management, technology development, and budget/staff management.  Now I'll refine and develop new skills like business development and entrepreneurship.

Things are going pretty well for me at Forrester. George Colony is one of the smartest CEO's I've worked for.  At Forrester, an analyst can reinvent her/himself and stay refreshed, challenged, and engaged.  So now, sitting near the top of my 2nd career development S-curve at Forrester is a great time to contemplate both internal and external directions - from a position of strength, affording time for patience, introspection, and due diligence.

That contemplation has led me to my decision to ramble on.  My work experience includes a lot of companies you may recognize:  General Electric, Prudential Securities, Deloitte & Touche, Arthur Andersen, Coopers & Lybrand, Andersen Consulting, Fidelity Investments, Razorfish, PUMA AG, Stride Rite/Keds, and Forrester Research.  So why join a company that has yet to be named, without decades of brand history?

Because I believe the market opportunity is huge.  And we get to build this one exactly how we want.

At a macro-level, businesses must adapt to a new world of work.  As digital-born natives enter the workforce and all consumers assimilate new digital behaviors, organizations have no choice but to evolve from their legacy operational models, built on principles from the industrial revolution.  We are now in the social revolution - a Groundswell of change.  The idea of "command and control" has been turned upside down and the enterprise must avoid being crushed by the inverted pyramid.

Over the past two-and-a-half years I've been focusing on two major concepts:  social computing and customer centricity.  They fit very well together; becoming "socially successful" today requires that companies use process and technology to facilitate internal and external alignment.  Your market is calling for this in a voice that gets louder every day.  Unfortunately, many companies try to ignore what they're hearing - and I see an opportunity in helping enterprises listen, learn, and take action.

Our yet-to-be-named firm will help companies and their new leaders unlock value from social computing within the enterprise, driving customer-centricity and effective engagement.  The evidence of success will be found in culture and profit.

We will be hiring, partnering, building, and advising in the near future.  If you're interested in working with us to help change the world of work, email jobs at dachisco.com.

Companies CAN'T "join the conversation"

My colleague Jeremiah recently posted about why some don't need to join the conversation.  He makes two key points:

1. Brands can and should use a combination of social computing tools can help brands engage individuals - e.g. voting, tagging, and sharing - which are not "conversational."
2. All people do not want to participate with you in the same way.

About a week ago, I blogged about how it's what's on the inside [of an organization] that counts.  That means people, i.e. individuals on your payroll must be ready to participate in social media.

Your brand can't blog.  Unless you're going for comedy, you shouldn't have a corporate mascot like Aunt Jemima, Jack In The Box, or the Brawny Man blogging.

If you or someone in your company is thinking of blog authorship behind the curtain of a corporate logo, stop and make sure that your organization is actually ready to get social with the outside world.  Because a company can't participate in a conversation, only individuals representing a company can.

This thinking comes naturally to individuals in firms who understand this internally.  Fortunately, it can be taught. (But some will never learn - all people do not want to participate in the same way.)

Should we talk about the weather?

I'll admit that I'm a big fan of the Weather Channel.  I've got two channels at home (regular and weatherscan), web bookmarks for frequent travel destinations, and two mobile bookmarks (regular and iPhone).  Earlier this week, the brand/channel agreed to an LBO of $3.2 billion, less than the original target of $5 billion, and will be managed by NBC Universal.

I'm not in the weather business (just a fan), but I think this deal makes sense beyond the eyeballs and ad revenue that media outlets seem to be reporting on.  See, earlier this month at one of my speaking gigs, I had lunch with someone from NBC, who gave me a different perspective on this [potential at that time] deal than what you may be reading about today.

Before we go there, let's take a step back.  The other buyers involved were Time Warner, CBS, and Comcast.  Two publishers and a MSO moving boldly into content.  So NBC seems to fit in the former category.  But that's only a slice of the picture.  From a media perspective, adding the Weather Channel makes sense, but their problem is that consumers don't spend a lot of time spent on site/channel. However, they get lots of eyeballs, meaning lots of ad impressions/revenue.  (An old/traditional model way of thinking.  In other words, doomed.)

Back to lunch.  So we're talking about weather and advertising and some of the possibilities when you combine the two.  Like an airline with banner ad inventory that could show skiing ads to someone who looks up a ski destination, or a Caribbean vacation ad to someone seeing snow in the forecast.  [yawn]

It would take a whole lot of uber buttons, 30" spots, and mobile text banners to make that $3.2 billion pay off.

Who's NBC's parent company?  Oh yeah, General Electric, the world's largest conglomerate.  So here's where things get interesting.  The potential value behind the Weather Channel lies within using its data to improve all of the other businesses within GE.  Sure, all of those advertising applications are interesting, but there's a lot of money in helping the transportation, energy, aviation, finance, etc. businesses more intelligent by better understanding the weather and how it impacts businesses on a current and forecast basis.  (Get the Corporate Audit Staff on this one right away, Jeff.)

At least that's the opportunity, "weather" or not its full potential is realized.  I wonder, is there any data that you have hiding in plain sight that could help dramatically improve your business?  It could come to you as simply as making small talk about the weather.

It's what's on the inside that counts

This isn't going to be a long post, although I've been thinking about the subject for a while.  I could probably spend the next few years on the topic, so instead I'll keep it brief for now.

The use of social computing has evolved over the past ten years (c. Cluetrain) and hockey-stuck over the last four.  Now blogs are the "new traditional" social media, morphing from their early ugly duckling status into slow-moving and elegant swans (overtaken by higher velocity, short-form channels).

But a small problem is starting to emerge along with the mainstreaming of social media.  Although there's a lot of talk about it - and more businesses feel the need to do something about it - most businesses are not internally prepared to make social media work.  I see this quite a bit when I'm working with clients, reflected in the questions I am asked:

• What happens if we accept customer suggestions but then don't make any changes?
• Why doesn't our blog have any comments?
• How am I supposed to formulate a strategy when our IT policy blocks access to social media sites?

Growing up, I must have heard the phrase "it's what's on the inside that counts" about a thousand times as I searched for an identity.  Today, brands are experiencing growing pains as well, figuring out how to create relationships with their customers.  And they're discovering that they need to understand how these things work before engaging successfully with the outside world.

We have hope, because individuals within firms have personal social media experience - and more enterprises are waking up to the fact that they need to put resources in place now, because just like e-commerce 15 years ago...social media isn't going away.  Instead, it's becoming the new way that things work.

Otherwise, brands co-opt social media and fill microblogs, RSS readers, and social networks with clutter, interruption, and irrelevance.  Same as advertising ever was.