Quest for the Cloud

Twitter is one of those things that you either “get” or you “don’t”. For some, having a large group of people know that you were “doing yard work in the heat” is a sense of validation (of what, I don’t know). For others, Twitter is a business tool that enables them to quickly and succinctly get information out to interested people and even get responses to tough problems.

One of the best uses of I’ve heard of Twitter: A technical support person at a notable wireless device vendor had a tough problem from a customer in the field. Nothing in the company’s knowledge base had an answer, so he put the question on his Twitter feed. Not only did he get multiple answers within 30 minutes, but the winning tweet was actually from a similarly tasked engineer at another (competitor) company. Cost to the company: zero. Benefits of a happy customer: priceless.

Followers = Qualifications?

For Best Buy, it is also just became a job qualification.

I saw this week that part of the criteria for applicants to a “Senior Manager for New Media” position at Best Buy is a post-secondary degree and at least 250 followers on Twitter.

On the surface this sounds very progressive - clearly the sign of a company that has their finger on the pulse of the nation. In fact, Best Buy has been big on Twitter for years and they have “Mix” (blueshirtnation.com) as a service just “for Best Buy employees who want to stay connected via email, SMS, or Web”. They of course have a Twitter handle with almost 5,000 followers.

Clearly, it looks like Best Buy “gets” New Media. That’s why it is so surprising they came up with a qualification metric that is purely focused on numbers. It doesn’t take much to get a legion of followers just by going to a site like IWantFollowers.com -Just take a look at this guy who has over 2,200 followers and follows almost 2,500 people himself. The “plan”: you follow me, and I follow you. And it is automated - even our own handle q4tcblog has been spammed with membership requests just to “pump the numbers”.

This brings up a really interesting point when you flip this around to how companies handle social media within the enterprise. Is the quality and value of participation based on how many people “follow” on <insert your favorite enterprise networking platform here>? Is the perceived value a person has in an organization based on how many forum or blog posts they have made on the corporate Intranet? I’m sure that off to top of your head, you can find at least 5 ways to “game the system”.

When layoffs happen, will this “participation” be used as a metric? What about just job evaluations?

Companies that aren’t careful about the metrics they choose could easily get into a situation where a (justifiably large) group of employees feel that their lack of participation in a specific social application adversely affects their employment. The reasoning goes that non-participation either means they lack initiative or miss critical information because it is primarily disseminated through a new media channel.
Software vendors who are exposing these metrics need to put more thought into this beyond reporting straight numbers. This is where the concept of “reputation” and “kudos” for specific items comes into effect (also this still has the non-participation issues for users who don’t live and die by feeds).

While there are a few different ways to solve this problem, perhaps a combined metric is a good first step. How many contributions did an employee make versus the number that was voted up by others in the application/community? After all, a person could live on Coke and FaceBook feeds yet provide almost no value to the company. Now if that user were continually contributing valuable content that makes them indispensible to other users, chances are they are indispensable to the company as well.

The Value Quotient

The ratio between kudos and contributions could be a very telling number. Let’s call this number the “Value Quotient”. Oddly, this number is as important to all those ego-rubbers as is to prospective employers. If Bob gets 10 kudos in 100 postings (VQ=10%), he looks much better than 10 kudos with 1,000 more useless postings (VQ=1%).

My guess is that when Best Buy made that job posting, the writer was not really thinking about a hard qualification for the job, but some way of expressing that a new media manager should be involved in new media. The path to infamy is paved with good intentions…

And woefully, the metric I describe is not available on Twitter, although I suspect such a metric would really improve social networking in general and help us understand who we *really* should be following and who is in it for the ego-rub. If I see someone with 1,000 followers but a VQ of 0.01%, I’m really not interested. But someone with 50 followers and a VQ of 10% - that’s someone I want to follow!

If I was the hiring manager for Best Buy, I would take an applicant with 50 followers and a VQ of 10% over someone with 250 followers and a VQ of 1% any day. Chances are I’d get someone with something intelligent to say when they open their mouth (something Twitter and other “status update” sites desperately need if they really want to become relevant in the enterprise).