Why would companies want to add video, yet another form of communication, to the mix?

It’s quite simple. Video offers a compelling visual connection that other communication cannot provide, especially for companies with enormous workforces in far-flung cities. Using a single video to share news and information, reinforce company culture, and encourage a flow of ideas from the CEO all the way to interns is incredibly powerful.

We recently interviewed Rocky Walls, CEO of 12 Stars Media, to get his thoughts on the topic.

Here is what Rocky had to say.

How is your company using video internally? We want to hear (or watch!) success stories about videos in your workplace.

Post your story below.

Klout believers include Cathay Pacific Airways, which recently launched a score-based perk program in the international terminal at San Francisco International Airport. Anyone with a Klout score of 40 or higher is allowed into the airline’s exclusive lounge, where showers, workstations and a noodle bar will keep online influencers happy.

As with most things that are loved by many, there are active dissenters such as Klouchebag. Some might say it’s sour grapes for those who make a case against Klout, but it’s hard to argue that a high Klout score is important for everyone. In fact, I would argue that it most certainly isn’t. (Today, I’m edging out the Aflac duck by two Klout points. Is that really an important comparison?)

This is particularly important to remember if you are considering a Klout-style tool for the enterprise. Klout’s metrics can benefit organizations that embrace an enterprise social culture, but only if they know how they should be using it to their advantage with some employees without alienating or disengaging others.

HOW KLOUT CAN BENEFIT THE ENTERPRISE

Job titles aren’t the best indicators of influence. Take your mid-level managers. If their internal Klout scores are comparatively low, are they being effective leaders? Mid-level managers should be able to influence the hearts and minds of others. If yours aren’t reaching and engaging with influential people, perhaps you have given these folks positions they can’t carry out effectively. They may be filling spaces on an org chart, but are they executing the impact you need?

If you are using enterprise social media tools, you can visibly see these types of discrepancies. You may have noticed that some of your best and most prolific content creators and sharers aren’t your mid-level managers; an internal Klout score could recognize and reward your most influential employees. Enterprise social media empowers employers and managers (and employees) to see what information is being posted, and how people are responding, forwarding or commenting. These are true measurements of influence.

MEASURING THE IMMEASURABLE?

Arguably the most troublesome aspect of Klout is no one knows the algorithm and your score is in the hands of one company. According to the Klout site, each score uses data from social networks in order to measure:

1. True Reach: How many people you influence
2. Amplification: How much you influence them
3. Network Impact: The influence of your network

From a business standpoint, assuming that the score being calculated ties in actions that truly indicate that you influence others, then influence is measurable. That vague thing called “clout” becomes “Klout” and you can now measure what has been virtually impossible to measure before. The capabilities of Klout suggest that we’ve found a way to measure someone’s effectiveness to influence, at least as it relates to enterprise social media.

In the external Klout, your score is affecting people’s judgment of you, whether you want a score or not. Internally, some employees will say that this scoring is not fair, but it’s only unfair if it’s used inappropriately. Not everyone should have a high Klout score. If you are a research scientist in a corporation, your manager should not expect or even want you to have a high Klout score. They want you to be in the research weeds, embracing your inner introvert. You don’t need to be out influencing others.

Think about this way. Say you are applying an activity-based costing model to determine how much a process is going to cost your company by breaking down the steps and figuring out how much each step costs. This model is great for manufacturing processes to find ways to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. If you take that same methodology and apply it to a creative or less predictable process such as branding, product development or public relations, it doesn’t work.

Think of Klout the same way. The metric measuring influence must be valid for the audience you are evaluating. If you’re gauging the influence of a marketer, manager, recruiter, leader, communicator or someone who is trying to affect change within the organization, then Klout is valuable.

ONE OVERALL SCORE DOESN’T TELL THE WHOLE STORY

If in an enterprise setting you knew the individual metrics (true reach, amplification and network impact), then the scores are useful. If you know just the overall score, it’s not as useful. If someone has a high amplification score and a low true reach, that combination will tell a manager that he needs to help the person improve her reach so she can have more influence within your company. If the manager knows just an average or some other combination of amplification and true reach, he can’t use the score as effectively.

Klout measurements could also be tied to performance reviews. If you had a young employee with a high amplification score, as a manager, you could set a goal for her to improve her true reach and network within your company to increase her influence.

Internal communicators are constantly looking for people within their organizations who have great stories. Those ambassadors are creating and sharing those stories. Using some combination of the Klout metrics, these corporate communicators can gauge which employees are creating the most influential content, who is reading it and what the stories are about — all useful in content curation.

When Klout becomes part of the enterprise social media toolbox, being able to see and evaluate how individual scores correlate will be vital to comprehensively acting on them.

EMPLOYEE GROWTH & ENGAGEMENT

When used wisely, the big benefit of Klout could be to let employees see that they are influential, empowered and have a high value. These things are at the heart of employee engagement. Another benefit is more particular to your future leadership.

An emergent leader takes initiative. A Klout tool for the enterprise could help organizations readily find who those people are, and measure how they are influencing others by communicating and collaborating with others. What’s more, managers or other leaders could use the individual metrics to support these rising stars to grow into their full potential. The ability to see who, really, is influencing the vice presidents and C-level executives is incredibly valuable information. Klout has the potential to make that kind of knowledge measurable.

In 2006, the University of Virginia opened the National Social Norms Institute (NSNI). The stated goal of the institute is to research and evaluate the use of social norming to address issues in at-risk populations. The NSNI has demonstrated success for this approach in a number of areas, including: tobacco and alcohol use, DUI prevention, intimate partner violence and academic performance. Though they have primarily focused on college populations, they have case studies for other groups as well. If a normative approach can get college students to reduce drinking, then there isn’t much is can’t do!

240 miles north of NSNI, nestled in the majestic hills of Delaware County Pennsylvania is another success story.

In Concordville, just south of Philadelphia and less than 100 miles from Baltimore lies the impressive 800 acre campus of a very successful high school program. It is a boarding school that houses about 1,000 males ages 14 to 18. Their facilities are nothing short of incredible. 13 residential houses, on-site medical, optometry and dental centers, an indoor olympic size natatorium, a massive indoor track and field center, a gorgeous 20,000 book library and a spectacular 6,636 yard golf course. The teachers have campus housing, company cars and a great pension. They routinely win state championships in various sports.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I did a project for them early in my career – which is how I found out about it. Frankly, I was a little thrown off when I got there. This was an American high school? The dorms were spotless. Students said “good morning” and “yes sir.” No one was walking on the grass.  Students were paying attention and when a teacher asked a question, everyone raised their hand.

I remember speaking with the librarian in their fantastic 20,000 book library. There was a large salt water aquarium in the middle of the room. I remember asking how she stops kids from throwing stuff into the tank. She basically said that would never happen. I chuckled thinking how she must be a new naive teacher. Doesn’t she know teenage boys love to break stuff; a trait they eventually grow out of, at around age 50. I found out later why she was right.

What is more remarkable is Glen Mills is not your average high school. They are a juvenile detention facility, and not the jay-walking kind of juvenile. The kids are in for some serious offences: armed robbery, assault, gang-activity, grand theft auto. Grant Grisson writes about the entire history in Without Locks and Bars: Reforming our Reform Schools. It is a fascinating study in social norming and cultural change.

Though founded in 1826, by the 1970’s Glen Mills was faltering. Grisson writes “very few administrators were interested in presiding over a dying facility.” Then in 1975, Sam Ferrainola (1932-2011) made a decision, the day after his arrival as administrator. He ordered all the locks and bars removed. No gates and no guards. Everyone thought he was dangerously naive and out of touch. But this was no touchy-feely bookworm. Sam, a Korean war veteran, never backed down from a fight, even with state politicians. But still, removing locks? In a reform school?

Ultimately, Sam believed a simple concept, which research has proven to be true. Negative peer pressure and destructive social norms can create very bad behavior; positive pressure can do the exact opposite.

During the first six months, Glen Mills was in chaos. Students left campus, teachers were in open revolt. They were financially strapped. Years later (spoiler alert) the institution began to change. That change begat other changes and soon the entire organization began re-focus on accountability, results, pride and ownership in the school.

Let me take a quick aside to address what might be the elephant in the room. There is often criticism that Glen Mills is pampering kids who should be doing time. That’s a fair critique if you believe in punitive punishment; Glen Mills just happens not to. They are focused on rehabilitation and results. Their recidivism rates are almost one-third of other facilities. They have non-existent rates of vandalism, violence, predation, theft, and teachers attacks. They have higher rates of high school graduation and college admittance.

I want to leave any and all politics aside. This is not a post about reforming our correctional system. There is no implied endorsement or critique. I only selected Glen Mills because it is the most extreme example I could find of social norming radically transforming an organization. That entire organization is driven by a core belief that human behavior stems from a need to gain peer group acceptance. If that encourages good behavior, people will behave. Positive peer pressure and norming even works on 1000 juvenile delinquents!

How does that help the organization directly?

For one, it is more effective than rules. Other detention centers have rules, but not results. Second, it frees up opportunity costs. That’s the only reason Glen Mills has such great facilities. They take the exact same money per student as other juvenile centers. They just don’t have to spend it on stun guns, barbed wire, gates, bars, cameras, locks, fixing vandalism, and guards. As an organization, they have “outsourced” their security apparatus to human sociology. Because of that, they are seeing a huge return on investment.

Ultimately, research and experience shows that a normative approach works. You need the courage and conviction to implement change. It needs to come from the top and permeate everything you do. You also need the patience to let the effect take hold. Social norms take hold easily but sometimes the effect takes time to see. Once it takes hold however, it has the benefit of being self-sustaining, which makes future changes even easier.

Never heard of ‘em. What are emergent leaders?

This term is not yet a common one, so let me explain. An emergent leader is one who takes the initiative to communicate and collaborate with other people toward a common outcome. That outcome could be completing a project, completing a client deal or promoting a piece of information to influence others.  This initiative is self guided. These leaders aren’t being required to use their leadership skills. Instead, they are responding to a challenge or opportunity on their own and working with others in creative ways to lead them. As a result, they are earning credibility.

Marketing pro and writer Geno Prussakov brought the phrase to light in a post, saying, “It is emergent leaders that are most respected and most followed.” The job title isn’t what defines their leadership level or skills. It is more attributed to the influence they wield, garnered through persistence, communication and personality.

(For further study, check out Collaboration Insights: Structured vs. Emergent Collaboration by Larry Hawes of Dow Brook Advisory Services.)

There is no neat little box for emergent leaders on an organizational chart, and that can be a disadvantage. A company that swears by its org chart can miss out on recognizing top talent within its ranks. Enterprise social media empowers human resources professionals and C-level executives to gauge who their emergent leaders are.

How does enterprise social support emergent leadership?

The business of leadership is typically a linear, hierarchical process. The people above you decide if you’re capable of leading and in what capacity. That’s not how it happens in real life. Among your group of friends, you may have a ring leader. But I’m guessing that person wasn’t chosen. He simply emerged based on his social skills and ability to mix a good drink. On a larger scale, bloggers like Seth Godin have used their social channels to become incredibly influential leaders.  Seth emerged as a thought leader by taking the initiative to share and communicate, mainly through his blog.

Enterprise social media enables this same kind of organic leadership. When employees are empowered to create and share content, interact with others in a community and demonstrate thought leadership, creative, self-guided leaders will emerge.

In an interview with David Kiron, MIT Sloan’s Andrew McAfee offers a great example of how this played out at a very large Indian company.

Is this really something new?

Before social media existed internally at organizations, you couldn’t see this type of leadership potential. Just a few years ago, for example, if I worked in human resources at a 20,000-person company and was looking for the best person to launch a new product and be a brand advocate for that product, I would go to the marketing team and ask them to lead that initiative. The marketing team would make recommendations based on who had led similar projects, who had success launching other products or other criteria.

In a social environment, I can monitor social activity and see the conversations happening about this type of product. I can evaluate who has earned the respect of their peers based on social interactions. I can also see who’s interested in what. (Even though someone falls under mergers and acquisitions on the org chart, I might notice a wellspring of creative ideas and shared content. That person has marketing potential.)

An emergent leader in the social arena either establishes a community or starts leading a community of interest and shows thought leadership in this area. If you’re paying attention, you’ll see patterns of growing influence and implementation of their thoughts by others in the organization. Like in an off-line environment, others will assume they are a leader and have some leadership responsibilities.

When you engage employees through enterprise social media, you are also engaging leaders who are thriving in an environment where they are doing what they love. Don’t let the absence of a fancy job title fool you.

Human beings are social creatures…and yes that even includes most developers. We are designed to live in a world of social interaction. Our brains are massive pattern recognition engines trained for this sort of thing. We live in groups that expect certain behavior in certain situations to follow certain patterns. We can’t function without these norms. They give our behavior context and allow others to efficiently assess, judge and respond. However, you might surprised just how incredibly subtle yet powerful these can be.

The Milgram experiment is (in)famous for many reasons. This is the experiment where participants were asked to give electric “shocks” to another person to help them “learn.” It turns out that people are really really pliable. Normal people were convinced to administer lethal electric shocks of 450 volts to a complete stranger while they howled in agony screaming for them to stop. As terrifying as that is, that is not the most amazing part of the experiment.

What is more terrifying is how much the participants did NOT want to do this! As you watch the films and read the transcripts, the participants (the shock-givers) are visibly shaken and clearly upset. They cannot believe that they are actually doing this. It is scary how little prodding it actually took. These were not vulnerable people being ordered by their boss or drill sergeant. They were responding to a man in a white coat at Yale politely saying, “Please continue.” To me, that is the amazing part.

Some explain this result using social conformity. This is where a person transfers decision making to the group at large. According to researchers like Muzafer Sherif and Solomon Asch, people can embrace social norms without even weighing the costs or benefits to themselves or the group. Some game theorists assert this is an adaptive mechanism that has evolved over time.

But how can that be true?

People are supposed to be self-interested and rational. If social norms were creating sub-optimal outcomes, there be would course corrections and those norms would change…right? Not always. Sometimes rational actors can create irrational behavior.

Like a dollar auction where participants pay $5 for a $1 bill. The Tragedy of the Commons is another example. All this assumes people are rational; a belief I question every holiday shopping season. Once emotions and social pressure get added to the mix, it is easy to create less desirable outcomes.

Let’s look at an example where norms lead a group astray. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman (@DanielKahneman) found that people feel a stronger emotional reaction to bad outcomes when it was caused by something they did, rather than something they avoided doing. This is why I cannot sell my 90 million shares of Webvan. What if I sold them and then they went up? (Hey, it could happen! I’m looking at you Kickstarter.) But this phenomenon helps explain why most people are so risk averse and reluctant to change.

Now perhaps you have heard the phrase, “bias towards action?” This phrase doesn’t seem to make sense given what we just talked about. How can people be predisposed to action and more likely to avoid action? Because there is a bias towards only when action is considered the “normal” response. For example, if there is a crisis, there is an expectation that politicians should “do something.” Even if the correct response is to “do nothing,” they feel pressure to act. By doing so they often make matters worse, triggering yet more pressure to act, which makes things even worse…and the mobius strip continues.

The same pressure to act exists for goalkeepers in professional soccer. I cite this next study because it shows the power of social norms to drive sub-optimal behavior. I also cite this study because professional soccer goalkeepers – who are judged in part by their ability to stop penalty kicks – should be highly motivated to make the right decisions. They are also highly experienced in this particular domain. This is as real-world as it gets.

The study, called Action Bias Among Elite Soccer Goalkeepers, was published in October 2007 in the Journal of Economic Psychology. They reviewed penalty kicks in top leagues and championships worldwide. For those who aren’t soccer fans, penalty kicks are touch to stop under any circumstances; about 80% of penalty kicks succeed. Sports Science has a fascinating breakdown of the penalty kick:

Given the rules of soccer and the mathematics of human reflexes, goalkeepers have to “guess” before the ball is kicked which way they want to block. The study concluded that the optimal strategy was to stay in the goal’s center, (i.e. “do nothing”.) As a side note: I have suggested to both my boss and my wife that my optimal strategy should also be to do nothing. So far, there are no takers.

However, goalkeepers almost never stay in the center. Even though there are three roughly equal choices (right, left, center), they choose “doing nothing” only about 2% of the time. How is that possible? Because the social norm is for goalkeepers to “do something.” Maybe it’s all the Pointer Sisters’ music they play during practice, but goalkeepers feel pressure to jump.

After all, they don’t get paid just to stand there. No, they get paid to stop goals. But social norms aren’t allowing them to do that as effectively as they could. In fact, goalkeepers actually feel worse when they miss a penalty kick after staying in the center then when they incorrectly jump to one side. Without even knowing it, the social norms of the sport are causing teams to lose games they could have won.

Of course, most social norms are not bad. They make civilized society possible and they enforce all kinds of great behavior. It’s the reason we tip at restaurants we will never revisit. It is why we queue in lines instead of cutting. It’s why simply seeing a picture of someone’s eyes reduces theft. It’s why we wear the clothes we do. (That’s my excuse!) In a future post, I want to talk about open-source in terms of social norms.

But can all this social norming stuff actually help your organization get things done?

Absolutely and in real measurable ways. In the final post of this series, we will look at an amazing case study. Not in theory, but a real-world example of using the power of social norms (plus some courage and conviction) to transform into a world-class organization.

Social norms can create the behavior you want and reduce the behavior you don’t. We know that it is pretty easy to induce normative behavior. Granted, making that change long lasting is a tougher challenge. We also know that you can create the wrong set of norms, which in turn, drive the wrong set of results.

But normative behavior can also free up other organizational assets. You spend less on training, less on security, improve employee retention and morale. Why? Because you are letting the unwritten conventions of your organization guide the work. This is a human equivalent to Ruby’s “convention over coding” mantra.

You don’t have to fix as many bugs in production if quality is in the air from the minute your developer walks in the door. When information sharing is who you are, you don’t have to force extract it from reluctant employees. Assuming you have the courage to allow your “goalkeepers” to “do nothing,” you will win more games.

Next post: we look at an organization that did just that and how you can too.

• The lost productivity of actively disengaged employees costs the US economy $370 BILLION annually. (Gallup)
• 70% of engaged employees indicate they have a good understanding of how to meet customer needs; only 17% of non-engaged employees say the same. (Wright Management)
• Those companies with a highly engaged workforce improved operating income by 19.2% over a period of 12 months, whilst those companies with low engagement scores saw operating income decline by 32.7% over the same period. (Towers Watson)

The disturbing part is that many companies aren’t doing anything to nurture engagement. In fact:

• Less than 50% of chief financial officers appear to understand the return on their investments in human capital. (Accenture)
• 75% of leaders have no engagement plan or strategy even though 90% say engagement impacts on business success. (ACCOR)

But there is opportunity!

• Out of 10,914 workers surveyed by Blessing White, only 31% are engaged

If you understand the value of engagement but aren’t doing anything to support it, consider where you are and where you could be. To illustrate the point, check our Lupfer’s Pinterest board on engagement and then consider these two hypothetical companies: Worldwide Widgets Inc. and Global Gadgets Inc. Which company do you relate to more? Which company do you want to relate to more? Visualize a fully engaged workforce in which you value your employees as people, not job descriptions.

Empty Memos vs. Subtle Empowerment

WW: At Worldwide Widgets, management believes that everything it sends to its employees is read and understood. When the value of employee engagement finally hit home, a memo arrived in everyone’s inboxes indicating that the company cares about how happy, satisfied and engaged its workers are on the job. The memo included a line about vowing to fix its employee engagement issues … and then nothing happened. Memos are popular at Worldwide Widgets. In fact, when any organizational change happens there, a memo is drafted, sent and promptly ignored by disengaged employees.

GG: At Global Gadgets, management understands the value of employee engagement and is doing things about it at every level. Helping employees feel empowered is critical to engagement, so when Global Gadgets launched an organization-wide change, the company’s CEO got in front of a camera. She announced the change through an enterprise social media channel and asked for feedback. Through the social media tool, employees posted feedback, asked questions and saw from their coworkers’ comments that they are not alone in their concerns. When a lot of employees questioned one particular aspect of the change, management revised its plans. That kind of empowerment really strengthens engagement. At Global Gadgets, employee engagement strategies take a holistic approach and subtle steps. There’s no memo announcing a commitment to employee engagement. They just do it.

What a Consultant Says vs. What Your Employees Say

WW: A consultant hired by Worldwide Widgets to improve its employee engagement sold the corporate communicators on a Twitter-style tool to anchor their enterprise social media strategy. “It’s new! It’s exciting! It will allow your employees to engage in real time and share things just like they do on Twitter,” she said. “Sounds great! Where do I sign?” the CEO said. The tool launched — via a memo announcement, of course — and activity started to grow. And then it dipped. And then it died. The Worldwide Widgets corporate communications team chose a tool without considering how the company’s intended users engage with social media in their own lives. They came to find out too late that their employees aren’t big Twitter users. There was no emotional response to this Twitter-style enterprise social media tool, and so it failed.

GG: With the help of a consultant, Global Gadgets found out what kinds of technologies and tools engage its employees outside of work. It turned out that YouTube and blogs are incredibly popular among its workforce. Instead of trying to force a drastically new tool on its team, the Global Gadgets corporate communications team met them where they are already engaged and comfortable. They developed an internal blog platform that makes creating and sharing videos easy. They launched the blog using a video introduction and tour, showing users how to post and what the blog is all about. Participation steadily grew and has continued to climb. Tapping into that emotional connection to what the employees already had an emotional response to was vital to its success.

Rewarding Numbers vs. Rewarding People

WW: At Worldwide Widgets, the dollar is the most valued sign of an employee’s contribution to the bottom line. The company is focused on numbers when it assesses performance. “If he’s bringing in new business or saving us money somehow, then he deserves a reward,” is the general opinion. What management fails to account for are the contributions of other employees to the “moneymaker’s” overall team. If they didn’t silo knowledge, they would have a clearer understanding of who is contributing to the success of the company.

GG: Through its commitment to engaging employees and the use of enterprise social media tools, Global Gadgets has broken down the barriers of knowledge sharing. By making information, conversations and project updates open and transparent, a team’s overall contribution is visible. Management is able to account for things like the quality of work, the depth of relationships with customers and brand loyalty that a team or department has. This empowers Global Gadgets to recognize and reward entire teams, strengthening their own working relationships to continue on the upswing.

Where Do You Fall?

Are you a Worldwide Widgets or a Global Gadgets? Do you engage with job descriptions or do you engage with humans? If you are serious about realizing the value of employee engagement, remember to treat your employees like people.

Even though they were welcoming, I was not an actual cadet. So while others were contracted to the Army post-college, I was not. If you are interested, you can re-create my ROTC experience for yourself at home. Get up at 4:30 in the morning, put on a 30 pound ruck sack and start marching. To get the full effect, have someone scream “your other left!” at you every so often. (My sense of direction is still terrible!)

One day, we were doing some team-building exercises. You know, the kind of thing where the whole team has to come together and figure out some puzzle. One of the exercises was to get your team and “equipment” across a “river.” In team building circles, this one is called “crossing the river” (You can get a flavor of it below.)

Basically, you have a bunch of people and stuff (like boards and boxes) on one side of some marked off space (the imaginary river). You have to move your stuff and your team to the other side. No person can touch the “river” (otherwise known as the gymnasium floor). You get points for stuff and team members that make it to the other side. We were competing against other teams for points.

The trick here – which we quickly figured out – was to use the “equipment” to build a bridge across the river. You can then walk across the boards and boxes without touching the floor/river. As time was running out, there was an excited crowd of six cadets cheering safely from “shore” as the last man was trying to cross. He was balancing on a very thin board trying his best to wobble to safety.

But I knew he wasn’t going to make it. And because of that, we were going to lose the game. So I did what I had to do…which is what I assumed was the point of the exercise. I reached out and yanked the board right from underneath him. He never saw it coming. One second, he was balanced precariously on a board; the next second, he was crashing to the gym floor. I held the board in my hand, safely on “shore”, knowing that the extra point gave us the win. The entire gym was completely silent as I screamed, “We won!” They were stunned by what they just witnessed.

At that point, the Sergeant pulled me aside and suggested, “Perhaps you should go change now.” After a short hazing period and narrowly escaping death by blunt force trauma, I realized my mistake. The point was not to win at all costs, but to follow the ROE (rules of engagement), build trust within team and come together towards common purpose. No wonder they were shocked.

Looking back now, I see a larger organizational lesson which still applies today. The fact is, it never occurred to them that someone would do what I did. No one would push a team member into the river – in front of everyone – steal the board they were standing on to score a cheap win?!? For them, they had an entire culture and reinforcement mechanism that should have prevented my over-eager action. Of course the “puzzle” had rules which I followed. But they were relying on an ethos and normative structure to enforce unwritten rules. Rules, which outsiders like myself, could not know.

Now imagine your own organization.

What are the implicit rules that govern behavior? What are the cultural norms that reinforce the behavior you want or encourage the behavior you don’t? When you look at great organizations, they all have a set of beliefs that permeate everything they do. Apple doesn’t just have a great design process…design is who Apple is. Michael Loop gave a great panel entitled Great Design Hurts where he makes the same point a slightly different way.

The research on social norms would fill an Encyclopedia Britannica – if they still sold them. For those interested in a wide view of the prevailing thinking, I highly recommend Theories of Social Order: A Reader published by Stanford in 2009. It is an edited collection that has a great breakdown of research on motives, group behavior, bias, and trust.

When I say social norms, I’m really not talking about the obvious things like schedules, language or dress code. I’m talking about norms that force your employees to behave according to unwritten rules you may not even know about. These norms are reinforced every day through hundreds of tiny interactions. Social norms guide your company much more than guidelines, standards or even laws. It’s kind of like a meeting I once had with an executive where he said, “We don’t have a business architecture.” My reply was, “Oh you have one alright! You just don’t know what it is. And it’s running your company right now.”

What are your social norms? Are big ideas encouraged? Do questions draw unwanted attention? Does team size have a natural asymptote? How is whistle-blowing viewed? How important is geography within the offices? Are your virtual communities run by cliques? Are standards meant to be followed? Are meetings supposed to be organized or free-wheeling?

Virtual interactions also rely on social norms to guide virtual behavior. However, violating these can have an impact just as real as violating social norms in “the real world.” Just because your employees can log-in, doesn’t mean they can join in. There’s a difference.

Kipling Williams of Purdue University did an interesting study in 2003 with people playing “Cyberball.” Cyberball is a made-up online game with no real winner where people pass a virtual ball around. During one experiment, a person was selected to never receive the ball. Even when this person was told beforehand, that it was just a computer program following a script, they still felt ostracism and lower levels of belonging and self-esteem. If a computer program passing a virtual ball in a pre-defined pattern, around a made-up game, where no one loses, can trigger these feelings, imagine what your work environment could do to them.

In fact, Facebook – the largest virtual community on Earth – struggled against its own norms when it started allowing corporations to create accounts. Corporations, like me in ROTC, were caught unaware of the existing norms and created a lot of self-inflicted problems for themselves. In 2008, just after Facebook started this, Dr. Mihaela Vorvoreanu (@mihaela_v) published her findings in The Journal of New Communications Research. Facebook had existing social norms around “hanging out” and sharing personal information. Small companies and non-profits benefited from this because their content was highly personal. Big corporations focused on branding, impersonal campaigns for “likes” and shared nothing intimate. They stood out like a tourist, an unwelcome tourist.

In the posts to follow, I want to continue to talk about different aspects of social norms. First, social interactions can be incredibly subtle. Second, norms can be created unintentionally and often in ways that harm the larger organization. Lastly, I want to discuss some success stories of organizations transforming themselves by utilizing the power of social norms.

A little friendly competition is usually a good thing. It’s a safe bet the promise of a reward has made you strive for something more, and being part of a team working together toward a common goal has made you more engaged in the tasks at hand. And perhaps a desire to improve your current state just needs a little gamification to pull it within your reach.

Gamification is the use of game dynamics to bring about certain behaviors and support goals such as self-improvement, increased productivity or a deeper knowledge within your company. In the area of enterprise social media, gamification can be a powerful tool to engage employees to reach their goals.

Bunchball, a leader in online gamification, published “Gamification 101,” a strong overview of the concept. It’s available for download here. In the report, the authors write:

“The overall goal of gamification is to engage with consumers and get them to participate, share and interact in some activity or community.”

This description is not far off what make enterprise social media so valuable.

Gamification is made up of mechanics and dynamics. Players — employees, customers, etc. — rack up points, clear levels, climb to the top of leaderboards or earn gifts in order to fulfill motivations or desires such as status, achievement, competition or altruism. Some of the world’s most visible brands are embracing it. Starbucks uses gamification through Foursquare to lure and reward customers with offers and badges. The Nike+ product line uses incredibly popular apps and personal goals tools to engage its users to stay fit and buy more.

How can the enterprise get in the game?

Here are three potential uses, based on common business challenges and three scenarios from the Bunchball report:

1. 1.    Sales people and channel partners can be incented to grow revenues and focus on desired product mixes via competition and challenges. Management has concluded that a lack of collaboration and knowledge sharing within the company is hindering its overall success. To help address the challenge, a game model that rewards employees for networking internally is established.

Employees earn points by interviewing another team member and completing a pop quiz on the person or checking in with the person at a coffee shop. Introduce coworkers to each other for bonus points. For every point earned, the employee is entered into a drawing for a weekend getaway.  As a more passive reward, during play, the employees are learning more about what their coworkers do and sell, integrating that information into their own teams and projects.

The first of two major benefits of this game is that it addresses the common CEO concern of “if we only knew what we know.” Actively sharing knowledge makes companies stronger. A second benefit is that this type of game could reduce the need to seek outside consulting help by finding knowledge resources on the inside. As an additional benefit, the game could also increase employee engagement by setting employees up to become more acquainted with each other as people — not just names on an org chart.

1. 2.    Employees can be motivated to pursue optional training initiatives that enhance their careers and make them more valuable to the company. Your company knows retention of its most valuable employees must be a top priority. One way to support this challenge is by supporting their ongoing education through an enterprise social media game.

The game provides employees with a series of webinars and podcasts that will support their learning. When they choose to watch or listen, they will post the “top five takeaways” from the webinar/podcast to a team-wide or company-wide enterprise social media channel. The writers of the most interesting, informative or entertaining best-of lists will then be rewarded by showcasing their newfound knowledge on the homepage of the company intranet. This model recognizes the accomplishments of an employee and shares the knowledge with the biggest audience possible.

1. 3.    Employees can be incented to adopt and stick with healthy lifestyle choices that extend their lives and reduce healthcare costs. Healthcare costs are booming and the future of healthcare is up in the air. Your team has determined that preventive care is the best way to keep your employees healthy and costs down. Therefore, you are integrating a fitness-related game into the business environment.

For the game, you create a series of mapped “walking trails” starting from your location. The trail distance ranges from.25 miles to 3 miles, easily walked during a lunch hour. Each time someone completes a trail, they log their miles into the enterprise social media tool. They earn bonus miles for recruiting additional walkers to join. The person who has earned the most miles on a monthly basis receives a bonus. The person who recruits the most people at the end of the year and the top-mileage person for the end of the year get a bigger bonus.

Healthier employees reduce an employer’s health care costs, thus reducing how much employees pay for heath insurance. And, of course, employees who are feeling well and aren’t spending their days inside a doctor’s office are more productive.

Gamification has a knack for turning business challenges that threaten to alienate employees and engender negative attitudes into child’s play, engaging its players and inspiring positive behaviors.

Is your company ready to get in the game?

Why or why not?

He gave each child a survey and fed those answers into a computer. The computer gave each child a new position in the line-up. (I was assigned to play “the bench,” which my mom assured me was a very important position.) As expected in these types of stories, the new line-up began to win. When they would fall behind, the children would rally by saying things like, “We can’t lose, we are the computer team” or “We have computer power.” Inevitably, they went on to win the championship.

At the celebration, the coach told the team – who were so inspired by their perfectly aligned computer selected roles – that the computer said everyone should be a pitcher. He had lied to the kids and just randomly moved the lineups. In the end, the kids were the real reason the team won, not “the machine”. The story had a happy ending…as long as you ignore that an adult in a power position lied to children and manipulated them to win games. But I digress.

The purpose of retelling this story is to introduce an idea called automation bias. To be fair, automation bias isn’t widely known. In fact, it doesn’t even have an entry in Wikipedia – which nowadays practically means it never existed. (But I assure you, it is as real as I am…wait a minute, I’m not in Wikipedia either!) It is a real phenomenon and one you have probably experienced yourself first-hand. Linda Skitka from the University of Illinois has done some very interesting research in this area, especially around medical and pilot errors.

Like the children in our earlier story, real-life humans often make similar mistakes. Automation bias refers to the phenomenon in which people mistakenly believe the infallibility of computer-based systems. It is called bias because users become predisposed to accept the computer’s authority and act in accordance with its recommendations. Like the kids in our story, people become emotionally invested in the “power of computers” and it affects our behavior.

This extends even into situations involving life and death. For example, research shows that air traffic controllers, despite their extensive training and ability to perform well under stress, lean towards delegating key decisions to a computer system. Studies show that people will trust a computer’s advice even when it contradicts their own intuition or training. This includes jobs with highly trained professionals such as pilots and doctors. The Therac-25 accidents recount numerous doctors ignoring their intuition and training because of thier bias towards the machines. This effect also extends to those specifically trained in technology, who presumably should know how fallible technology can be. Even working in groups with other people doesn’t totally eliminate this effect.

Most research indicates that automation bias is an unconscious cognitive shortcut meant to improve efficiency. That’s ironic because studies have shown that some increased automation can actually decrease performance. Turns out automated cues actually diminish the users’ willingness to put forth the cognitive effort to process all the information. This is especially true if the task at hand is complex. Other studies show that over-reliance on computers weakens our social intuition for perceiving bias and faulty expertise. Said another way, the presence of technology make it harder for us to tell who is full of it.

What does this have to do with social media?

Because automation today is amorphous. Technology is everywhere and automation is integrated into everything we do. We use technology as a second brain. Edwin Hutchins developed the theory of distributed cognition in the mid 1980’s. Interestingly enough, he also studied pilots. (Note to self: if I want to be studied by future psychologists, become a pilot…or a serial killer.) We use devices as an extension of our own brain, doing things we can’t or don’t want to do. Seriously, when is the last time you manually dialed a number? But automation bias is something more, something deeper than storing hard-to-remember data. Automation bias replaces vigilant information seeking and processing. That’s why it is a challenge.

What you have to realize is that automation will affect how users view and respond to information presented to them. You have to be sensitive to the influence (perhaps undue?) that a system has over users’ perception of the information itself. Sure, deep down, we know that social networks are populated by people…in fact, that’s why we use them. But on another level, how do we access our “social” network? By logging into a machine, or accessing a device, or clicking a mouse. At that point, we are at the fringes of automation bias trying to subconsciously differentiate system from human. We are after all, not interacting with people. We are interacting with a machine who is a proxy for the people we really want to reach.

And the more technology does for us automatically, the stronger the chance that our cognitive laziness undermines the very system we are building. So it is an interesting challenge. How do you introduce and socialize technology into a complex organization? You want to empower employees to use technology without over-powering them. If you lose the ability to leverage their instincts and experience – if they defer mindlessly to a systems’ authority – then you lose what makes them human and what makes them your best asset.

Sherry Turkle (@STurkle) is a renowned researcher from MIT who writes a lot about these issues. (And she has a Wikipedia page!) Though she doesn’t talk about automation bias per say, she does describe how the virtual world interacts (and supplants) the real world. In some sense, you could view it as an extreme case of automation bias. She gave a fantastic talk at TEDx in 2011 where she talked about the “culture of distraction”. But think about how we often manage these distractions…with more and more automation. #irony

The subtitle of her book Alone Together says its all: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other.

I happen to prefer another book by her entitled, Life on the Screen. It is near and dear to my heart since it was written years ago about text based MUDs – which kids today would stare at like a T-Rex skeleton. Years from now my grandchildren will tug on my shirt and ask, “Papa, why did you play games that were text-based? Were you like in jail or something?” Anyway, one of my favorite lines from that book is, “You are what you pretend to be…” (Then I really am a ninja!)

One last thought about automation bias. The children’s story from the first paragraph is etched in my memory. I know – almost without a doubt – that my mother read it to me as a kid. I think back to that and think maybe that is what drew me to technology. But I cannot for the life of me find that story – or even the name of the book – anywhere on the web. So I have come to doubt that this story ever existed. Automation bias in action. That’s how powerful it is. Google says it isn’t there, it doesn’t exist. I start to think perhaps I am wrong; perhaps I made it all up. Or perhaps the CIA implanted this story in my head to be some kind of Manchurian blogger. Sounds crazy but like my mom used to say as we made tin foil hats, “You can never be paranoid enough Adam…if that is your real name.” Ok, that’s probably not what happened, but you get the idea…

Mark Schaefer offers up five signs your company culture may be getting in the way of your social progress. His list covers obstacles such as corporate culture mis-match and lack of executive sponsorship. In this post, I’m offering up a vision of where your culture needs to be to make enterprise social media successful for you.

First step: Management must have a vision already in place or being set. Management must communicate clear, upfront reasons why you’re considering a social strategy and what its goals will be.

Cultures ripe for enterprise social media historically have the following characteristics:

1. They encourage Collaboration

Collaborative cultures promote information sharing and expect it all levels, from entry level to C level. In collaborative environments, people are rewarded for contributing to the team instead of just for their individual achievements. Work is treated as a team sport where working together is tied to better business results.

Companies with a collaborative culture understand that collaboration is not exclusive to extroverts who tend to more vocally make their contributions. As Susan Cain expounds on during a great TED talk, introverts have just as much — or more — to offer a department, team or company as their more outspoken counterparts.

2. They share Knowledge

Open, transparent networks are vital to enterprise social media. Without a knowledge-sharing culture, the real value of social tools is lost. When people are transparent about what they’re doing and what they’re working on, knowledge is not only shared in a surface-level, straightforward manner, but it also bubbles up out of the discussions and interpretations that knowledge-sharing enables.

3. They support Innovation

When a company rewards its employees for stepping back and questioning things and coming up with different solutions, that’s innovation. Outside consultants or experts aren’t always the best sources for finding new ways to improve processes, products, services or systems. Enterprise social media can support improvements and change in the workplace through its ability to connect people and ideas.

A company’s values are a major part of its culture. For enterprise social media to live up to its potential, a certain set of values needs to be in place. In a nutshell:

• It must value employee knowledge and contributions
• It must value innovation and new ideas
• It must value transparency and open communication

In order for enterprise social media to perform well, management has to value employee knowledge and contributions. It’s not about valuing the fact they are doing work. It’s about valuing the person as a person with unique experiences, insights and knowledge. Even if they are off topic, these contributions are valuable. It’s a more holistic way of looking at each person.

Having these values doesn’t mean your company can’t have a repeatable process. Its collective mindset must always be that it can be and do better. The question, “How can I get a better result?” must frequently be asked. And management must listen to answers from all levels. The value of open communication must be executed on a consistent basis. In order to establish a culture (one of 3) that has to be communicated on a consistent basis through an active communication plan.

The “Enterprise Social Culture” Works

Vetter is a suggestion box application that helps companies collect suggestions. Big brands have used such tactics to solicit and carry out suggestions from every level of their business. When British Airways recently faced a tough economic environment, increased competition and environmental standards challenges (some self imposed), the company launched a Staff Suggestion Scheme to tap into the creativity of its staff. Thanks to one suggestion submitted to its Staff Suggestion Scheme, British Airways is saving £600,000 a year in fuel costs. The bright idea: “descaling the toilet pipes on planes.”

Mini management carried out a similar program at its giant Cowley factory in England. The effects reportedly extended beyond monetary gains, strengthening teamwork and changing manager-worker dynamics. Over the course of two years, more than 14,000 suggestions were submitted. Management took forward 11,000 of the suggestions.

Amazon listened when a software engineer, who presumably rarely had his hand in service development, suggested that Jeff Bezos implement a free-shipping service, now known as Prime and known as a critical marketing tool for the giant online retailer.

Aside from the potential to make or save your company millions of dollars, with these values in place you are sending a clear signal to your team that their opinions are valuable. If your company is considering an enterprise social media strategy, be sure it is ready for it. Enterprise social media is powerful but it’s not a magic bullet. On the other had, it should improve current business processes, not just support them. It should allow for a better way of working within the right company culture.