Beyond Gaming the Badging System

Image by: Rocket Ship 

When I think of badging and achievements in social media apps, I view them as a way to get people to stay engaged.  Getting someone engaged has many benefits for those apps that are out in the internet, but in almost all cases the badging is there to help drive revenue.   I view badging in a similar manner.  Badging is a way to keep employees engaged in a platform or system that has been implemented.   But the bottom line is not to drive direct revenue out of the employee but rather to keep employees engaged to drive some sort of business value.

Recently I had debate about how badging in the enterprise can work in the most effective manner.  The discussion centered around two types of badges.  For this post, I am going to refer to each type of badge as 1) direct badge and 2) indirect badge.  In direct badging, the badge is awarded based on a direct action taken by the person. For example,  a teacher gives a student extra credit for doing extra work or completing an assignment early.   In indirect badging the person is rewarded with a badge based on the action of a second person. For example, a teacher provides extra credit to a student because he received "kudos" from others in the school on the work she did, or how she acted in a specfic situation.

The debate centered around which was more important.  As I reflect back on the conversation, I realize now that both are very powerful for two very different reasons.  Direct badging provides that direct reward for an action - aka. immediate satisfaction.  This is a great way of getting people to stay engaged on your platform.  It keeps people coming back for the next badge and trying to get to the next level.  But when direct badging is not done well, the badges can be easily gamed.  Having a badge "gamed" is not good.  How many times have you been part of a project where metrics are gathered.  As part of the project, the team starts gathering metrics and set some goals based on these metrics.  After a while you find that the goal is being gamed and someone is cheating to make sure they always win.  

For example, suppose that there is a system at work that has a wide range of workflows/tasks that need to be completed each day. Some of the tasks available every day are easy and others are rather hard to complete. Now suppose that you set a goal that indicated that you would be "successful" if you completed 20 tasks.  As it doesn't matter which task you do first, what do you think would happen? If you wanted to game the system, you would come into work early and try to meet the success criteria by doing the 20 easiest tasks.  How is this type of activity helping the company or the individual?  And if there are people gaming the system, are they creating any quality content or providing value at all?

So what happens if you do not provide a reward based on the persons direct action but rather reward the person based on the value that they provide?   Wouldn't that be much better for the company and help stretch that person into doing a better job.  This is where indirect badging can provide additional value over the direct badging solution seen very often in systems.  Indirect bading provides people a badge because someone found value in what they had to say.

For example, Jill writes 15 blog posts. We give her a badge for writing the blog. But do we know that the blog posts provided any value?  What happens if Jill is not really providing any value, but  rather just blogging a couple of haikus or other non-business value added blog posts. How does badging provide any business value?   It doesn't. but if we were to provide a badge to Jill when 20 people visited her blog post or 5 people liked her blog post, or 10 people commented on her blog posts, I hypothesis that by giving Jill a badge when people believe that the content is worthy of reading, liking, or commenting that you drive a different type of engagement.  Jill will be much more interested in writing blog posts that provide value to others in the company.  

While this reward based on an indirect action is better, it still is not perfect.  Jill might have friends and ask them to visit her blog posts, like her blog posts, and comment on her blog posts.  That is always possible. But if you have a blog post that gets 1000 unique user views, I would venture to guess that Jill was providing value and not gaming the system.  In addition, you could combine several indirect metrics for a new badge.  For example, 15 unique views, 5 likes, and 2 comments gets you the Value Added Level 1 badge.

Badging is not as simple as capturing the metric directly, but rather should be done with thought and analyzed to think how someone might decide to game the system.  Combining both direct badging and indirect badging will help drive engagement beyond just engagement created by direct badging.  

Have you seen badging done poorly?  What have you learned from the bad badging and how have you changed things to make it better?

Riding the Wave

Image by: Eric Ziegler

Since a recent vacation to Virginia Beach, I have come to realize the similarities between the fun I had with my family and the approach I take in my current job.  While at the beach, I am not someone that just sits on the beach and soaks up the rays, but rather I go down to the water and hang in the water for hours on end, playing with the kids, body surfing and riding my body board. Over the years, as the kids have gotten older, they have shown more and more interest in riding the waves, just as dad does.  This year was a banner year (and I expect them to continue to enjoy riding the waves). The were more interested in riding the waves and trying to figure out which wave was best to ride.  

I encourage them a great deal - helping them in different ways so that they can really enjoy riding the waves rather than just getting frustrated. With my kids, I took the opportunity to teach them the tricks of the trade on how to catch a wave, teaching them how to body surf and body board.  I taught them how to pick the best wave to ride, which included teaching them how to tell if a wave approaching was good or not and then teaching them how to determine where the wave is going to break. 

As with anyone learning for the first time, they were not successful the first time (or the second or the third ...).  Every day as we played in the water, they were learning and getting better and better at figuring out how to "ride the wave".  And when they couldn't get it after several tries on their own, instead of having them get frustrated, I helped out by giving them a helpful push to get up to speed, or a loud shout "NOW!"

My job implementing Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) solutions and enterprise collaboration parallels my interactions with my kids.  What I find is that employees don't know how to "read the waves".   They are often interested in collaborating and using the E2.0 tools, but they don't know how, when, or which wave to jump on.   Not all E2.0 tools are meant for all business areas, just as every wave is not meant to be ridden.  That is why having someone consulting with different business areas are so important.  The businesses need to know how to start and when to start.  They need to have someone be patient with them, repeating what they are taught and providing that helpful push in the correct direction. Some businesses might be able to figure it out on their own, but the initial interactions is key. Teaching early and often will ensure they are successful.

It is important to remember that everyone is on a different learning curve.   For example, my son, the youngest, is able to understand what I say about the wave, and knows when to start swimming or paddling to catch the wave, but he is not strong enough, and requires that helping hand "push" to actually catch the wave.  Some businesses need that extra hand push to get started.   They require someone to say, "now" and then the extra push to make it real. But as they grow and learn and get stronger, they will be able to do it on their own.   And that is what my team is there for.  To provide them a helping hand, lending our expertise in helping to navigate which wave to ride.

Enterprise Search Failure - Connections

Image: Eric Ziegler

How often do you hear someone say, "why doesn't our enterprise search work as well as Google search? Bing?" or "Why can't I find the content I want  to find." or "I can't believe our search engine sucks." or "Our enterprise has a very small fraction of the content that Google searches and I still can't find the content I am looking for." or "FIX IT!".

In my previous blog posts, I started a series of  posts about internal enterprise search and how it is not as good as internet search.  In my first post, I provided an overview of how internal social interactions can improve internal search engine results.  In my second post, I discussed how using the context of the employee can provide enterprise search engines a boost in providing improved search results.  As a definition for what I meant by employee context I proposed that employee context is made up of a wide variety of types of information, including HR system information, social profile information, social connections and social interactions.   In this blog post, I plan to discuss how the power of social connections can be used to improve search results within the enterprise.  

When I mention connections, I am referring to the idea that one employee "follows" another employee.  This following is similar to those external social networking sites such as facebook, twitter and google+.   But how can these connections between employees be used to improve search results?  Below are several illustrations of how connections can improve search results for each employee.  For each of the examples below, I am using the following base example to illustrate my point:  

Joe, an employee, follows five other employees and has 15 employees following him (Joe).  In addition, the five employees Joe is following, follow a combined 20 more people (some with multiple people following the same person).   Each of these connections (both direct and indirect) can play a key role in improving Joe's search results.  

Directly following:  Joe is directly following five other employees.  Content created, modified or interacted with (comments, likes, tagging, bookmarking, etc.) by these people has a higher importance to Joe then other employees.  Think about it, Joe is following these people for a reason.  So why is the content these people create, modify and interact with not given higher relevance when providing search results to Joe?

Directly being followed: Similar reasoning can be used for the content created by the 15 people following Joe, but it goes in reverse.   Joe does not realize that the 15 people are creating good content.   Joe is not following any of these people, but they are following Joe because he creates content that is related to ideas each of them are interested in.  Because of this, the content these people create has a higher chance of being valuable to Joe, he just doesn't know it.  But there is a caveat to this, Joe is not following these people, either because he has knowingly not followed these people or he has not discovered these people.   Because of this, the content created by these 15 employees should not receive as much of a relevance boost as content created by the direct followers.  

Indirectly Following: Again, similar reasoning can be used for the indirect followers.  Joe is following 5 people who are following a total of 20 people that Joe is not following.  Since Joe trusts and follows those 5 people, there is some merit and a higher chance that the content created by the 20 indirect employees will be of higher relevance and importance to Joe.  Because of this, the content created by these 20 employees should get a relevance boost in the search results. But just as the 15 employees that follow Joe, there is a caveat.   Joe is not following these people, either because he has knowingly not followed these people or he has not discovered these people.   Because of this the content created by these 20 employees should not receive as much of a relevance boost as content created by the direct followers.

With these improved relevance boosts for people direclty following, directing being followed and indirectly following, Joe searches on the term Java and receives results with an improved relevance boost for the 5 employees he is following, the 15 employees that are following him and the 20 indirect employees. In addition, the content from the 5 direct employees has the largest relevance boost, with the 15 employees following Joe and the 20 indirect employees he is following improving the relevance but not with as much of a boost in relevance.  

With these search engine algorithm improvements, the search results have just gotten tremendously improved, making searching for content a better experience for Joe and every other employee.  In future blog posts, I plan on continuing to discuss topics of how to improve internal enterprise search engine results. Future topics include reviewing how HR systems, employee profiles and social interactions can be used to improve search results.  So check back periodically to hear my thoughts on how enterprise search can be much better than it is today.

Enterprise Search and Context

Image: Breen Jones (link)

In my previous blog posts I talked about enterprise search and the reasons why search was not as good in the enterprise as it is in the enterprise.  The post was about why enterprise searches fail and that using social internal to an enterprise, enterprise search can be greatly improved.  +Joachim Stroh (@Joachimstroh) posted a comment on my blog that adds to my ideas.  He states:

"The traditional view is that content is coming from carefully curated repositories that are tied to corporate taxonomies that are tied to search facets. Way too complicated...."  

My response is absolutely correct! My thoughts are that if an employee has to do something beyond what is necessary for the job it probably won't happen.

So if employees are not helping other employees to find the valuable content they created, how do you improve search in the enterprise?  In my previous blog post, I mentioned that social business / E2.0 are both valuable ways to improve search results.  But there must be other ways to improve search.  In addition, social is way deeper than I could ever talk to in one blog post.  In this blog post, I will attempt to outline how enterprise search can be improved by providing search results based on the context of the employee performing the search.

As I did in my last blog post, I want to first analyze what are some of the tricks that internet search engines use to improve search results for each end user.  Internet search engines provide search results based on the context of who the person is that is searching.  They use the location of the person and provide results that are located closer to their current location.  Internet search engines keep track of each person's recent interactions and uses those interactions (which search results did they click) to improve search results. Internet search engines have now started the trend of incorporating end users social interactions to improve the results.  They are using a persons connections (relationships, who they are following, who they interact with most often) along with a host of other social information to improve search results. Each of these improvements to internet search is about providing search results in the context of person doing the search.  For example, when I search on a term, the potential that the search results are different for me vs. you are getting higher and higher.  These changes to how internet search engines provide search results to people is very powerful and a great way of providing the best results possible when there is a humongous amount of content in the internet.

So how does enterprise search learn from internet search?  Enterprise searches can do every one of these techniques to improve search in the enterprise.  And the amazing thing contextual search results is that I believe this is the one spot where enterprise search can do a much better job than internet search.  Enterprise's have a wealth of basic information that they know about employees.  While the internet search engines can learn from personal profiles, enterprise's can use information from the human resource systems along with personal profile information (internal and potentially even external (privacy could be an issue here)).  Enterprise search engines can learn from the interactions people have every day.  For example, the systems employees use and interact with each day can provide a wealth of information on how an employee does their job and what systems they use most. But interactions don't just happen with systems of record, but they also can occur on internal social platforms.  These social platforms can provide a large amount of information about who people are connected to, what interactions they have with other people, and the types of topics they are most interested in.   Lastly, by combining many of these pieces of information together, you can determine an employees expertise, which can also influence and improve search results for that employee.

In future blog posts, I plan on talking about the internal search engine topics.  This topic is so large and has so much potential that I will be creating several blog posts on how "employee context" can improve enterprise search.  Topics will include: the employee profile, the influence of interactions, the connections of employees and expertise of employees.  Each of these topics will review how they have the ability to improve search results for the employee.  So check back periodically to hear my thoughts on how enterprise search can be much better than it is today.

Enterprise Search Failure

Image by: Phillie Casablanca - link)

How often do you hear someone say, "why doesn't our enterprise search work as well as Google search? Bing?" or "Why can't I find the content I want  to find." or "I can't believe our search engine sucks." or "Our enterprise has a very small fraction of the content that Google searches and I still can't find the content I am looking for." or "FIX IT!".

Fix it sounds so easy, but it isn't that easy.  Internet search is dramatically different than enterprise search.  While there are many technical  differences, the biggest difference is not technical by behavioural.  People creating content in the internet are creating the content with the hope that others will find it.  These people, creating content on the internet, have personal incentives (marketing, personal brand, selling a product) to have other people find the content they are creating.  They use many different techniques to improve the finability of their content.  So, what techniques do they use to improve their content?

They tag their content, they use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) sites to improve their content for search engines.  They use social media to  market their material, which also improves the findability of their content.  The more references to their content, the more likely the content will  show up in a search result.  By using social media, people are attempting to garner a loyal following that promotes their content (think free advertising).  And if they can use social media to have their content cross linked and promoted by other people, the chances that more people (directly connections and indirect connections) are going to see their content, which in the end is exactly what they are attempting to do.

Let's contrast this with what happens in the enterprise.  In the enterprise, employees create content typically for a specific group of people, not  intending for the content to be found.  In many cases, employees are not creating content to be shared. (There are exceptions but those are for  specific groups setup to share corporate information, such as a corporate communications teams).  In contrast, the vast majority of the enterprise is creating documents and information and not thinking about how the information could be found or discovered. They are not sharing and there are no  incentives (personal or corporate) to share the information.  In many organizations the tools the employees use to create content and store the content is not even setup to allow for the content to be easily found.  Enterprise search engines often are not even searching the repository where the content is stored.  While the technical connections are not available, the employee is not helping the rest of the company to find their content either.  For example, when the employee wants to let someone else know about their content, what tool do they first turn to?  eMail.  If you are lucky they send a link to the content.  If not, they send the attachment in the email.  The only people that benefit from the later is the sender and the recipient.  In addition, in both scenarios, search engines don't learn and improve relevancy when eMail is used.

What are some ideas on how to improve the search results in the enterprise?   Incorporating social media techniques into the enterprise is one method of improving search results in the enterprise.   By providing a platform for people to collaborate, share, and to tout what they are working on is just one step in improving search results.   If an employee can use these tools and the search engine can learn from the enterprise social media interactions, the search results will improve.  By providing these hooks, such as tagging of content, cross linking of the content, and getting more people to interact with each each other and with communities will improve the search results, much the same way social media improves the search results in the internet.

But that is not the biggest thing that needs to occur.  While a technology can be put in place to allow people to interact, interactions don't occur because of the technology.  Companies have to change their culture;  companies have to get their employees to think from a sharing perspective. They have to create information and documents with the realization that others can find it and learn from it.  Companies need to find the incentive for the employees to partipate and be active and to share.