Evolving Web

Giving versus Co Creation

It’s 9:30 am at Moderate Technologies. Peter Weinberger, the president, walks into the office, and he’s excited.  Earlier that morning while showering, he had an epiphany – one he believes will revolutionize how moderate people do moderate things. 

He bursts into the office and exclaims, “I have this awesome idea! Let’s do it!”

Now most likely, one of two things will occur here:

One: Peter can “give” his employees the project.  He can devise a sure-fire plan and he can deliver it to them with enthusiasm.

The group will gladly execute, and will feel compelled to do so because he's their boss. But all their decisions from this point forward are Peter-focused:

• Is this what Peter wants?
• I would do something I think is better, but technically this is Peter’s baby.
• I wonder what Peter was going for here, because this just doesn’t make sense. But heck, I’ll do it anyway.
• I’m not sure if I should do this, I’ll go ask Peter.

Even if Peter specifically asks his staff for input, it’s human nature to defer to an owner or creator. So, in this case, Peter has inadvertently owned what he wanted to give or share.

A plan is most often (and usually wrongly) seen as an authoritative document or statement. When Peter came up with the plan, he established ownership, subsequently disempowering his staff.

Two: Peter's other option is to separate in his mind the idea - which is viable and can stand on its own - from the implementation. He can then sit down with his staff and brainstorm new ideas, and float his as one of them.  A couple of things could happen: the staff will choose Peter’s idea, or a better one will emerge.  Either way, Peter wins.

If Peter’s idea is sound enough to make it through his team, then the discussion of implementation is the same. The team discusses the implementation. Peter’s plan then becomes one option; it is no longer a dictate.

By the end of the meeting, Peter’s idea becomes the team’s idea.

It’s tough being Peter.  When you have a terrific idea and a great way to implement it, you can’t help but want to run into the room and share it with everyone. You are enthusiastic and feel your plan is a gift. It's awesome, surely everyone will want it. But the more gifts you give, the more the team has a two-fold reaction. On the one hand they start to feel entitlement: Peter gives us gifts. On the other hand they feel resentment: Here comes Peter with something else for us to do, and I never fully agree with his plans. So there’s this mixture of dependence and resentment that is rapid-fire poison for an organization.

Co-creation can diffuse this dynamic.

Blogged in Ocean Shores, WA

Have My People Tweet Your People

“You don’t give your Twitter duties to an intern” – Morgan Johnston from Jet Blue at #140TC

 

Business is lazy.  If business doesn’t understand something, it quickly assigns it, outsources it or otherwise gets it off the to-do list.  At the Twitter Conference #140TC in Mountain View this wee, Morgan Johnston talked about how important it was to have someone in the company with authority interacting on social media.

He had several stories about directly helping customers because Morgan had full penetration into the organization.  To the extent that he held the door open on a plane for two extra minutes so a family running from one delayed flight (on another airline) to that flight could make it.  The family had a member who was tweeting his pain while they ran.

Outsourcing your social media activities to an intern or a consultant means you stand a pretty good chance of working with someone who may well know how to use Twitter, but knows nothing about your business.  Don’t get me wrong, I know some people who are free lance community managers, have more than one client and do a great job.  But these people make it a priority to know their client’s business and ensure that they can quickly get to people capable of acting on a customer request.

If you must outsource your social media interaction, make sure that the person you are hiring cares, that you take the time to train them in whatever they need, and that you give them access to resources.

If you can’t do this, then don’t outsource.  Do it in-house – which you probably should be doing anyway.

Technorati Tags: social media,twitter,social media outsourcing,outsourcing,lazy,jet blue,morgan johnston

Chasing Bucky

“Aren’t you a .Net shop?” he asked me.

“No.” I replied

“But you built this in .Net.”

“I would have built it out of rice crispie squares if it were appropriate.”

At Gray Hill Solutions, we don’t subscribe to one coding platform.  To do so would be to lose any advances in software tools – which come at a wonderfully bewildering pace.  It makes sense, then, to not specialize in the tools – but in the application of tools in general.

Society has finally caught up with Buckminster Fuller.  Fuller was on a life-long quest to make the world a better place.  That’s a big ticket item.  It’s difficult to make the world a better place through myopia. 

In his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (read, buy), Fuller gave a long and impassioned argument about the dangers of over specialization.  He leads this argument with this passage:

Leonardo da Vinci is the outstanding example of the comprehensively anticipatory design scientist. Operating under the patronage of the Duke of Milan he designed the fortified defenses and weaponry as well as the tools of peaceful production. Many other great military powers had their comprehensive design scientist-artist inventors; Michelangelo was one of them.

Many persons wonder why we do not have such men today. It is a mistake to think we cannot. What happened at the time of Leonardo and Galileo was that mathematics was so improved by the advent of the zero that not only was much more scientific shipbuilding made possible but also much more reliable navigation. Immediately thereafter truly large-scale venturing on the world’s oceans commenced, and the strong sword-leader patrons as admirals put their Leonardos to work, first in designing their new and more powerful world-girdling ships. Next they took their Leonardos to sea with them as their seagoing Merlins to invent ever more powerful tools and strategies on a world-around basis to implement their great campaigns to best all the other great pirates, thereby enabling them to become masters of the world and of all its people and wealth. The required and scientifically designed secrecy of the sea operations thus pulled a curtain that hid the Leonardos from public view, popular ken, and recorded history. – Bucky Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

The shifts from Leonardos to Pirates and so on were enabled by advances in knowledge.  Merely introducing the number 0 into the human brain created a massive revolution not only in technology and travel, but in how we relate to the nature of work and to each other.  Fuller here was saying that we can all be geniuses in our own way – we just have to pull back the curtain.

To Fuller, the geniuses were not overly specialized.  They could not be.  In order to truly be creative, you need materials from which to create.  Frans Johannson calls this “the Medici Effect”.  The Medici Effect is, in essence, a mashup of ideas that can only come by stepping outside your field of expertise and learning from something radically different.  Fishermen have something to teach Internists.  Astronauts have something to teach pawn shop owners.  You never know, because the nature of insight is that it creatively links ideas that may not seem linkable.

So we are now in a world where we are understanding the world faster than ever before.  Digital technology so vastly speeds up the conversation that innovation and invention are common place.  “What have you invented for me lately?”

We are now all da Vincis.

In order to be da Vincis, we must now embrace Fuller-style generalism. No one is better to examine than Fuller himself for this.  Being a generalist didn’t mean Fuller was mired in reading random books.  Fuller built housing and cars.  He was an author and and artist.  He was practical and theoretical.

Or we can look at Henry J. Kaiser (right).  Kaiser oversaw shipyards, steel mills, automotive plants, engineering firms and a massive health care company.  Dude was hardly stuck in one mode of thinking.

The fact is that today advances in systemic thinking are requiring more holistic visions.  The human body was at one time a collection of fairly autonomous parts that functioned together.  Now, the body is understood more as a system and medicine is reacting to this realization.  But it doesn’t stop there, because the body reacts to lead in your paint, to particulates in the air, to the sun’s rays, to recycled air, to motor vehicles, to stress …  Suddenly being a doctor is even more complicated than before.

Recently when I was in Hospital for pneumonia, the doctors asked me a lot of questions. An not-insignificant number were about stress.  Did I own my own company?  Was business going well?  How was my life at home?  Had I suffered a loss recently?

At that point, at least at that hospital, I knew medicine had turned a corner and that we were starting to embrace Fuller’s wisdom at last.  Our understanding of the world and life is becoming more systemic and holistic.  The advances of technology and the speed of culture are now so fast that expertise is seen as temporal and contextual.  What is our expertise today will be obsolete technologically very soon – but the experience  of learning and applying the technology is what is really important.  The actions are ethereal, the lessons learned are permanent.

Now it’s up to us to let people know those lessons learned and to grow from them.  That’s the new expertise. We are all experts, we are all generalists.

Technorati Tags: Buckminster Fuller,Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,Frans Johannson,Medici Effect,da vinci,trevor blake

Blogged at My House in Seattle, WA

Making the Twitter Backbone Usable - CoTweet

People keep talking about making Twitter work for business, but for me it was missing any way to include it into a company’s workflow.  At last, CoTweet allows people to form work groups (centered on a single account) and have permanence for tweets and actions.

Here we see a Tweet where @Sprezzatura has retweeted a question I asked.  I am able to assign that Tweet and annotate it for appropriate action.  This is an instant quantum leap in Twitter usability for business.  Saved Tweets then appear in a personal to-do list.

The personal to-do list, combined with annotation, provides both context for the action and the action itself.  Note that the bottom tweet was a DM, so the app shows regular and direct messages in the same UI – understanding that to me they are both information and the delivery mechanism is simply metadata.

Each tweet-task in the to do list can be DM’ed, replied to, Retweeted, reassigned, e-mailed, or marked done.

My longstanding complaint about using Twitter for any business purpose was simply that Tweets were inherently unmanageable. 

The CoTweet interface is very clean and usable.  Unbelievably so, in fact.  It may be one of the more beautiful interfaces I’ve seen.

The only thing that would make it blast into space and win the X Prize would be an AIR app.  They’re going mobile first which is a shame.  An AIR app gives you access to all users immediately.  Mobile, while necessary, is cumbersome for development and likely only going to benefit iPhone users.  I would have prioritized it differently.

In fact, the lack of an app will mean I will use CoTweet for the time being as a management tool and not as a tool to actually participate in Twitter in real-time.

That being said, I’m looking forward to getting my collaborators on CoTweet and using it to move tasks around and work better with the Modus Cooperandi account.

Technorati Tags: cotweet,twitter,microblogging,management

Blogged in the Alaska Air Board Room, Sea-Tac Airport

Privacy in a Post TMI World

Lisa Hickey has a nice piece today about the bit of our private lives that we are discussing publicly.  The crux of the matter is trust and expectations.  Lisa says:

Anyone who has been on Twitter for a while has seen this phenomena: Spouses, children, boyfriends, girlfriends will say to someone who Twitters a lot: “You’re not going to put that on Twitter, are you?”

Yes, it’s funny. A sign of the times. My kids say it to me all the time. But here’s the thing: there’s a trust issue going on here.

There’s an interplay here.  I trust you with information that I’d rather not be distributed via Facebook.  To the point now that we have FriendDA which was originally created, such that it is, to let friends talk about business ideas, but is now routinely employed as a statement of “Don’t put this on Twitter.”

FriendDAs usually aren’t printed out, people are tending to say, “So I’m invoking FriendDA here….”  The counterpart nods, and the conversation continues.

So, socially, we are creating new conventions to plainly demark where privacy begins and ends.  Whereas privacy was previously assumed, it is now transparency that is assumed.  Information we’d like to keep close now comes with a wrapper.

Photo by Hamed Masoumi

Technorati Tags: Lisa Hickey,Facebook,Social Media,FriendDA,Hamed Masoumi,transparency,privacy

Voting With Our Feet – The Ethics of Sponsored Conversations

Today, Jeremiah Owyang posted “A running list of sponsored conversations”.  He has a laundry list of sites and products that engage in various forms of advertising and paid content. 

The article and its comments bring up the ethics of paying for supposed user-generated content.  With user-generated content, the assumption is that objectivity comes from personal experience unhindered by conflicts of interest.  If someone pays for a post, there is an immediate and obvious conflict of interest.  As a reader, you start to lose trust in the blogger and her content.

This ethical question isn't a new one, to blogging or any other form of communication.  All writers and all media have found themselves dealing with this.

Pick up any magazine and there's a good chance you'll find an article that turns out to be an advertisement about half way through.  Other publications run press releases, slightly edited, as stories.

Watch the morning “news” and you’ll find your NBC news staff telling you about new NBC programming.

I agree, Jeremiah, this is growing - it is an obvious win for both marketers and bloggers.  The bloggers are the ones who have the questions to ask of themselves.  How far along the shill-line are you willing to walk?

This is a personal question. 

As readers ... do we wish to read these? If not, we'll vote with our links and our attention.

Update: Read Write Web has an excellent response to all this.

Marshall says:

We respectfully disagree with Forrester's recommendations on this topic. In fact, we think that paying bloggers to write about your company is a dangerous and unsavory path for new media and advertisers to go down. We recognize that it's a complicated question, but we don't feel convinced by Forrester's conclusions regarding those complications.

Defenders of the tactic argue that it doesn't differ substantially from traditional advertising, that it's effective for advertisers, that bloggers want to profit from their writing and that with proper disclosure there's no loss of credibility for either party.

Technorati Tags: Jeremiah Owyang,conflicts of interest,blogging,shilling,shills,spam,splogs

Blogged at Modus Cooperandi, in Seattle

Lean Management and The Pull of Goals

Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

In lean management, a pull system is a natural flow of activities driven by the natural pace of the work that produces value.  Today I stumbled across this quote from Viktor Frankl, whose book Man’s Search for Meaning is surely one of the top 10 influential books on my world view.  In this quote, Frankl suggests that goals are a pull system.

Goals are indeed a pull system.  Goals come from internal processes.  We have individual and shared goals that motivate us to act.

In between goals is a thing called life, that has to be lived and enjoyed.

~ Sid Caesar

Goals pull us, we ideally act based on goals.  These individual actions are tasks.  The tasks we take on are in service of the goals.  However, if we don’t actually enjoy what we’re doing in service of these goals or, worse yet, act contrary to our goals – we are squandering our lives.

In a business context, if goals are clear amongst teams and the organization, the work involved in achieving those goals is more likely to be rewarding.  We are happier in doing it.  And this is a pull process.

A beneficial by-product of pull systems is they reduce waste.  Pull systems do this by highlighting where we are operating in ways that stymie our goals.  Pull systems reward innovative thinking to remove these points which are constraining our goals.  Pull systems say “The constraint is here, it is obvious, are you going to do something about it?”

Though I still have no semblance of a life outside of Nine Inch Nails at the moment, I realize my goals have gone from getting a record deal or selling another record to being a better person, more well-rounded, having friends, having a relationship with somebody.

~ Trent Reznor

Trent Reznor here is saying, “Look, I don’t live to work or work to live.  I live to live.  I am a musician and it’s my life.  But my goals aren’t fame oriented, they are happiness oriented.”

Making music makes Trent happy.  Making people laugh made Sid Ceasar happy.  Understanding where people found meaning made Viktor Frankl happy. 

In an organization, creating good product or solving a problem may make us happy. 

At heart, though, the successful application of our talents is what makes most of us happy.  When our organizations have no clear definition of goals or work contrary to individual goal achievement – waste is the result.  We end up with, as Frankl says, the “push” of drive.

The push of drive is the artificial force necessary to apply to people to get them to work contrary to their own goals.

Enter here the concept of friction.  When you apply an external force to an object to get it to move, friction occurs.  The amount of friction is the amount of energy lost in the transfer of momentum from one object to another.  Loss of energy = waste.

In a pull system, things operate faster by removing friction or constraints.  In a push system, things operate faster by applying more force.

For Reznor, the push would be more money, the pull would be self-improvement.  Money may drive him, self-improvement motivates him.

When creating rules in organizations or devising ways to get things done – ask yourself “What are the push and pull elements here?  What motivates people, and what drives them?  Where is friction created?  How much friction can we withstand?  What friction can be avoided?”

Technorati Tags: Viktor Frankl,sid ceasar,trent reznor,management,lean software engineering,lean management,waste,muda,organizational psychology,pull systems,goals,yes I just quoted frankl sid ceasar and trent reznor what are you going to do about it

Blogged at Caffe Appassionato in Seattle’s Interbay Neighborhood

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Previously Personal Passions -- an End of Eleanor Rigbyism

As a kid, I remember getting my first video game system – Super Pong.  Soon after that came the TRS-80 color computer.  My friends had the rest: Vic-20s, Atari 2600s, Odyssey^2s, and so on.

All I wanted as a kid was to have all the games all the time.  That’s it.  Nothing special.  Just thousands of 8 bit games.

Surely that would be heaven.

30 years later, I have them.  All of them.  All the Odyssey games, all the vic-20 games, all the Intelevision games, most of the Atari games.  All in their original geeked out cartridge form.

I acquired these over a two year period in the 1990s, I found some mailing lists where people who were into this sort of thing had massive auctions.  Most of the games were a dollar.

I understand the mind of the collector.  Even if my collection was acquired rather quickly. 

Many of my friends have done the estate sale route for years.  Some to buy things to resell, some to collect things for themselves.  They come back with stories that basically make me unwilling to even go to estate sales.

People will massive collections of stuff.  You name it, stuffed animals, papers, magazines, books, curios, pepsi bottles,….

Things of massive importance to these people – but passions seldom shared.  Introverted.  And, in the end, wasted on estate sale reps who don’t know how to convert them into useful collections.  Quite often they are converted into the filling of garbage bags and indiscriminately sent off to the dump.

I also wonder if these passions while they are unshared are sort of like dreams deferred.  They cause people to become a little odd.  The inability to share makes them into obsessions more than passions.  You become holed-up with them. 

I would like to believe that affinity groups on the Internet will mitigate this phenomenon.  That people of esoteric interests will be able to befriend people of similar interests.  They can be extended in a passionate, scholarly, and friendly way through community.  Then, in the end, there will a community to take and extend these people’s previously personal passions.

Technorati Tags: community,collections,eleanor rigby,estate sales,musing

Blogged at the Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, WA

Photo by Tonianne

Findability is Power II – Social Media Principle #10

In the first attempt to describe Findability is Power, I defined the principle thusly:

10. Findability is power – Unfindable information or people are irrelevant.

Ed Vielmetti left this comment:

I'll have to disagree, Jim.

There's lots of unfindable information that's terribly relevant - information (or at least data) that's available only if you know precisely how to ask for it of precisely the right human being with precisely the right words and maybe the right tone of voice or the right letterhead.

If an organization can tax your patience by making it difficult for you to figure something out, it can destroy your desire for it.

Ed is right.  And I’m somewhat annoyed at myself for misstating my intentions.

This would be better stated as:

10. Findability is power – Unfindable assets are waste.

The previous post showed how context and other factors change how we relate to information.  But I was remiss in not making the whole point.

For business: information, people, and objects are all assets.  In order for assets to be worth holding, they need to be usable in some way that creates more value than their cost of storage, management and maintenance.

Jen Zug shows us through her (very timely) tweet that we as consumers now expect findability.  We expect to go to KUOW and intuitively find assets.

When the customer does not find what she wants, she gets annoyed.

Annoy me once, shame on you.  Annoy me twice, I’m tweeting about it!

Ed’s comment speaks to waste from information not being immediately findable.  Whether I’m looking for something at KUOW or within my own company – if I have to fight to find relevant information my patience will wear thin.  My push to find the important and relevant information will end when my internal opportunity cost calculator in my brain says, “This is now too  much trouble.”

On the flip side, when information is readily accessible, its value is astronomically higher.  When I Google something and get the answer in less than a second, the cost of acquisition of the information is monstrously lower than its potential value when I use it for something or even if I discard it.

The required end-value of a use of data needs to be very measurable to obtain it in a person-to-person system.  If I need something, it needs to be worth my time, the person I’m bothering, and the annoyance penalty for taking us both away from other things.  In a computerized, rapid access world – that same information takes less than a second to obtain and inconveniences no one.

This means that casual queries based on conversations that could prove fruitful in the future are possible.  Multiple avenues of inquiry can quickly be attempted, analyzed and discarded with minimal impact on corporate resources.  Discovery of unexpected and highly useful information is now much more likely.

I’ll finish up by bringing up Jen Zug again … she expects the information to be findable.  So should she.  Now, the organization of KUOW has gained her ire.  What would Jen have done if she found that content?  More than likely she would have tweeted it.  She would have said, “Incredible story today on KUOW about Vegemite Soup” (or something) and given a link. 

KUOW’s poor findability turned a viral promoter into a viral complainer.

Within a business, poor findability turns innovation into frustration.

Technorati Tags: Jen Zug,Ed Vielmetti,KUOW,twitter,10 social media principles,social media principles,social media,findability

Blogged in the Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Washington

Karma is Real – Social Media Principle #6

This post is fifth in a series of my Social Media Principles.  The base post is 10 Social Media Principles.

#6: Karma is real – You give more, you get more.

I was much amused to find that Doug Haslam’s mention of An Bui’s remix of the 10 Principles focused specifically on this principle.  He says:

Not that this was An Bui’s intent for the blog, but I have trouble imagining saying “Karma is Real” when trying to ask the Big Boss for more social media budget.

Well, it certainly was our intent and I welcome the conversation.  I personally have found most upper management (Big Bosses) prefer arguments that are both in and out of the box.  Concepts like this rupture the box from the inside.

Reap What You Sow

If Doug is worried about non-western religion, he can use Reap what you Sow

Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.- Galatians 6:7 

or perhaps B.B. King

I do everything you tell me to
You won't do anything baby but try to make me blue
Baby, you ought to treat me right
Oh baby, you're gonna reap just what you sow
-- B.B. King, Treat Me Right

or Emerson

"You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Trust me, the invocations are inexhaustible.  Karma is not a concept owned by any culture or religion.

As a word, Karma simply means “action”.  As a concept, it is tied to the laws of cause and effect.  If we give more, we get more.  If we act well, we are treated well.  If we are snarky, we get some snark back.

This concept upsets some people as being all hand-holding kumbaya-like. So, let’s examine how and why it is important for business and where it comes into play in social media.

Court of Public Opinion

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently. – Warren Buffet

What other people think matters.  And it should.

The Brand

In business, people are judging your brand, your product quality, and your actions.  People are taking their money, their energy, and investing it in your product.  Your reputation is important.

Prior to now, business reputation could often be made through advertising and public relations slight-of-hand.  But the world is becoming more and more transparent and, simultaneously, elephant-like.  It sees more and forgets less.

Once trust is destroyed it is very hard to build back.  No one is rushing to give Bernard Madhoff more money.

An Bui’s post focused on this concept.

The Culture

Internal to a business, Karma is a major driving force as well.  For example, who is hired, promoted, and ultimately successful for your company is entirely a product of karma.

But whose Karma and what Karma?

Ideally, it would be bottom-up karma – a meritocracy of the best and brightest working their way up through the system and creating the best and healthiest company imaginable.

Why are you laughing?

You are laughing because we all know it doesn’t work this way.  Promotions are all-too-often the result of backstabbing, Peter Principling, incompetence reshuffling, ulterior motivating, politicking, etc.  Sometimes it’s due to corporate or union momentum – that inexorable force that promotes people simply due to longevity.

You are laughing because it’s inconceivable that we could create a business that would be healthy enough to actually reward and promote appropriately.

(This is why Buckingham’s first book is called First Break All The Rules. The current rule set doesn’t allow for bottom-up Karma).

Top-Down Karma

An organization most often derives its culture from management.  As we discussed with the mythical company Amalgamated Suckup (Jim’s version, An’s version), as companies become less introspective, they rely more on policy to govern the business.

Policies become a crutch.

Policies generally require stuff and most often that stuff comes in the form of information rigidity.  The right form at the right time – no exceptions.

As the form trumps function, people lose enthusiasm and stop working for the success of the company and more for the success of the policies.  “How the game is played". 

Karma being satisfied here is not from the bottom – or from the individual.  The karma being satisfied here is from the institution.

Now, follow the dots.

If a bottom-up meritocratic approach gives you the best and the brightest – what does a top-down bureaucratic approach give you?  It gives you people skilled at satisfying your bureaucracy and navigating your politics.

Karma in Social Media

 

"Realize that everything connects to everything else."
- Leonardo DaVinci

Now, unless my history is inaccurate, DaVinci didn’t have a Powerbook.  (though he probably sketched one)

Karma is certainly not an invention of social media.  But social media highlights how people react when healthy social reinforcement is in place.

Karma in social media is everywhere.  Whether explicitly stated, as in this screenshot from Plurk, or more implicit, understanding the notion of Karma is what makes a good social network.

First we have the notion of a “friend”. The liberal definition of Friend in social media upsets a lot of people.  (Some people like to be outraged, it makes them feel important).

But, as used in social media, friends are people you have contact with.  The term friend is … friendly. Networks form.

People in these networks do things.

To the left here we have my Yelp statistics. I’ve given this company 140 reviews, gone to a bunch of their events, and I’ve amassed about 100 friends.

Why?  Why would I spend my time adding to the intellectual property of this company?

The reason is entirely Karma based.

I gave them 140 reviews, these reviews were good enough to get them to make me an “elite” member. This means I rose through the meritocracy to get special perks.  (Hosted dinners, etc.)

You will also see that people vote on each review.  It can be useful, funny and / or cool.  This is done by readers.  Any reader.

Compliments are from fellow Yelpers who can leave a compliment under any of 9 categories.

Good behavior on Yelp can be noted by anyone at any time and in many different ways. 

Social media has shown us repeatedly that sites that provide ample rewards for good behavior see more good behavior.  Those that penalize bad behavior see people leave and go to other sites.

What Goes Around Comes Around

The principle here is a principle: Karma is real.  As businesses plan projects, cultural changes, and their relationships internal & external, the fact that in a networked world people can quickly judge and mete rewards or punishments must be a guiding force. 

The community will judge your company based on your actions.  It’s that simple and it’s that complicated.

Or Perhaps Bob Dylan says it better:

You may be a preacher with your spiritual pride,
You may be a city councilman taking bribes on the side,
You may be workin' in a barbershop, you may know how to cut hair,
You may be somebody's mistress, may be somebody's heir

But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.

-- Bob Dylan, Gotta Serve Somebody

UPDATE:  Here is a good, concise application of this principle by Hutch Carpenter correlating tweets to followers.

Image and Captions for the Image of the “bloke from Poland” courtesy of Donald H. Taylor. 

Technorati Tags: Doug Haslam,An bui,Bob Dylan,Ralph Waldo Emerson,management,10 social media principles,rewards,karma,karma is real,Donald Taylor,Plurk,Leonardo DaVinci,Marcus Buckingham,kumbaya,warren buffet

Written at my vacation house, in Ocean Shores, WA.