I had a very interesting talk a little while back with Gregg Petersmeyer and a couple of his colleagues. Petersmeyer is the CEO of Personal Pathways, a startup that aims to increase levels of trust and confidence among people within an enterprise “who need to collaborate successfully, but who don’t really know one another.” (I have no financial interest in or business relationship with PP)
PP believes in the power of technology to increase trust and confidence among weakly-tied colleagues (and perhaps even to convert potential ties into actual ones). The company harnesses this power by creating “internal corporate social networks that accelerate, deepen and extend purposeful relationships around the work that needs to be done. Users develop a unique 360° user profile of depth and substance, celebrate one another’s large and small successes, and create meaningful groups and communities of interest.”
As they explained this to me I was, of course, nodding my head vigorously in agreement. As I’ve written before, I believe that the new crop of digital tools for building, maintaining, and exploiting social networks are both novel and powerful for individuals and enterprises alike.
The element of PP’s offering that I found most thought-provoking was the “360° user profile, ” which is composed in large part of responses to questions that PP has come up with. These questions are designed to reveal what kind of person a respondent is, and what kind of colleague she’d be. If I understand correctly, they’re intended to accelerate the process of getting to know someone who might work half a world away, and to facilitate the process of building a trust relationship with that person. Presumably, the PP questions and user profiles will also be used by managers to select people into teams.
After they described their company I responded to what I’d heard by brutally oversimplifying, then further insulted PP by implying that it was derivative. “So this is Facebook meets eHarmony for the enterprise?” I said (I was evidently channeling a screenwriter pitching a script to a studio executive). Petersmeyer replied, with more grace than I warranted, that this was a fair summary.
We then had a fascinating discussion about whether this was the right approach. We talked not so much about the Facebook part (everyone in the room agreed that some type of digital social weak-tie-maintaining glue is valuable) as about the eHarmony part.
eHarmony advertises that its “patented Compatibility Matching System® narrows the field from millions of candidates to a highly select group of singles that are compatible with you. Unlike other sites where you can post a picture and paragraph and then browse the profiles of other users, eHarmony does the matching for you based on 29 DimensionsTM of personality that are scientifically-based predictors of long-term relationship success.” These 29 dimensions are determined from an individual’s responses to 258 questions. I have not attempted to complete an eHarmony application myself, but friends who have tell me that it is quite a bit of work.
The quote above indicates eHarmony’s confidence that its algorithms will do a better job matching people than the people themselves could. The company as much as asserts that in the important task of looking for love we don’t know what we’re looking for as well as the brains behind and computers within eHarmony do.
eHarmony’s approach to connecting people is to first collect a large amount of structured data from them, then have the people themselves sit by while computers and algorithms go to work on this data. The company claims a great deal of success with this approach and has become popular, with perhaps as many as 25 million members.
Craigslist, another extremely popular website, takes exactly the opposite approach to facilitating personal connections. Craigslist asks its users to categorize their postings (‘jobs,’ ‘housing,’ ‘personals,’ etc.) and to specify a geographic area, but makes no further attempt to specify or standardize the information posted. And as everyone who has spent time on the site knows, the diversity of posts is simply astonishing. If you’re a CL newbie and want to get an idea of this variety, check out the best-of-craigslist (Be forewarned, though, that a great deal of viewer discretion is advised.).
CL’s approach is to let people describe what they have and/or what they’re looking for with no rules, guidelines, or requirements (beyond a few intended to keep things legal). There are few communities more freeform on the Web, and its personals sections is, like eHarmony, highly popular.
Is one of these two approaches better than the other? Leave aside for the moment the fact that eHarmony automates the work of connecting people, and concentrate only on the fact that it requires them to supply a large amount of structured information. And compare this to CL’s almost completely unstructured environment. Which of these two types of digital connective tissue would you rather have throughout your organization?
This is far from an idle or academic question. At present most social networking applications – Facebook, Twitter, etc. – are close to CL. They require very little and offer great freedom of self-expression. Underlying their architectures is a conscious or unconscious philosophy that if left to their own devices people will do a good job of expressing themselves, and that their self-portraits will be both accurate and revealing.
The success of these communities strongly indicates that this philosophy is not bankrupt. In other words, there’s clearly some validity to the idea that unguided self-description leads to connection. But would guided self-description work better?
Personal Pathways is betting that it will. A large part of their value proposition (as I understand it) is the survey they ask people to complete when they join their organization’s PP-built social network. This survey is intended to provide valuable information to their current and prospective colleagues, in particular the kind of information that people might not have thought to provide if left to their own devices.
Given what I’ve learned about the strength of weak ties and the value of converting potential ties into actual ones, if PP’s approach is better than CL’s for interconnecting people than it’s the one enterprises should adopt. But is it the better approach?
My intuition tells me that I’d learn a lot more about someone from reading their Facebook profile, 50(?) of their tweets, or even a couple paragraphs of freeform self-description than I would from reviewing their answers to a standardized questionnaire, no matter how carefully constructed it was. I find that responses to standardized questions look, well, standardized; they tend to flatten out variety rather than highlight it. Because of this, when I’m getting to know someone I want to hear what they want to say, not what any third party (no matter how smart or well-intentioned) wants us to talk about.
Do you share this preference, or do you find more structure beneficial? Some sophisticated organizations are in the latter camp. McKinsey, for example, has a highly standardized interviewing process for new hires. Hiring is, of course, a crucially important type of interconnection; McKinsey believes that it’s far too important to be handled in a freeform manner, and so has adopted a PP-like approach.
For other kinds of personal connection in professional settings, do you think an at least somewhat standardized approach is best, or do you have more faith in the freeform? Are you closer to the eHarmony or craigslist philosophy of interconnection? Leave a comment, please, and let us know. And if you have any data on this topic or know of any good research in the area, let us know that as well.
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
I think paying attention to the audience type in a discussion such as this is really important. For those in the enterprise that consider “browsing” and “discovery” to be an important ingredient (Marketing, R&D, Development) to work success, a free form approach makes a lot of sense so you can make your own judgments about quality and credibility . On the other hand, for a sales rep, standardization of profiles around predefined contexts work much better. So a Twitter or CL model might be too open ended and requires a lot of attention. PP might afford the right balance if it could be fused with predefined tasks (“who's credible around a solution, market, customer, etc). Which leads to me to think Friendfeed has the beginnings of a more promising model than Twitter or CL.
I think the best method depends on the seriousness of the relationship.
For most business contacts, the Craigslist metaphor is great. It's fun. It's interesting. I don't need to know everything about you.
But if we're going into business together, I like the eHarmony metaphor. I need the specifics, the particulars. I want to make sure I don't miss anything about you.
Interestingly, 236 eHarmony users are married every day in the United States, on average. That accounts for about 2 percent of all marriages in the U.S. Craigslist doesn't keep stats on that kind of thing, but I presume that if they did, they wouldn't really compare in the “seriousness” department.
So can we have both in the enterprise? Start with Craigslist, progress to eHarmony when ready?
(Disclaimer: eHarmony is a customer of my company.)
I'm firmly in the CL camp. We've tried too long and too hard to create taxonomies that guess people's needs and intents and miss every time. I now subscribe to the minimal amount of systemic categorization and maximizing people's use of search to let them get what they want when they want it.
This is largely an unpopular stance in IT organizations that tend to have leadership that skews to the more structured/workflow process types.
I think there is a third option that lies between these two, but it depends on the feature set of the platform. If the platform delivers a combination of social networking as well as project and content collaboration, the system itself can provide you with a pretty good picture of the person.
For example, suppose I have identified a person as a possible resource for an new initiative. I have visibility to the profile information he has posted, but I also have visibility into the work he has done; projects he has worked, comments he has posted (similar to the DISQUS, for example) , work product he has produced, and people with whom he has worked. If after reviewing these data, he seems to have the expertise I want, I can also see if any of my close connections have worked with him, and I can reach out directly to them for an assessment.
A system like this would not require individuals to enter a bunch of profile information and keep it up to date, but rather because the system is the platform through which they do much of their work and collaboration/communication, the information about that person grows as a natural consequence of their daily activities.
Any system that relies on individuals to provide and keep current information about themselves will ultimately be limited by people failing to provide enough information, gaming the system by spinning what they do provide, and not keeping their information current.
Refering to your blog's title, what if the best result would come up from a combined approach? A more complete profile datas inspired by eHarmony's model and, while facts reveal more than words, a period of time to study someone actions in Web environments.
Like quantic physics, I rather prefer base my analysis on people's movement than static infos only. I am wondering if eHarmony's algorythm could take care of business interests and caracteristics of potential partners to provide a “perfect” business match?
I don't believe the CL model works well in enterprises, in part because there is just too much information to make enterprise-level search effective and efficient. The productivity loss due to ineffective search is incredible.
I concur with many of Andy S's points. Explicit information provided in corporate profiles/directories is not updated frequently enough (unless made mandatory, which I'm guessing is pretty rare). An employee's social capital provides a great deal of valuable information, including expertise level, communication skills and style, etc. Insight gained from SNA will reveal a more accurate picture of how work really gets done and who the real experts are. Leveraging this is critical going forward as global competition necessitates a stronger focus on HCM, KM, and HR decisions. (Hopefully prediction market data yields this type of insight as well.)
Overall, context is key. The eHarmony model is great if your profile doesn't change, which I assume is the norm in the context of long-term, personal relationships. Answering hundreds of questions might seem excessive, but given eHarmony's success rate, the return on that investment of time is invaluable.
Two of the biggest problems in the enterprise are expertise location and search. The former needs some combination of explicit and implicit information. The latter does as well, however implicit info should carry more weight. Both are contextual activities, but search is more immediate and situational. Looking at the user's search history, web 'footprints', search history of the user's direct connections, etc., will provide much better search results.
The CL approach is a disaster; not only is the user starting from scratch for each search, but the user's results are dependent on the CL poster's ability to enter an accurate description, use keywords and/or acronyms the user understands, etc. This approach is part of the reason that today's enterprise-level search tools are ineffective.
Bob P
Hi Andrew,
Thought provoking article. To use a cliche, “Actions speak louder than words”. I would rather judge someone by what they do online than they say online. Having said that, there are two hurdles to that approach.
One, actions are generally spaced over time. i.e. What books I read, what blogs I write, what movies I see … needs to have history before I can collect all that information and make some judgments based on that.
Two, I may not get all this information from someone again because either they don't share that explicitly or there are still technological hurdles that don't let us integration every online activity into every other.
So collecting information about someone is easier, faster and possibly the only way to do it today. But I think as more people start to share what they do online and technology allows us to do that, I see that explicit information capture would not be as necessary.
Andy –
Very interesting discussion. There are a few things we at Personal Pathways would like to contribute to the conversation.
In actual practice our profile is somewhere in between CL and eHarmony (we agree with several of the comments that a combination of the two is actually the preferred approach). In contrast to eHarmony, we do not require users to fill out every portion of the profile but rather allow them to fill out as much as they would like when they would like and in the form they would like. In contrast to Craigslist, we do provide more structure to the information in the profile to both 1) help users who are not comfortable starting with a blank text box present information about themselves and 2) solicit information in a form that the system can more readily identify connections among individuals. By combining these approaches, a variety of insights about individuals can be achieved.
Ideally, insights about a person reveal a variety of non-random dimensions to them – dimensions of life and work that matter to another person and can affect the chemistry and effectiveness of a relationship. Therefore, the challenge is to reveal glimpses of a person of a nature and substance that increase the probability of triggering other people or another person to think about them differently than they would have absent this information. Research and experience support the idea that the level of trust and confidence that underlies collaboration that achieves differentiated results depends on knowing one another beyond a superficial level. While that non-superficial level might be gained by either the CL or eHarmony approach, Personal Pathways' approach helps surface meaningful insights about colleagues of sufficient variety to support the most effective collaboration.
We appreciate the framing of the question from you and the comments thus far. We also look forward to more discussion on this topic moving forward and seeing how this topic plays out in the enterprise.
I think Andy S says it well. The answer definitely falls between the two and sounds like PP are doing something along those lines. In my company we've been more toward the CL model – not with any Web 2.0 attempts at social networking – but knowledge management, communities and the collaboration that should come from encouraging communities of practice. I believe you really lose a lot of your valuable information and possible connections when there's little or no structure. Speaking as an eHarmony success story, I can say the structure of the questionaire helped go way beyond the superficial. It definitely required some seriousness of intent. The fact that I didn't have to look at anyone elses 200+ answers was important-that would have lost me immediately, just like weeding though a bunch of search results that had no relevancy or algorithm behind them. The computerized compatibility matching gave me a starting place that would have otherwise taken a lot longer to get to. Then you have the platform to do the free-form interaction. In some cases a little bit of freeform info was enough to decide “no match” and in other cases, just the opposite.
My company recently did an internal network analysis to evaluate the quantity and quality of linkages between employees and we're now looking at the results for trends (e.g. people in knowledge communities tend to network more with other people in communities and we still have a lot of geographic and organizational walls). Next we'll need to come up with some action items to improve the picture. I think one action has to do with giving people more ways to connect using technology since we are so globally dispersed. But I believe that's a big cultural change and a very up-hill battle.
I agree with Ashwin, that actions are more important than words. We advise organizations that want to build a corporate social network to merge structured and unstructured data in people's profiles. That means, any corporate information, e.g. role, location, contact details should be pulled in from the HR directory. The profile should also include some free-form fields for interests, expertise knowledge etc.
The most part of a profile however, should be dynamic. It should pull in all the actions that the user performs on the corporate systems, i.e. tagging, commenting, bookmarking, favouring, rating, adding information to the CRM, checking in a document into the DMS, making changes on the wiki etc. These actions truly reflect what a person is about, rather than relying on the words that a person uses to describe himself.
Experience shows that people can't be bothered filling in their profile data and even less to keep it up to date. That's why I can't imagine people answering a large number of questions unless it is mandatory. But even then, the role and work of people change. Do they then have to answer those questions again?
I would be very interested to know who the BETA company testers are. I assume you are not allowed to disclose that information, are you?
Craigslist is a huge site and always something new happening.
Have to say I do agree. Things like this just are what they are.
Good article! In relation to public awareness, the demand for unsecured personal loans is at an all time high. Unsecured personal loans are loans made without the backing of collateral. Your average bank won't make them, definitely not during times like these. There are other options, though, for those who don't want to go to a normal lending institution where they know they'll be turned down. You can get unsecured personal loans through payday loan companies. If you just need a cash advance loan, you can apply for an unsecured personal loan. The best ways to survive in this time of recession it to minimize unwanted expenses, and try to budget your income so you wouldn’t depend more to many kinds of loans and payday cashes not unless you really need it.
Very interesting article.
I think that I tend to appreciate the Craigslist approach over eHarmony and I agree with you that standardized questions tend to elicit standardized answers. In thinking about it, I would imagine the time that goes into determining the questions and then how to categorize people based on those answers would be quite intensive. While I think some level of categorizing based on standardized questions may be useful, I'd like to see something that adapts based on a more long-term interaction that isn't quite so black and white.
Having met my wife on eHarmony, I have to say that the algorithms eHarmony came up with do a phenomenal job of matching people based on their personalities. After using numerous dating sites, I finally hit upon eHarmony and found my right match. What eHarmony does is analyze your personality based on the standardized questionnaire. The report they issue is itself very insightful. They illuminate what your most important needs are, and I was surprised to find that through my 14 years of dating I had not learned nearly as much as I did from the results of my eHarmony questionnaire.
The questionnaire gave me new insight into what I needed in order to prosper in a long term relationship. The “other” dating sites allow you to browse through different profiles, but you are subject to your conscience desires, and not driven by your subconscious needs. You may go for a person who is very attractive, but does not have the deep-seated personality traits that make for a long lasting relationship.
My vote is for eHarmony all the way. I don't know if they have divorce statistics yet, but I would bet my savings that the rate is much lower than the alternative means of meeting your true love.
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eHarmony is a great site. Though i have a wife i always search for right girl there. LOL…..
who has two books to her credit, is now working on a book
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