YamJam and HRTECH: The Rise of Social Recognition

By Jim Lundy

This blog post is about the rise of Social Recognition, but it could be titled the coming war between Badgeville and Globoforce (Badging vs Corporate Recognition), but we’ll leave vendor wars for future discussions. At the #HRTECH Conference a few weeks ago, our biggest take away was that the socialization of corporate recognition programs will be one of the biggest additions to a Social HCM strategy. Note we are talking about real recognition, not just some badges that you give out in a social network. I’ve written about Gamification done right in a previous post and since that piece, one thing I’ve noticed is that there are more conversations happening around this topic. Many end users are still trying to understand what is going on in this space.

One of the things that happened at Dreamforce, was that Salesforce’s Work.com business unit announced a Recognition offering that featured Amazon Gift cards. When someone wants to recognize another person at the firm, they can do that in Salesforce Chatter and give out some real recognition.  You  have to give Salesforce.com some credit, they stepped up and helped to enhance the area of Social Performance, even if they are not in the business of selling Corporate Recognition programs the way that a vendor like Globoforce is.

Jump ahead to HRTech and there was some real buzz about embedding recognition into a Social Platform. The problem is that many are not really offering that yet. We see it as a natural evolution of a Corporate Recognition program. Being able to give real recognition in a Social Platform can amplify the message of the actual recognition because more people see it and the employee or customer getting the recognition feels even better about getting it. We’ll be discussing this more in some of our Syndicated Research.

Jump ahead to Yammer’s Customer Event #YamJam and four of the twelve vendors in their Expo area are focusing on performance and recognition. That tells us two things. First, Yammer has emerged to be a Social Platform and two, lots of startups want to get into Social Performance and Recognition.

The key point about adding recognition to a Social Platform is you should not separate the formal recognition program you already have in place from the one you want to add to your social network. Since we are practitioners of Social Networking and help end user enterprises with their Social Strategy, we advise enterprises to look carefully at things such as badging, before diving in. As I indicated in my earlier post, enterprises need to take a step back and look at what they already have in place in areas such as recognition before they socialize it.

We’ll be talking more about what happened here at YamJam in other posts, but so far, a pretty good event. For today, you can follow me, @JimLundy on Twitter for realtime updates.