The "Aha!" Moment: Why Facebook and Your Onboarding/Retention Efforts Rely On the Same Emotions...

Your people strategy and Facebook have more in common than you might think.  Let's hit you with some details on how Facebook views new member onboarding and then talk about the connection after the jump.  From Time:

"Facebook did not invent social networking, but the company has fine-tuned it into a science. When a newcomer logs in, the experience is designed to generate something Facebook calls the aha! moment. This is an observable emotional connection, gleaned by videotaping the expressions of test users navigating the site for the first time. My mom, a Facebook holdout whose friends finally persuaded her to join last summer, probably had her aha! moment within a few minutes of signing up. Facebook sprang into action. First it asked to look through her e-mail address book to quickly find fellow Facebook users she knew. Then it let her choose which of these people she wanted to start getting short status updates from: Details about what a long-lost friend from high school just cooked for dinner. Photos of a co-worker’s new baby. Or of me carousing on a Friday night. (No need to lecture, Mom.)

Facebook has developed a formula for the precise number of aha! moments a user must have before he or she is hooked. Company officials won’t say exactly what that magic number is, but everything about the site is geared to reach it as quickly as possible. And if you ever try to leave Facebook, you get what I like to call the aha! moment’s nasty sibling, the oh-no! moment, when Facebook tries to guilt-trip you with pictures of your friends who, the site warns, will “miss you” if you deactivate your account."

Onboarding is one of those things that I always have on my list to do more with.  You get busy, you rationalize that you're doing enough or "more than other companies" (rationalization alert!!), so you keep it on the backburner.

Meanwhile, the "aha!" moment either happens or doesn't in your organization.  How much better would our satisfaction, engagement or retention scores be if we thought about the aha! moment daily?  How would our strategy differ from the team member who's open to having the aha! moment versus the one who's more jaded?  Would we deal with the natural cynics differently?

So many opportunities, so little time.  The aha! moment is on my list, and it went up the list a few notches after reading the Facebook approach.  How about you?

If you're really feeling the Facebook vibe, you can even order "I'm VP of HR, $#$@$" business cards like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

On second thought, maybe hold off on those biz cards and just focus on the aha! moment.

Comments

[Ed Nichols]

I've seen a massive shift on companies approach to social media over the last few years. More recently I have actually seen organisations integrating social media applications into internal systems - i've seen one company that has nearly recreated all the functionality within facebook!

[social media applications]

This post is different from what I read on most blog. And it have so many valuable things to learn.

[Custom Facebook Application]

I have seen the different website changed the strategy.Now website interlink the website with facebook connect