There was once a study where psychologists shown subjects a series of pictures, asking them to rate how attractive the people in the pictures were. Unknown to the subjects, they sometimes saw two of the same person– the difference being that one picture would be digitally manipulated to increase pupil dilation.  The impact?  The picture with the increased pupil dilation would on average receive one point higher in ratings– say, a 7, instead of a 6, out of 10.  The ancient Egyptians knew this two thousand years ago.  Before going out, girls would put eyedropper solution in their eyes to dilate their pupils.

But why does this work?

When you are attracted to someone, your brain instructs your eyes to let in more light– to collect more information on the object you are interested in.  Thus– the law of reciprocity, which is the old Dale Carnegie trick of “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People”.  How can you take the old techniques of remembering people’s names, asking people to talk about themselves, and giving compliments (instead of criticism)– and update that to the year 2009?

I like you

Do I?  Who knows, but there was once a car salesman in the Pacific Northwest who mass mailed prospects and handed out zillions of business cards.  He is allegedly the top car salesman in the US.  The secret?  (No, not “The Secret”, which is a book and movie).  He printed “I like you” on the backs of these cards.  Completely obvious, yes– but effective, nonetheless.  Facebook just released a feature where you can click “I like it” against any activity in your feed.  There is almost no downside to hitting “I like it” to anything that is in your feed as well as anything that a friend posts (within reason).  At the extreme, perhaps you can be accused of a nodding bobblehead or a “yes man”– perhaps a risk if you were to create a script that automatically hit “I like this” for anything you and your friends do on Facebook.  Hint: who wants to write the script and sell it to people on Linkedin?  Insurance and real estate agents would love it, by the way.

Your baby is beautiful and what a delicious meal you made!

Not all babies are beautiful– sorry.  And not every dinner at a friend’s house was the best [insert name of food] that you’ve ever had. But back to the rule of reciprocity, people like folks who like them. So in the world of LinkedIn, you can write a glowing recommendation of someone who you’d actually like to have a recommendation from.   There is a good chance they will reciprocate– provided that your recommendation is authentic and thoughtful.

I’ll invite my 10,000 of my best friends

Yeah, right. Remember the days of MySpace trains, where you could join the train and auto-friend everyone else– then get a million friends overnight?  The same is true with LinkedIn and Facebook– there are people who think that the quantity of friends makes up for lack of any depth with a few key close friends.  “So how many followers do you have on Twitter?”, was a question that came up in last night’s Tweetup in San Francisco.  I happen to have almost a thousand. There are folks who have 30 times that.  Yet the ratio of how many folks you have followed, divided by my how many friends you have is a more accurate measure of your influence. There are guys who have followed 10,000 people, and naturally got 3,000 folks to friend back.  Then they unfollow most of those original people and have a great looking ratio.  It goes back to developing relationships, which can only be done one person at a time.

Too much of any good thing is bad…

There is abuse in any of these tactics– but it doesn’t mean the tactic is not valid.  Overdo it and people will wonder if anything you say is just a veiled attempt at self-promotion.  But as Mark Twain said, “The key to success is to be genuine. Fake that and you’ve got it made!”

The beauty of sites like Hotwire and Priceline is that you can get a discounted price provided you are flexible about times, locations, and brands.  In general, we have had a great experience booking hotels and run most of our conference business through them.  This one time, we booked a 4 star hotel in Santa Clara for what looked like a great price.

One of our co-founders, Dean Mao, won another coding competition, this time with WeekendApps on the OpenSocial platform.  He doesn’t like publicity, but I thought I’d mention this feat anyway.  He won a pass to the Google IO conference, 1 million banner ad impressions, and some conversations from two private equity guys who want to hire away our star.  Next week, the app will be live on myspace/orkut/my.yahoo/ igoogle.  And we hope to be able to ad serve it with our social ad platform.  Congratulations to Dean!  Look for a note from him when the app is publicly live.

If you have a tripod, which of the legs is most important? Of course, they are all equally important– if you take any one of them away, the item being supported collapses.  The same is true in hiring.  Do you want smart folks, trustworthy folks, or hard-working folks?  How about hiring an absolute genius who is lazy or a hardworking thief, or a trustworthy idiot?  Over the course of the last year, BlitzLocal has grown to 53 employees and it has been a tough road in finding the right people.  If you have been cursed with success, to have more great projects than you have people– then you understand the urge to hire people who aren’t necessarily awesome, but might be “good enough”.

The weakest link

And thus, you might be tempted to bring in folks who aren’t superstars.  You have a variety of justifications: we really need some one right now, we can train them later, every company needs to have some grunt workers, they’re “good enough”, he’s a nice guy, and maybe we can use them for another project later.  But when you’ve lowered your standards, you create a cascading set of problems.  At first, this person performs poor work– but that’s normal, you say, since they’re still getting up to speed.  After a few weeks, they exhibit some of the same problems, but you decide to give them more time– and carry them by not only training them, correcting the work, and eventually just doing it yourself.   At some point, you become exasperated and complain that you should have just done it yourself in the first place– would have been less time and the project would have been done well and on time.

Hot potato

At the point this person realizes that they aren’t cutting it, they’ll probably go into defensive mode.  Rather than accept any kind of responsibility, they’ll claim they’re too busy, that someone else didn’t complete something they needed, or that they actually did the work already– maybe you lost it in your email?  Whatever way that the dog ate their homework, you’ll end up wasting your time trying to get them to straighten up.  Their saran wrap shield is see-through and absurdly weak, but they don’t know that.  Maybe they told a fib along the way, but now that they’ve gone so far with it, they can’t back out now– that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  I’ve had several folks say the nuttiest things with a straight face to me, in spite of chat logs and being caught red-handed.

But wait, there’s more!

Because you didn’t get rid of them right away– because you are a nice person who wants to extend multiple opportunities– this person feels that they can slide by undetected.  They have made friends with other team members– kind of like an a parasite that has set down roots into the host victim.  When they sense fear of being dislodged, they will politic and create turmoil– a smokescreen to perhaps confuse or distract you. After all, they have kids to feed, a mortgage to pay, and a general lifestyle to support that they’ve become accustomed to.  Keeping them around longer is telling them that their performance level is okay and even if it weren’t– that you’re not about to do anything about it anyway.  Perhaps you have a reputation as being such a nice guy that they don’t think you have the guts to call them out on it.  They might even be so bold as to steal from you, and then boast to their friends about how they did it.

Just say “No!”

Has this happened to you?  Joel Spolsky has one of the clearest rules of hiring.  If you’re not absolutely sure it’s a yes on the candidate, then the answer is no.  If you’re thinking “maybe”, then the answer is “no”.  If they have some great qualities in one area, but your instinct says that they’re either not trustworthy (they complain about how the last company treated them), not intelligent (can’t give clear explanations of what they actually did, or not a go-getter (talks too much about work-life balance and priorities), then the answer is no.  And if this person has managed to slip by– perhaps they were a friend of a friend, said the things they thought you wanted to hear, or made a great first impression with their professional clothes, then the kindest thing to do is let them go right away– don’t let them and everyone else suffer.