Chris Daviduik

Roughly a week ago I decided to take advantage of Facebook’s new “promote” option for some posts on my Facebook Page in order to ensure a larger than usual number of people would see them. You may be aware that despite Facebook being constantly touted as a godsend to artists, small businesses, and the like, in order to connect with their fans or consumers the truth is in a galaxy far far away.

To give you an example, my page, as of this writing, has 1958 likes. On June 14th when I decided to promote my post that number was essentially the same (within 5 likes). Looking at some recent, non-promoted, posts prior to June 14th they would usually reach (i.e. get seen by) between 173 - 314 people depending on how many people commented on or liked the post. So that means a post usually only reaches between 8.8% - 16.0% of the people who like my page. This is dismal.

At this point it is worth going back and digging up the story regarding how I got those 1958 likes in the first place. A few years ago when my band (which the Facebook Page is for) was starting out I decided to invest some money in Facebook Ads in order to attract some likes and get our name out. I spent roughly $5/day for maybe a month or two or something. It doesn’t really matter how long the ads were shown for as much as the fact that a few hundred dollars were spent. In retrospect we got a lot of likes and some other benefits as a result however that is the subject of a different/future rant.

If an unnerving trend is not already evident let me explain. Facebook wants to charge you to get likes and then charge you again to reach those likes. Unfortunately my legal knowledge is limited however this “feels” borderline illegal.

Now you might be wondering how much they charge to screw you over. In my case I gambled $10 to promote one of my page’s posts. According to Facebook it reached 1658 people, 614 of which were organic, 705 were viral, and 1288 were paid. This implies only 1288 were the result of my $10. Whether you think that is a good deal or not is up to you however further data from Facebook indicates out of all of those only “37% of the 1958 people who like your page saw this post.” Math says that is 724.46 people. This went from dismal to depressing.

So I’m paying $10 for 1288 people who don’t even necessarily like my page to view my posts. On a separate post the next day I paid $5 and got the same 37% result. This means when I “promote” my post it isn’t being seen by the people I want it to but instead being (likely) ignored on the sidebar somewhere amidst all the other ads.

When I click the “promote” button for my Facebook post it specifically states “Get more people who like your Page to see this post.” According to actual data this is a blatant lie. As I write this I am getting more convinced of this being “actually” illegal instead of just “feeling” illegal. How is this anything but false advertisement? This is on top of the fact that I am paying to reach people I have already paid to like my page (via advertisements).

Despite all this Facebook still provides a “better than nothing” benefit however I would urge people to keep their distance and look for better alternatives. Fortunately Facebook has set the bar exceedingly low so this should not be too difficult.

I found this useful the other day and thought it worthy of “blog post” status. Hopefully someone else will find this equally useful.

If you are developing on Google App Engine then you have probably begun using their new NDB API (does anyone know what that is an acronym for?). One of the (many) cool new features includes Structure Properties. Essentially these let you group together a collection of model properties for easy reuse, such as the Address property Google uses as an example. When you fuse this together with the repeated attribute you have a practically unstoppable data storage machine. Except you just have to figure out a way to collect the data.

If you are a sensible person you are probably using Webapp2 or Django on App Engine (although I’m sure each party would debate the sensibility of the other). I’m going to assume you are using Webapp2 because otherwise what I am about to say will probably not make any sense or be at all useful. Although Webapp2 doesn’t come built with a form framework (at least that I am aware of) we have WTForms! Now, onto the interesting part…

Continuing with App Engine’s Address example lets create the associated WTForm:

class AddressForm(Form):
    type = fields.TextField()
    street = fields.TextField()
    city = fields.TextField()

Then its as easy as the following to incorporate it into your Contact form:

class ContactForm(Form):
    name = fields.TextField()
    addresses = fields.FieldList(fields.FormField(AddressForm), 'Address', min_entries=3)

Boom! Piece of cake. Then in your POST handler you can just grab the data from your AddressForm and drive it into your Contact entity:

form = ContactForm(self.request.POST)
addresses = []
for entry in form.addresses.entries:
    address = Address(type=entry.type.data, street=entry.street.data, city=entry.city.data)
    addresses.append(addresses)
contact_entity = Contact(name=form.name.data, addresses=addresses)

Woohoo! We did it! The only problem now is how do I get the data out of my entity and back into the form if I want to edit it? No problem! Problem solved:

addresses = []
for address in contact_entity.addresses:
    addresses.append({
        'type' : address.type,
        'street' : address.street,
        'city' : address.city
    })
form = ContactForm(addresses=addresses)

Mission accomplished!!! I think that should answer all your questions however if you have any left just let me know.

I had some ideas this morning, somewhere between doing my exercises and having a shower, that I think everyone can agree are brilliant.

The Problem

My recommendations are intended for agile work environments although it is possible they may be applicable to other crappier work environments. If you are not familiar with scrum/agile it essentially involves working in short sprints, perhaps a week or two long, where the planning for that week’s work is done at the beginning of the sprint and then a release at the end. Wikipedia has more information, not relevant to my discussion, that you can acquaint yourself with if you like.

In the case of a two week sprint you might spend a few hours on the first day planning the work which will be done over course of the next two weeks. During this time it is a natural occurrence to have differing viewpoints regarding how some of the work should be accomplished (or even the exact definition of the problem being solved). Typically these disagreements are solved using some boring democratic process which involves agreement by the majority of people involved (maybe around 6 or so).

The Solution

I propose a superior alternative where disagreements are solved using physically demanding one-on-one competitions. Each group of people with an opposing viewpoint can nominate someone to represent them to perform said physical task(s). These exercises could involve arm wrestling, pushups or some other quantitative activity where an obvious victor can emerge. This would help encourage people to maintain peek physical form in order to win over their competitors.

Let’s Make This Interesting

Now at this point you are probably thinking “won’t this just encourage companies to retain employees who are  physically advantageous but might not be able to perform their other required tasks satisfactorily?” That is a great question! And I’m glad you asked.

In order to avoid this obvious conundrum I have a fantastic solution. The team with the highest velocity, as judged by a third party chicken, gets the option to make a trade with one of the other teams. So if some useless team who has been doing nothing but browsing reddit all week (I do love reddit though) has an Arnold Schwarzenegger to fend off dissenters then LOOK OUT because those rockstar programmers who have been hiding in their caves all week are coming to get him!

Fantasy Work

The best part about the above solution is you could easily create a meta game around it by calculating odds that different teams will succeed and/or employees will be traded. A Fantasy Work League™ if you will. Everyone can pick their favourite employees at the beginning of a project (or fiscal quarter maybe) and see who comes out ahead at the end.

Not only will this make work more interesting, it will boost moral by creating excitement around the office. “Joe Programmer got traded? NO! He was on my all star draft!”

Summary

By implementing a program where employee’s choices are based on peek physical condition a culture promoting healthy lifestyles will obviously emerge. Rewarding teams with the greatest output will also motivate teams to work hard and prevent some bad apple from gaming the system. Finally by creating a Fantasy Work League™ incorporating this system an immediate boost of employee moral will be seen since they will be excited about the environment they are working in.

I challenge anyone to find anything that could possibly go wrong with this.