It’s good practice to appreciate your successes and learn from mistakes. Reviewing lessons learned and acknowledging co-workers is encouraged by such process gurus as the Project Management Institute. We were taken by a recent discovery: how Umbraco CMS is creating and embracing an asynchronous non-geolocated team of open source developers through shared “high fives” over Twitter.

Our History – You Rock Awards

You Rock Awards at Pure Visibility

We are a driven bunch, much more prone to notice and stew about the 5-10% that went wrong instead of the 90-95% that went right about a project. We started a practice to give each other public compliments and called them “pineapples” (for reasons you can read about on the Pure Visibility History page). Sometimes we even presented actual tasty pineapples to each other.

Toy porcupine, shared by eperales on Flickr

Over time, we decided to expand our practice to include “porcupines”, the inverse of a pineapple, something that was a learning event. We elected to share these to prevent teammates from going down a known dead-end path.

We like nuance rather than black and white, so we elaborated the taxonomy to include “pork-apples” (half porcupine, half pineapples) and “pine-u-pines” (half pineapple, half porcupine).

Or the more complicated and multi-faceted “yay-boo-yay,” a good thing with a bad surprise inside that has an OK resolution, or “boo-yay-boo”, a bad thing that seems to resolve but then reveals another problem underneath. These silly names got us talking about these things, and sharing solutions.

We have experimented a little with Twitter-like chat and messaging systems, where we can make these kinds of announcements to include remote team members in the celebrations and the lessons, but usage of these has faded after a short while. Institutionalizing this practice (everyone had to share a pineapple and a porcupine each week…) kind of deadened it and we got out of the habit.

Umbraco’s Approach

So, we were heartened to see this practice echoed and expanded immensely to Twitter (something many of our team members already use) by Umbraco CMS, an open source Content Management System. We haven’t actually seen an Umbraco CMS deployment, so we cannot comment on their product, but their process is fun and lighthearted.

They’re using Twitter, and the hashtag #h5yr (high five, you rock) to call out colleagues for successes. They’re also using Twitter and the hashtag #h5is (high five, I suck) to share lessons learned. What’s interesting is that instead of by reciting your errors by rote and educating the team about how to avoid your misdeed, there’s something light and positive about announcing that you rock for finding your own error.

Maybe it’s snarky  and self-deprecating when used by some, but I’m taking it at face value. I believe there is a victory in finding and correcting mistakes. I’ve always been an advocate of “making mistakes faster” – sharing work early and producing work iteratively to ensure that mistakes in understanding are corrected way before the end of the production process.

Anyway, see for yourself to interpret how it is being used by the Umbraco community by reading some recent posts on these sites:

• h5yr.com
• h5is.com

What I like is that it is shared, public, using a system that exists and is already in use, and lighthearted.

Hat tip to the Chief Happiness Officer blog.

We’re developing Instructor Resources for our Internet Marketing Start to Finish book. It has been a fun project.

Yet, because several of our chapters describe data analysis, any exercises for students require… well… data. And since we’re describing how to use web analytics data, creating exercises for using Google Analytics seems like the right first step.

All perfectly logical, except it lands us in a quandary. How do we create exercises for these chapters without knowing whether the students have access to web analytics at all? What might the quality of the analytics installation be, on any access they can beg for through a family or academic network?

In the big sandbox, made available through Creative Commons on Flickr by Ernst Vikne

We came to the conclusion we had to make available a sandbox account where students can view real data. Something where they can play with data, experiment with the interface and learn a few things.

Requirements for a learning Google Analytics (sandbox) account

1. The account should be properly installed (code on every page of the website). One of the first signs of poor installation is a large proportion of self-referrals in the traffic sources, showing that folks are looking like they’re coming from the same website. This can indicate incomplete installation of script-based web analytics services. Web data with configuration issues or gaps in deployment is tricky to impossible to analyze.
2. The account should have over two years of data in it, to shed light on any seasonal trends at work at the monthly level and to provide a long enough timeline to measure year over year change. Because web analytics is recorded from installation forward, it’s not retroactive. So, by the time the course has started, it is years too late to have an interesting data set for students to engage.
3. The account should have goals that have some business value by which to measure success of initiatives and/or success of the site itself.

So, Any Volunteers?

Yet, for businesses that use the Internet heavily for marketing and sales, web analytics data are typically proprietary, so it is hard to envision a scenario where interesting business data is freely available. If you know of such a situation, please leave it in the comments! Otherwise, keep reading for our current, half-baked solution.

Our Current Idea

The Good

The personal blog of one of the authors meets criteria 1 and 2. It has been installed completely on the (very simple) site and has been collecting data since fall 2006.

The Bad

The site and the analytic account is missing several things that would make it a good working dataset – the author is not running paid search to the site or doing a concerted link building program, so the referrals and paid search traffic sources are weak to empty. Worse, it lacks goals throughout its history, to be blunt the site lacks goals beyond experimentation and self-expression. So, it is a poor example for business goals, but a dataset nonetheless.

The Ugly

The thankless and annoying part will be to maintain access for students to the data. Setting up a publicly available login/password seems an invitation to treachery (among other issues, this “open” Google Account would end up having an available email account from which to spam the world).  

So, we’re going to opt for fielding requests from qualified instructors to provide a list of students access for a pre-defined period, opening us up to a lot of silly administration and a fair bit of “tech support” back and forth when student A cannot access her account because she does not yet have a Google Account set up even though she already gave us her email address.

This “access rigmarole” happens all the time with new clients, and doing it for free is not appealing. Yet, this is something that is part of the Google Analytics “setup” process, and is in itself a learning experience, though something I, for one, wish I’d never learned so well!

Let us know if you see a better solution out there or can envision something easier to maintain. Thanks in advance for the input!

What to Do When a Candidate asks to “Link In”

I Heart Job Offers Resume T-shirt by BlackBirdTees

What to Do When You’re a Facebook Friend of a Candidate?

An Age-Old Problem, with Heightened Visibility

Our Decision

Looking for More Guidance?

As part of larger SEO engagements, we manage the Google Places listings for some of our clients who have many locations. For these, we help our clients flesh out their listings with keyphrases relevant to folks searching for their services. We ensure that the listings are as complete as possible and we help maintain the data by updating the listings when locations open, close, or change their address.

Well, the tricky part of this engagement is the information in spurious listings. For the data we upload, Google Places offers a nice interface through which we manage adding locations, removing locations, and updates in bulk. It is the listings we don’t upload that sometimes cause us and our clients consternation. Google Places receives data from more than just our uploads. It soaks in data from across the Internet, and unfortunately, sometimes it pulls in old or outdated information. Read More

Knitted phone cozy - back

It’s important to bring fun and yourself into the workplace. I’m a knitter, and so for me, this week, my fun was to Yarnbomb the Co-Founders’ office.

When folks are on the phone all day, why shouldn’t the phone bring a smile to their faces? And what is more smile-inducing than a tacky knitted phone cosy with daisies?

Isn’t it time someone’s computer monitor stand sported a vining daisy i-cord?

Knitted daisy i-cord climbs the monitor stand

Want more information on and photos of knitted graffiti aka yarnbombing aka guerilla knitting?

• Yarnbombing.com, “Improving the urban landscape one stitch at a time”.
• Images of knitting graffiti on Flickr.
• Images of guerilla knitting on Google.
• A 2009 New York Times blog article on an “installation” of parking meter cozies.

What ideas do you have for generating a smile or two at the office today?

Love collaboration? Helping folks gain visibility and clients for their businesses? Love coordination? Love laughter?
Then, you might be right for Pure Visibility’s Relationship Manager position. Please check out our Relationship Manager position opening.

Dear Hootsuite,

We love Twitter, professionally and personally. It is a fun way to stay connected, an effective way to share good news and to connect with others, and it can be part of a cross-medium SEO and relationship-building strategy.

We have used Hootsuite to manage multiple-user access to shared or enterprise accounts for a while now, and we wrote in 2009 how TweetDeck and Hootsuite are better together. Well, here’s the reason we’re writing you, dear Hootsuite. In the body of that post, we of course shared our passion for TweetDeck and then in comments section of that post, we expressed a preference for a competitor, CoTweet. And, we’re sorry about that, we really are.

You see, when we flirted with TweetDeck it was because of its ability to create lists and segment the Twitter streams we’re following into thematic groups. You do that now. And when we expressed our admiration for CoTweet, it was because we needed to be able to manage multiple users on multiple accounts, and Hootsuite, we think you would admit this yourself, that wasn’t your strength at that point. Yet, in the time since, you’ve really grown, and you’ve made that part simple and added other features that make you the Twitter client we recommend to our clients.

The source of our Ardor: Google Analytics Parameter Presets

Beyond those “keep up with the Joneses” type updates, you’ve really set yourself apart with your Google Analytics integration. We also love Google Analytics, it helps us measure the work we do for our clients, and it gives us lots of web data to dive into and extract value for our clients. And it makes us so happy that you and Google Analytics get along so well!

We often recommend the Google Analytics URL builder to help clients tag URLs used in campaigns for tracking. Well, in the excitement of sharing or scheduling a tweet, it can be hard to remember to paste in all of those parameters at the end. And so, we were thrilled to see the ability to set the parameters as a campaign default when any URL is shortened within your dashboard.

Request – Multiple Presets Please..?!

So, assuming you accept our apology, dear Hootsuite, would you be willing to listen to one pretty-please request?

We love the custom URL parameters so much that we want to use them ALL THE TIME, so we have a request for an extension or tweak to this functionality. You see, we would like to get more specific with our campaign names, well, because we’re hyper about analytics parameters. So, ideally the analytics custom presets would to be configurable at the level of of the account rather than the level of the entire Hootsuite dashboard. You see, if we’re tweeting for ourselves, tweeting for a client, or tweeting personally, we want to be able to use different campaigns to comply with their or our best practices. And, we would prefer not have to remember to reset them every time. We love the “set and forget” pleasure of having the preset there in the first place.

Anyway, Hootsuite, thanks for listening. We sure do appreciate the wise and helpful owl you’re turning out to be.

In case you missed it (maybe you’ve had your TweetDeck turned off or you don’t surf the Amazon best sellers list), Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness came out today.

Disclosure: I’ve long been a fan of Zappos. I have hard-to-fit feet, and I very much appreciate the selection and the easy returns they offer. I’ve also long admired their openness and their zest for fun. I was one of the bloggers who received free advance copies of Delivering Happiness. I wrote my (positive) review of the book on my personal blog.

What I wanted to discuss in this space was the multifaceted, organic social media hoopla surrounding the book launch.

One of Zappos core values is to Build Open and Honest Relationships with Communication. And, this book launch is an illustration of that approach. And, it is a huge signal of the amount of trust Zappos has in its book and its brand to release many books to many bloggers and request honest feedback from across the blogosphere.

Aspects of the campaign

Inviting honest reviews

Ahead of the book launch, the website offered free advance copies to bloggers and provided us clear instructions for an honest review and where to link on the book’s website and Amazon. The Delivering Happiness Book website reader reviews page tallies reviews (though at the time of this writing the last update to that page was June 2, before the requested date to publish blog reviews). Perhaps more telling is that Yahoo Site Explorer sees 6,209 inlinks to the Delivering Happiness Book website as of today at 1:42. Click this link to see Yahoo Site Explorer has found more.

Strong Schedule Planning

1. Reviewers got clear instructions on when to publish their posts – we could have posted anytime, but were encouraged to post this week, today if possible, around the launch.
2. They’ve had happy hours each Friday leading up to the launch.
3. They’ve encouraged Meetup groups to form around the book launch week.
4. And they’re livestreaming the launch party from New York City.

Clear Calls to Action

1. Get connected – become a fan on facebook, follow them on twitter
2. Start a movement – take the pledge to act in ways to increase others’ happiness, instigate/attend a meetup to discuss the book (see above)
3. See encouraged links from reviews “inviting links”.

Now, these links are on the Delivering happiness book website. Why I believe it is valuable to reproduce them here is to illustrate how comprehensive the list is of ways to engage. Their strategy is open: it’s completely visibile and they’ve released their idea out to a larger community, to largely positive results.

Their strategy is also canny, because here on day one of the launch, they’ve had many reviews in blogs, on goodreads, and on Amazon itself, they’ve garnered many many mentions, building excitement. And, they’re doing it with clear calls to action. And, given the sales they’re seeing (#1 on Amazon.com), I would anticipate their advance planning is paying off in selling books and spreading their message.

We use Basecamp as our project collaboration vehicle – it allows us to share files, store conversation threads, and track milestones. For a while, we were also using it to record time on tasks on projects.

I’m a project manager, so my day tends to be spent in smaller chunks on more items than other folks on the team. I might have 10-20 time entries to make in a single day. The analysts work longer on fewer things in a day, but over a month, work on many client and internal projects, so their time entry is similarly complex.

Well, Basecamp requires you to enter time (by clicking into individual projects and recording time) is really sub-optimal when you’re moving between several internal projects and several client projects in a day.

We have been pining for a way to enter time more easily (without several clicks per entry – go to the project, go to the todos tab, click on the clock, enter the time and any comments, go to the next project, etc.). Jennifer, the relationship manager we hired in early 2010, agitated for a system change to make this part of our work simpler. She investigated several systems, and we chose Harvest because it integrated with Basecamp and had an exceptionally straightforward interface. Oh, and it has task timers, which certain members of our team really craved.

We switched to Harvest in April, and our first month garnered lots of positive comments from the team. It is hard to tell if time spent tracking time has actually decreased, because we changed our time recording definitions at the transition. This is anecdotal, but the amount of my time to extract summarized data from Harvest has decreased. And, because we’re getting time entered in a more timely manner, and listening to fewer to no complaints about our time tracking system, we feel this is an upgrade.

For more information on Harvest time tracking, see http://www.getharvest.com/features

The key to writing for the web is the old writing rule – know your audience. To serve that audience, you have to provide them

1. valuable information,
2. that they can find (search engine optimized), and
3. that they can understand (optimized for on-screen reading).

I will leave creating valuable content for a different post, and today I’ll address items 2 & 3.

2. Do your keyword research: reflect your reader’s language

Writing for your audience means using their language, not yours. And, what’s amazing is you can find out what they’re saying by asking the search engines.

Search engine records provide real time information on what people are looking for in their own words.  What a treasure trove!

All you have to do is ask Google to “listen in” and you’ll get guidance on how to speak to your audience, and how to help them find you all at the same time. Keyword research is market research.

The image on the left is a screenshot from Google insights for search comparing “writing for the web” “seo writing” “web copywriting” and “search engine optimized writing”. On the right is the Google AdWords Keyword tool, started with four key word phrases and expanded the list to give me data on 100 phrases based on the words I started with. Try these tools out.

To improve your web writing:

• Explore the words used to describe your product or service, no doubt you will learn something valuable.
• And then, write content that emphasizes the high traffic phrases that fit your content. While this sounds like a “duh” you would be surprised by how unconsciously folks revert back to their internal-speak when they write for the web.

3. Write for reading on a screen

Your dear reader might have several applications open. She might be reading on a smartphone on a bus. She might think she’s concentrating, but multitasking is less effective than focused attention, most likely her attention is diffuse.

Additionally, reading on a screen happens more slowly and with less comprehension than reading from a page. Jakob Nielson has compiled a meaty  list of web reading studies and information.

So, copy written for the web needs to be more scannable.

• Prepare bullets and lists instead of long discursive paragraphs,
• Break up long text with images and illustrations to get your message across, and
• Use simpler language than you might for a reader with more focus.

There are several online readability tests that allow you to get feedback on the grade level of your web copy. But, Microsoft Word will also tell you the grade level of copy in your file, so there are lots of ways to assess this. You might take this a bit further and assess your copy against your competitors’ web prose, and compare to more general online sites you value (such as the New York Times online) to give you a general target level. You might find you’re writing at way too high a level to be digestible on the web.

Build on Success

Do your research – research the words and double check the scanability and reading level of   your web writing before you publish it. And then, in the best tradition of the web, assess what is successful and keep on making it more findable and valuable to people and to search engines alike.