One thing that haven’t noticed much of is project management information on Pinterest. Searching for “project management”, “PMI” or “PMP” reveals very few pins and very few boards. It appears (just by browsing the site) that, as of February of 2012, the majority of users on Pinterest are women, and that the majority of posts are about clothes, fashion, food and education. So far it has been difficult to find project managers or other professionals interested in PMI or Agile methodologies on the service.

As such, I’ve set up a PMP Certification Pinterest board that I hope can become a collaborative board to share information about Project Management Professional certification, the PMP exam, and other PMI-related information of interest to project managers. I’m not sure how to advertise boards (I’m relatively new to the service) but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to find like-minded project managers who are interested in sharing information about project management online.

If you’re a project manager and you’re already sharing project management research, blog posts or other information on Pinterest, please let me know! I’d be glad to link up with you and help forward the profession on Pinterest.

I was late to the photo sharing phenomenon on Twitter; my first smartphone, an Apple iPhone 3G (not 3GS), took pretty horrible pictures, and as I had a two year contract with AT&T for that phone, I was unable to share photos from my phone for those two years. Now that I’ve moved overseas I’ve bought an iPhone 4 and have been very impressed with the quality of the photos it takes! It was about time to get involved and to start sharing pictures with my friends on Twitter.

So here’s how to use Twitpic, and when I think it is a good idea to do so.

How to use Twitpic

Using Twitpic is easy…

1. First, login to Twitter. If you don’t already have a Twitter account, you’ll want to sign up for one.
2. Once you have a Twitter account and are online, go to Twitpic’s homepage.
3. Click the Sign in with Twitter button at the top of the page; it will bring you to Twitpic’s welcome page.
4. Select Let’s Get Started (be sure to uncheck the box to choose not to follow Noah Everett and Twitpic if you don’t care to see news and information from the founder of Twitpic or from Twitpic itself).
5. On the next screen you will be able to upload photos and send the links to Twitter; on the right hand side of the screen you will also be given an email address to send photos to Twitpic in the form of yourtwittername.####@twitpic.com, putting whatever description you’d like to send to Twitter with your photo in the subject line. This is the method that I personally use to send photos to Twitpic – I take a picture on my iPhone, click to view it, and then click to email it to Twitpic.

When to use Twitpic

While researching Twitpic I ran across a post on The Next Web from a fellow who was of the opinion that you should never use Twitpic or similar media-sharing services. His argument is that it is much better to post your media to your WordPress blogs using Posterous (Posterous can also send media to Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal and Xanga – it’s certainly worth checking out). That way you can have complete control over your media; it will be searchable, it will not disappear if Twitpic should get purchased or go out of business, and you can control your own branding on the site where the page appears. I have to agree that these are all very good points, especially the last one – I personally stopped using LiveJournal as my primary blog when an ad on a post I submitted featured a huge photo of dirty yellow teeth – it really distracted from the heartfelt post I was sharing on the site!

However, I disagree that you should never share photos or videos to sites like Twitpic… I do think such sites have a time and place. The best time to share photos on Twitpic is when you don’t really care if your photos disappear in a few years, in a few months, or even in a few days… this is when the photos you are sharing are timely, and relevant because you’re sharing them in real time. Some examples of this include photos of the people you’re hanging with, or of a dish of the food you’re about to eat, or of something you find interesting at the time. On my own Twitter feed I shared a picture of the Châtelet Metro station in Paris, because I had noticed that since my last visit to Paris they’d installed safety gates beside the rails. This was interesting to me because I was there looking at it and wanted to share it, but certainly wouldn’t care to save it for posterity on my blog! Same thing goes for my stream of consciousness pictures during a visit to IKEA.

That being said, there is another option to consider – posting a photo to Twitpic when something happens, and then posting it to your blog later when you have a chance to download it onto a computer, resize it properly, crop it, and otherwise ensure that it is of proper quality for your personal blog and your own personal brand. In this manner you can summarize your activities to Twitter when they happen, and then craft proper blog entries about them later, where you can go into more detail about them. As I mentioned, the beauty of media on Twitpic is its real-time nature. I personally prefer to craft quality blog posts and not simply throw stuff onto my site (as such, I really dislike applications that automatically post daily recaps of your tweets to your blog – I like reading microblogs in real time, but I don’t much care to see archives of them).

It’s fun to view photos on Twitpic, catching real-time glimpses of the lives of the people that I follow on Twitter. If you’re not already posting your own photos to Twitpic or a similar media sharing site, I suggest you give it a shot!

Customer contact points are those points of contact at which businesses interact directly with their customers. This can include, for example, in-person communication, telephone conversations, interaction through the Internet, company-sponsored kiosks, and in-person customer support. Most businesses generally know what their customer contact points are, but many don’t seem to realize the importance of them!

When you think about it, most businesses have a very limited number of opportunities to come into direct contact with their customers. In fact, many businesses pay tens of millions of dollars (in the form of advertising) to fund a wide variety of ways that they can get their names and their products in front of their customers. What is amazing is how many businesses will pay big money on advertising, but then neglect (or mess up) the contact with their customers that they can get on the cheap, or even for free.

An example: At the grocery store

The other day I took my kids to the grocery store – not the one I usually go to, but in fact a bigger, better one, with a greater variety of foods and brands, a full pharmacy, and a selection of foreign and craft-brewed beers (which is always nice). The first place I took the kids on this occasion was the deli – it was right near the entrance.

At the grocery store we normally frequent here in Charleston, the people at the deli are courteous, quick, and friendly… and whenever I go to that particular store with my kids, the people at the deli always (maybe not without fail, but at least most of the time) offer us sample slices of whatever it is we’re buying (even if we already know what it tastes like, and don’t need to try a sample slice to see if we like it). It’s a great deli.

At the deli at this other, larger grocery store, the people behind the deli counter were lifeless, disinterested in me, and sloooow… you could tell that prompt service was not one of their priorities. When it was my turn to be served, I gave my order and, at the request of my kids, asked for a sample slice. The lady gave me the slice, which I divvied up for the kids. When I ordered my next item, I asked for another sample slice. This time, she cut the order, put it on the scale, measured it, and then gave me the slice… thereby charging me for it. The third item we ordered, she did the same thing. By this time I was already unimpressed with the store.

Now, I realize that it’s not a grocery store’s duty to give someone a free slice of something whenever they take an order – in fact, some people might think it silly of me to expect to get a free slice of anything at the grocery store. But remember that while at this deli, I was basing my perceptions of the customer service at this store by comparing it to the other store – one of its biggest competitors in the city. This store, with its poorly trained deli operators delivering sub-par customer service, was coming up short. And remember – this was a much bigger, better store!

The analysis

Maybe even more so than most retail businesses, Grocery stores have extremely limited opportunities to give great customer service. When you go to the grocery store, there are only a few people that you ever actually talk to – the cashier (unless you use self-checkout), the person at the meat counter (which I never go to), the fish counter (which I never go to) and the people busy stocking the aisles who you can occasionally ask for directions to an elusive product that isn’t where you think it’s supposed to be. Of this select handful of people, it is the person at the deli that has the greatest opportunity to give you excellent customer service! What difference is a few cents (the cost of a slice of Creamy Havarti Dill Cheese), when the person who is arguably the most important customer service representative in the whole grocery store can use it to deliver excellent customer service? With such a limited number of customer contact points, I was basing my impression of this store on poor service I received at the deli. Which may not make a lot of sense, but hey… I’m the customer, and it’s my perception that counts.

Epilogue

Some people might think that the CEO is the most important person in the company – they’re certainly paid the most, and get the most attention. But to a customer, the CEO is of limited value, at least where customer service is concerned. In fact, those people that customers correspond with the most are often some of the lowest paid people in the company! And it is with these people that the reputations, via the perceptions of customers like myself, of entire businesses are at stake.

I told my deli story to a friend of mine here in Charleston, and he relayed a story of his own about taking his own 5-year old daughter to the grocery store that I normally frequent (the one with the excellent customer service). While my friend was waiting for his order from the deli his daughter happened to complain to her father that she was hungry. Overhearing this, the fellow behind the deli counter promptly cut a few slices of meat and offered them to her. He then asked, “would you like some bread with that?” Bewildered, she nodded her head – and so the fellow headed over to the bakery to get two slices of fresh bread to make her a quick, free sandwich on the fly. Needless to say, considering I pay a visit to the deli almost every time I go grocery shopping (you tend to go through a lot of sandwiches when you have three kids), the next time I go shopping, I’m going back to the grocery store whose deli offers excellent customer service… and probably the time after that, too.

Now, if only I could get them to expand their beer selection…

Following people, and being followed

In my opinion, the concept of followers as it is being used on Twitter today doesn’t work very well. There is a huge subset of people online today whose goal it is to amass as many followers as they can get, regardless of whether or not they share their interests, or in fact are even interested in reading what those users have to say at all. This turns Twitter into a popularity contest of sorts where the goal isn’t to interact or communicate, but to “win the game”. That being said, I myself will follow people who have followed me, and read their tweets, even if I don’t share their interests, and I’ll interact with them as appropriate; if they’re reaching out to me for whatever reason, I’ll reciprocate. If I follow someone and they don’t follow me back, or unfollow me for whatever reason, I’m eventually going to unfollow them. I’m firm in my belief that Twitter should be a two way street; if I want to read information about a particular individual without the two-way communication there are better ways to do that.

I have somewhat around 450 followers on Twitter, which isn’t a heck of a lot and not even in the same ballpark as what some people have – tens of thousands of followers. But I do notice that even 450 people is way too many to keep up with. Whenever I check my Twitter page, or Tweetdeck on my phone, I’ll catch a glimpse at what’s going on at that very moment, but when I’m not checking Twitter the rest of the stuff that’s going on out there is lost to me.

This is okay for me, as I’m an individual, and it doesn’t matter too much to me why people are following me, or if I miss something that someone says about me, or don’t reply to someone who has messaged me within a given period of time. But these misses can become problems for businesses whose reputation is built on the way that they communicate with their customers. When a business first signs on to Twitter it is making a commitment to forge relationships with its clients, and there is a very real possibility that by doing it wrong they could make things worse.

Using Twitter as a business tool

If you’re a business, you want to promote your Twitter account as a means of opening up your business to Twitter users. When someone follows your business on Twitter, it’s key to follow them back – consumers are used to their showing an interest in products and services being a one-way street; if you follow them back, it may surprise and even delight them, and show them that you care about their interest in your company. If you send them a message, or interact with the things they say even when they don’t address you directly, you will be sending a very strong and powerful message. It’s one thing to be a tea company that automatically friends anybody who mentions “tea” in their tweets (this happened to me), but to actually comment on the tea mentioned in the tweet, or to suggest a cake to go with that tea, is truly going the extra mile. It will shock your customers, and in a good way.

The problem here is that it’s very hard for your business with its single Twitter account to scale properly when it comes to interacting with the potentially large masses of people who may be interested in your product. If you have 30 or 40 followers that’s one thing; it’s pretty easy to interact with them. But if you have tens of thousands of people following you, it’s hard to go that extra mile; most businesses simply don’t have the time or resources to respond to tens of thousands of people in a personal manner.

One way to solve this problem is to tweet as an individual working at an organization, rather than as “the organization”. That way, if you aren’t able to keep in touch with your followers 24 hours a day, you will be given some leeway – after all, people do have to sleep, eat, and take time away from their computers. The downside to this is that if the person tweeting from your organization leaves the company, his or her raft of followers will be leaving too… it will be the character recognizable to people on Twitter rather than the company itself. Plus, your business reputation will be tied to the actions of the individual or individuals who tweet on behalf of your company, and what they say on Twitter. In contrast, corporate Twitter accounts can be puppeted by many behind the scenes, and rules can be set regarding what or what not to broadcast.

Using search and hashtags in Twitter

The most obvious method to wade through the sea of tweets you face every time you log on is to use Twitter’s search feature. You can search on anything, and you can use the AND and OR tags to help you. Searching for “international AND business” will bring up tweets with both keywords in the tweet; “international OR business” will bring up tweets with one or the other, or both. The default is AND; if you type “international business” you’ll get tweets with international and business in the tweet.

The problem with this is that what you’re looking to communicate about may be vague enough that searching on that term will not provide valuable results. Soft drink makers searching for “drink” may find tweets about people drinking coffee or tea or going on late-night benders. Searching for “soda” will result in people talking about soda, but what if the tweet uses the term “soft drink” or “pop”? It will take some careful crafting of search phrases in order to achieve valuable results.

Hashtags (placing a # before a word in your tweet) make some sense of the spam, but only for those people who know to use hashtags when they’re making a post about something. If you’re looking for real-time information and you use a hashtag to find information, you’re only finding real-time information created by people who use hashtags. If someone’s complaining about your company on Twitter you’re going to want to know about it and respond to it whether or not the user has included a hashtag before your company name.

Some possible improvements for the future

As Twitter grows and evolves, there are several ways that I can imagine the service being improved.

• A filter bar along the top of the page to filter out probably spam, links, retweets, etc, to get at different reported views of the information you want to see.
• A list of people you are interested in (an easier to read version of the list you see when you click the link to see who you are following) so that you can easily see what they’re up to.
• A way to mod up and down comments, and to see only comments that are modded up (a certain star rating, etc). One similar method currently being implemented by Twitter is giving retweeted comments a higher “rating” than non-retweeted comments; those comments that are retweeted more are more likely to show up in a search.
• A focus away from people (a stream of what a person is saying) to a topic. This is akin to searching by hashtag, but topics may have several keywords that can lead into a “topic page”. So a page about open source development might feature the keywords Linux, GNU, Unix, etc.
• Company-specific Twitter pages, where companies can included a variety of different search terms and associated Twitter users to create a customized real-time Twitter portal for the company.

Testing to validate and fine-tune

This is what usability testing should be: testing a design to either validate that it is or isn’t on the right track or testing the design to see what needs to be clarified or iterated on. This is where usability is the most useful and helpful. Nearly all kinds of usability tests are looking for something along these lines; looking for gaps between a design and a user’s expectations/goals or confirmation that they are on the right track.

Proving to non-believers

This is the first of the two evil brothers of usability testing. Proving to non-believers might be my least favorite thing to witness and resembles more an exercise in a designer’s sanity than anything else. What I’m talking about is using usability to prove internally that a designer knows what they are doing. The best example of this is using usability to decide whether or not to use an industry standard vs. the deprecated industry standard that the application currently uses. Problem is, there’s nothing to test. It’s a waste of time to go through the motions of setting up a usability test to find out that a round wheel rolls better than a square one. It’s ok to test multiple competing designs and compare them, as long as the designs have some level of equivalence by representing pros and cons of each other.  But if you don’t trust your designer’s judgment to make baseline calls in their designs you have much bigger problems than usability is going to solve.

Getting the answers you want to hear

The second evil brother is the worst of the two because it means the usability test has been structured to lead the user’s answer to a desired result. This usually occurs for two reasons 1) resources don’t want to be spent to solve the issues with the current application 2) design doesn’t want to iterate any further. Rather than admitting this, usability testing is used to prove that the current state of the application is “fine” and needs no further work.

But wait, how can you lead a user to say something? Nothing is keeping them from telling the truth, right?

Let’s say there is an application that has a feature in it you want to “test”, let’s call it feature A. Feature A is used for data entry and is touted for being flexible and customizable. In reality users have repeatedly complained it is extremely difficult to configure and has a disjointed work flow.

• To start, prep the usability test so the difficult parts of feature A are partially configured ahead of time, leaving the most obvious part for the user to do during the test.
• Secondly, write the script so it walks the user explicitly through the data entry process, making the flow seem obvious.
• Next, point out the handful of data from overly honest users as outliers.
• And Presto! The user feedback comes back, unsurprisingly, positive for feature A.

Now I don’t believe that most usability tests are rooted in skepticism, blatantly dishonest or are trying to create inflated, self-serving data; the evil brother examples are fairly extreme. The important part to keep in mind is making sure your usability tests aren’t structured to cut a few corners so you have a slight advantage. Do minimal directive scripting by keeping the task description fairly general. Keep the objective of your tests clear and do your best to replicate a state in the application which reflects a real world scenario; the data will be more accurate from a practicality standpoint and will seem more familiar to your user.

Happy testing!

You can sign up to get your own Gravatar at the Gravatar web site.  The process is pretty simple:

1. Enter your email address
2. Reply to the confirmation email that gets sent to that email address
3. Choose a username (doesn’t really matter what it is) and a password
4. Click to add a new image
5. Select an image and crop it accordingly
6. Select a rating for your image (more on that below)
7. You’re done!

Once you’ve completed these steps, whenever you make a comment on a WordPress blog and enter your email address with the comment, the Gravatar associated with that email address will show up. Even though your email address will not be visible to people viewing your comment, your Gravatar will be visible. The Gravatar service within WordPress will look up your email address in the Gravatar’s bank of users and find the portrait associated with your email address. It will then display that picture beside your comment on the WordPress blog in the size dictated by the web site’s comment code. So your Gravatar will display in different sizes depending on the preferences of the person who set up the blog.

Gravatars can be rated G (General), PG (Parental Guidance), R (Restricted) or X (X-Rated). So, for example, you can choose to have two Gravatars; one of your face, and one of your privates (I don’t know why you would make a Gravatar of your privates… but you could). You could then set up the picture of your mug as your G-rated Gravatar, and the one of your privates as your X-rated Gravatar… for sites with a maximum Gravatar rating of G, PG and R your face would show up, and your naughty bits for sites that allowed X-rated Gravatars.

To set up your site to allow a certain rating of Gravatars on your WordPress blog, go to Settings on your WordPress dashboard, and click on Discussion. At the bottom of the page is a section for Avatars. Within this section you can choose to display or not to display avatars, the maximum rating of avatars that you will allow, and what the default avatar for visitors who have not yet set up an avatar should be.

Gravatars can also be displayed on your individual WordPress posts anywhere you like, by inserting the following PHP code in to your single.php file (or whatever file you use to display individual posts):

<?php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_email(), $size = '80'); ?>

If you look at the top right hand corner of this page, you’ll see this code in action – that image is being pulled from the Gravatar bank of portraits (if you right click on it and view it’s properties, you’ll see it’s coming from gravatar.com). When I registered as a user on this web site I entered my email address; the Gravatar is pulled from gravatar.com by using that author-specified email address. Note that you can change the size of the Gravatar by adjusting the $size variable. A word on this subject: Gravatars aren’t of excellent quality (I find they degrade significantly once you upload them to gravatar.com) so if you have a personal blog and are the sole poster, you might prefer to link to a better quality image within your site’s own infrastructure.

A couple of final notes: Gravatars go a long way toward building your personal brand online, so be careful what image you choose to use as your Gravatar! If you set up a new Gravatar and the email address you use is associated with comments that you have made in the past, your new Gravatar will show up on those comments. Also, if you change your Gravatar, wherever you have previously left a comment using the email address associated with the changed Gravatar, the new Gravatar will show up. If you do choose to upload an image of your privates (hint: don’t do it!) that image could suddenly pop up in hundreds of different places, without your being aware of it.

If you don’t have a Gravatar yet, why don’t you go ahead and get one now – they’re easy to choose and maintain, and they certainly add some personality to your online commentary.

A while back I wrote a post about the new Collecta widget for web and for WordPress, allowing you to embed Collecta real-time search onto your web pages and WordPress blogs. Since I wrote the post (on the day of the service’s release) Collecta has really taken off, and is getting a lot of great press.

Although I’m a big fan of Collecta (the service having been developed by, among others, my friends and former co-workers Christopher, Nathan and Matthew) I didn’t find the Collecta widget for WordPress very useful for my site. The reason for this is that the Collecta widget’s search parameters are defined on a per-site basis; you define them on the Widgets dashboard, and then wherever you place the widget on your site, those same search parameters are used. I wanted to be able to define my search parameters depending on the subjects of my individual posts – a reasonable demand for any blogger whose posts may span a variety of different topics.

The way I solved this was by using the Custom Fields functionality within WordPress. If I added a value for Collecta in a Collecta custom field when composing my post, a Collecta widget would appear in my sidebar using the search terms I’d defined. If I didn’t define a custom field for Collecta, that area of the sidebar would remain blank. It’s a bit of a hack, and Christopher and I plan to try to make something more permanent to address this need in the future, but at this point (as far as I’ve been able to find) I think I’m the only one who is using Collecta on a per-post basis within WordPress in this manner, so it’ll do for now.

And here’s how I did it, in case you’re interested in doing the same – fair warning, it does involve editing some code!

What you’re going to do is access the Collecta widget at collecta.com by using some PHP that you put into the sidebar on the web page that renders your posts. On your single.php page (or whatever page it is that displays your posts) enter this code where you want your widget to appear on the page:

<?php include( TEMPLATEPATH . '/collecta.php' ); ?>

This accesses a file called collecta.php in your WordPress template directory where your widget code will be stored. Go ahead and create collecta.php, and within it, write these lines:

<?php if (get_post_meta($post->ID, collecta, true)) { ?>

<h3><?php _e(get_post_meta($post->ID, collecta, true)); ?></h3>

<iframe style="border:none;width:100%; height:480px;" src="http://widget.collecta.com/widget.html?&query=<?php _e(urlencode(get_post_meta($post->ID, collecta, true))); ?>&alias=&nologo=false" id="widgetframe" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

<?php } else { ?>

<?php } ?>

This code places a Collecta widget on your post's page if you have defined a variable for the Collecta custom field, or displays nothing if you haven't. Note that you can turn on and off displaying the Collecta logo by using the "nologo" parameter, and you can also adjust the height and width of the widget by adjusting those parameters.

Save the file, then go ahead and start a new post. On your Edit Post screen, somewhat down the page, there is a box called Custom Fields, within which you can find an option to Add new custom field. Select Enter new, add a value of "collecta", and then click on Add Custom Field.

Click on - Select -, and choose the "collecta" value that you've just entered. Under Value enter the search terms that you'd like to have your post's Collecta widget perform real-time search for.

Write your post, save it, and view it - the Collecta widget should show up on your individual post using the search terms you've indicated, just as it does on the post you're reading right now, where I've defined the search term as "Collecta". Note that you can also search for multiple terms by using OR; for example, "Collecta OR widget".

I hope this helps you get the very powerful Collecta real-time search widget onto your posts - please let me know if you have any questions or feedback, and I'd be glad to help you however I can.

Good luck!

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