Success stories for GSA’s Regions « Strategic Online Presence

Success stories for GSA’s Regions « Strategic Online Presence

Managing your online identity

What does someone see when they Google your name? Someone else with your name? Maybe a comment that you posted long ago on a website like Meetup, or YouTube? Maybe books that you reviewed or bought on Amazon.com?

If you’re like me, Google pulls up other people with my name - that are not me. I address this problem by creating my own online identity through LinkedIn, Facebook, and this blog. Hopefully someone googling my name will find those sources first, and make judgements based on the information provided there – information that I have created and actively manage.

If someone googles a name and does not locate a definitive source of information, they may find random sources that may not be complete, or provide random or false data. This false data could influence the person who is googling a name to decide whether to hire that person, fund their project, vote for them, date them, determine if they are trustworthy, or inform them whether that person has received traffic tickets, where they live, if they own their own home, and if they have ever filed for bankruptcy, divorce, or been convicted of a crime.

You can’t control all of the sources of information on the internet – but you can actively create and manage your online identity. You can try to manage what people see when they type your name into Google. I recommend starting with LinkedIn, which is basically an online resume. Its helpful to have your professional experience online anyway, so that you can update it periodically. As long as you have established your identity on LinkedIn, go ahead and ask others whose names you know to join your professional community on LinkedIn. You know that stack of business cards that you have lying around in a drawer? Go through them and pull out the most meaningful cards. Search for these folks on LinkedIn, and if you find them, send them an email, inviting them to join your network. The next step towards creating your online profile is with Facebook, which is an engaging and hip way to represent yourself within the online community. Facebook now makes some of its listings available through public search engines, and is one of the most rapidly growing online communities, with 110 million active users. Create a page for yourself here, being mindful that you don’t have to post a photo of yourself. Look for friends on Facebook, too. You can add your blog, your delicious bookmarks, concerts you are going to, books you have read, etc. to your profile – or not.  

You could also try listing yourself in MySpace, Spoke, Xing, Friendster, and Zoominfo.com, and PNN Online. Another step should be to create your own blog. I like wordpress.com. This is a lot of work, isn’t it? Yes, it is, and I would suggest spending 15 -30 minutes a week working on this until you are happy with the results. 

You may wonder - why even bother? If you don’t create your online identity, it will be created for you, and it may not be flattering. Do you want that potential job interviewer to google your name and see random comments, or in the worst case scenario, your traffic tickets? Or do you want the HR person to find your resume and profiles on Linked In, Facebook, Spoke, Xing and Zoominfo?  In today’s world, one has to put not just one’s best foot forward, but one’s best electronic foot forward.

BTW, this works for corporations, products, and services too. For example, why couldn’t Sputnik have its own Facebook page?

Getting others to link to your website

Most people know that its good to get other websites to link to theirs. If you are marketing goods or services, these links can expose your goods and services to wider markets, without advertising.

But how can you get others to link to you?

Sometimes it can be simple, although time-consuming. I spend at least one day a month sending emails asking other webmasters to link to various pages on my site.

For example, GSA has free small business classes on “How to get a GSA Schedule” every month. There are several small business organizations that could help their clients out by offering them this information via a link on their site. So every month I send out emails to local Chambers of Commerce, city and county small business asking them to link to GSA’s small business events page.

The format of the email is something like this:

Dear ………

I found your webpage on www.—-.—/— and found it very informative. Could I ask that you consider linking to GSA’s Events page, at www.gsa.gov/ncrnews, so that your clients could easily find information on free classes that GSA offers on “How To Obtain a Federal Supply Schedule Contract.?” If you have any questions, please contact me at ……

Thanks!
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This is a website housekeeping task that I do once a month, generally when I’m also cleaning up broken links, or poring through webtrends to determine what pages users are going to on GSA’s site, and how they are finding these pages.

Over time, adding just one link a month can really increase the traffic to your website.

Eyetracking and your website

What is eyetracking? Why should you care?

Yesterday I found out what, and why. I went to a Eyetracking Demonstration led by Dr. Kathryn Summers, University of Balitmore & Michael Summmers, Summers Consulting, Inc., in collaboration with Nick Boswell, Tobii Technology.

During the presentation, Michael Summers showed how eyetracking - measuring exactly where user’s eyeballs go on a page - can be vital for website creators. Users tend to look at websites in a letter “Z” or “F” format. They do not watch animated images, but instead gravitate towards content in text form. This was born out by user eyetracking data gathered from large corporate websites - users did not dwell on, and often did not look at all, at expensive custom graphics that changed from one image to another. Content is still king. Spending money on expensive custom graphics is probably unnecessary - from your user’s point of view.

Eyetracking involves following a user’s eyes as they try to accomplish a specific task on your website. During the eyetracking demonstration, we watched users try to find the phone number for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on USA.gov. We the audience could see from eyetracking data - represented as red lines and dots - that users were scanning furiously to complete the task. All accomplished this task, but only with difficulty. Their difficulty suggested that the site could be optimized for people who are looking for disaster-related information.

Heatmaps are a method of demonstrating what areas of the website were viewed most, and where user’s eyes lingered the longest (indicating areas of most interest).

 I asked the presenters if there was current eyetracking data to coincide with shopping cart abandonment. It seems that much of this research is strictly proprietary - imagine if you could convert more of your online users to buyers - you would be quite in demand. Jakob Hencke, of Tobii Technology, said that a good place to look for that information is the  Tobii forum.

Usability Testing on a Shoestring

A few weeks ago, Steve Krug, gave this class - Usability Testing on a Shoestring - as part of an ongoing education series for Federal Website Managers.

Instead of talking through yet another boring powerpoint presentation, Steve created a real-life example of how to do usability testing on a shoestring.

He began by recruiting a member of the online audience, and then gave the volunteer a task to perform: go to the US Mint’s website, and locate the quarters for Utah available for sale.

The challenge was that the seminar was held online, in a webinar format. Therefore, no one could see the user while he was trying to complete the task. We could, however, see his screen through the magic of screensharing.

To overcome the obstacle of not being able to see the user, Steve continually asked the user questions like:

- so, what are you thinking right now?

- is this the result you expected?

- are you having difficulty?

The last question was asked because the US Mint website seemed slow. It turned out that the US Mint’s website was experiencing heavy traffic due to some new products, according to a workshop participant who was familiar with the site.

Steve demonstrated how usability testing can be cheap, easy, low-tech, and fast. His straightforward explanations and off-the-cuff testing method gave me the feeling that usabilty testing can, in fact, be easy to do on a shoestring.

Take a look back at Jakob Nielsen’s column on www usability testing for Sun in 1995. He reports that changing the menu on Sun’s site - to be more usable - increased its use by 416% over a two month period. Given that usabilty testing can provide so much bang for the buck, its amazing that most website managers don’t seem to know, care or conduct it.

I don’t know when Steve Krug’s new book will be published, but given the excellent seminar he gave, it seems well worth every penny.

Half of your users can’t read your website

I’ve been thinking lately about usability and the web.

Did you know that 50% of Americans read at an eighth-grade level? And that most websites are written at a tenth-grade level?

Can you imagine 50% of the users of your website having difficulty understanding it?

Dr. Kathryn Summers, University of Baltimore and co-author of Creating Websites That Work, presented compelling evidence that most websites are too difficult for half of  their visitors to read and use.

Dr. Summers presented compelling evidence about reading behaviors of lower literacy users. Truthfully, I was not sure how useful this information would be, and was thinking of attending a different seminar. This seminar was one of the most factual and compelling that I have seen.

Just think of half your audience being unfamiliar with your website and how to use it! These users need very simple instructions. They can be really confused by forms, especially forms that are rejected without clear instructions as to why. They find acronyms difficult to understand and even if they were defined once in the page, may not remember that first reference.

Dr. Summers shared her hands-on analysis of data from eye tracking sessions, research on the latest industry best practices, and experience of developing numerous web design prototypes at the 2007 Government Web Managers One-Day Workshop. That presentation is not online, but a 2005 presentation, Reading and Navigational Strategies of Web Users with Lower Literacy Skills, is well worth your time.

Curry may fight Alzheimer’s Disease

I did a bit of research last year while creating a paper for my graduate classes in professional writing and editing at George Mason University. I had begun by researching current clinical trials on Alzheimer’s disease. My interest in this topic is fueled by self preservation, as my grandmother died of this disease. Excerpts from my paper are below:

 Research Problem: Currently much of ongoing medical research is not easily available to the public. This translates into the public not getting the best and most current treatment.

How can the reporting of this medical research be improved so that it is more readily accessible to the public? Could the scientists and medical researchers assist by filling out a form that would provide specific information (i.e. metadata, keywords, plain language) targeted to this group? How can the scientists and medical researches identify the risks to providing this information in a public forum before it is disseminated?

Background: Recently, the BBC news service published an article on how a study showed that eating curry may slow the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Further research using Google provided only similar news stories that did not provide information as to how much curry one would have to eat to obtain this benefit. 

Further research at the NLM (National Library of Medicine) gateway returned seven BioMed published studies, however only three of the studies were available to read in full online for free – most were only abstracts, and the cost to buy the studies ranged from $25 - $75 per study.

Printing out and reading the three published studies provided very difficult - yet rewarding reading.

Scientists had found that the curry compound, curcumin reduced amyloid plaques in the brains of mice by 32.5% after only 22 months of treatment. Curcumin seemed to have only a few mild side effects. Two of the studies mentioned the type of curcumin used (Curcumin C3 Complex). Only one study referenced the curcumin manufacturer and locale. A quick Google search was used to find and buy the specific curcumin used in the studies.

Challenges: The time that elapsed from the time the BBC news article was read, to the time the Alzheimer’s fighting potential of curcumin was located in studies was approximately 2 hours. It took another hour to locate the curcumin manufacturer, and the retailer who sold it online at the best price.

Because of the terms and writing styles used in the reports, acquaintances who reviewed the same material could not seem to grasp the importance of the research to them, even when they had a parent has has been diagnosed or died from Alzheimer’s disease (meaning that they are also at risk for the disease).

Furthermore, it is not easily stated that it may be wise for those who have or are at risk for developing Alzheimers’s, to begin a regimen of taking curcumin or eating curry regularly. Currently, there are no effective treatments to halt this terrible disease. Given that Curcumin shows such promise in fighting it, and has few side effects, it would be wise to recommend its use in select cases.

Rationale: Many clinical trials seems to bear an implicit assumption that its sole purpose is to develop drugs to treat conditions and disease. The development of drugs is a long, expensive and arduous process, and while the drugs are being researched and developed, people may be suffering and dying needlessly.

These same studies that include the basis of the herbal, hormonal or nutritional based treatments, with the recommended protocol/treatment, sources, and ranked by order of most promising/least promising, identifying risks and contraindications of treatment, and including the risks of non treatment, could save lives and improve the quality of life.  They could do that by recommending a course of action to take, recommended doses, and sources, for those who pursue wellness through non-pharmaceutical methods.

The difficulty in obtaining easily understood and most current information available regarding groundbreaking medical research by the people it could help the most makes a compelling case for ensuring that this information is easier to find and understand.

In the example of providing medical research studies in a more accessible manner, this paper will demonstrate the value of providing a comprehensive knowledge management strategy to this important research. Methodologies such as reporting diseases, conditions and treatment methods by similar conventions will ensure better results when users from any educational level perform a search for knowledge. Usability studies, much as what is done for websites, will be recommended for analysis of changes needed to the way current medical research is reported. Metadata and keywords should be required of all clinical trials reported, and clinical trials should have a plain language component so that all may understand the results.

Outcome: Development of a template or form that will be completed by all who submit the results of clinical and medical research studies. The template/form will ask:

• What are the current treatments for this condition?
• What are the current ongoing clinical studies?
• Which clinical studies look the most promising for developing into a drug or treatment method?
• Have they been validated by other independent medical studies?
• Does the clinical study have a non-drug alternative, such as a herb, nutritional supplement, or other protocol that the public could follow until a drug is developed?
• If so, what is the specific formulation that was used in the study, and where can the public obtain that formulation?
• Based on the studies conducted to date for this condition, and the current medical knowledge, what course of action would you recommend to a family member, such as a son, daughter, sibling or parent to follow if they had this condition?

The studies on curry/curcumin and Alzheimer’s are here:

Curcumin inhibits formation of amyloid beta oligomers and fibrils, binds plaques, and reduces amyloid in vivo. 
http://www.jbc.org/cgi/reprint/280/7/5892.pdf 

A Potential Role of the Curry Spice Curcumin in Alzheimer’s Disease - This is a ongoing study with human participants, who have Alzheimer’s, taking Curcumin C3 Complex. The Curry Spice Curcumin Reduces Oxidative Damage and Amyloid Pathology in an Alzheimer Transgenic Mouse
http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/reprint/21/21/8370

A source for the Curcumin C3 Complex:
https://www.affordable-natural-supplements.com/19243.html

Save the beaches of the Outer Banks (OBX)

Imagine no more OBX beaches . . . Many of Outer Bank’s beaches are in trouble. Why are they in trouble? They have been pummeled by nor’easters, tropical depressions and hurricanes. Dunes that were once 10 – 15 feet high have been reduced in size, or on some beaches, completely blasted away by the storms. Isabel left her mark on many dunes and beaches of the Outer Banks. Yet the damage to the beaches remains only partly abated. Every year the Army Corps of Engineers requests funds for restoration of the Outer Banks beaches, and every year their request goes unfunded. As a result, some beaches which once had wide strands of 30 - 50 feet of sand may have only 10 - 20 feet today.

Those who do not live near the beaches may think that taxpayer dollars should not be used to restore beaches.  However, a recent Army Corps of Engineers Shore Protection Benefits Study concluded that,  

“only 35% of the benefits of beach nourishment occur locally, while “65% accrue to people who reside elsewhere.” This supports the coastal communities’ longstanding belief that the majority of benefits from beach restoration projects are not local benefits, but national benefits. The study also finds that, while beach restoration is likely to increase tourism and therefore increase local tax revenue, an increase in revenue to the local government is “unlikely to be large enough to fund an increased non-Federal cost-share from the current 35% to 50% or 65% of the project re-nourishment costs.” The study holds that to be true “even if the State participates by paying as much as 75% of the non-Federal cost-share.” The study also concludes that when recreational benefits are not included, that is “when there is no improvement to the quality of the beach experience”, the result is “zero” increase in regional benefits. In other words, when the storm damage reduction is the sole focus of a project, the local community does not benefit from any additional tourism revenue.”

 

 OBX provides recreation to visitors from throughout the USA and Canada, as North Carolina beaches are well-known as some of the finest in the world. Those who feel that restoring the beaches to their former state benefits only those living at the beach might be interested to know that in fact, there are several OBX public beaches within a 2 – 6 hours from Washington D.C., Richmond, Williamsburg, and of course many communities in North Carolina. These beaches improve the quality of life for those citizens, by offering recreational opportunities to anyone who can drive to them, and because they do not limit access to only the wealthy, or charge admission to them.  

The USA is a great nation, and we can be proud of its past great engineering feats (Verrazano Narrows Bridge, Golden Gate Bridge, the aerospace structures at Kennedy Space Center). It might sound like I’m switching topics - but why shouldn’t we use the best engineering skills in the USA to work towards the problem of replenishing, restoring and saving the Outer Banks beaches? Some years ago I backpacked across Europe and spent a few days in the Netherlands. One day I took a bike trip to the north, towards a small village that borders the North Sea. Our guide told us how the Netherlands had reclaimed much of the land that we had biked on from the north sea. We could see for ourselves the sea walls, dikes and the barriers that all work together to keep the sea at bay. 

How is it that this can be done in the Netherlands - but it cannot be done in the USA? Are the engineers in the United States not as clever as the engineers in the Netherlands?  Are the Netherlands richer than the United States, and able to spend more money on keeping the sea from deluging the land and causing great damage to it? 

I think the answer to these questions is that we could do this in the USA, the engineers in the USA are quite clever, and that unfortunately engineering projects in the USA have been underfunded for many years. At least that’s what The American Society of Civil Engineers states on their website, in their annual Report Card for America’s Infrastructure. 

 Non-profit groups that support beach renourishment are: The American Shore & Beach Preservation Association (ASBPA). The North Carolina Beach, Inlet & Waterway Association (NCBIWA) also supports shore protection and beach nourishment.  

Why do our elected representatives exude this nonchalance about the fact that our beautiful OBX beaches could easily disappear?  For example, this representative who violently opposes the Dare County beach nourishment project (Congressman Blumenauer’s comments that, “Artificial beach construction or “beach renourishment” is a particularly damaging and wasteful practice of the Army Corps. . . Unfortunately, artificial beach construction uses the money of all federal taxpayers to subsidize those few who live in beach towns.)

 If the Outer Banks beaches disappear, where would the 3+ million people who live in the areas of Washington D.C., Richmond, Williamsburg and Norfolk, and Newport News go instead for their beach activities? Should they all go to the states that are slated to receive much more funding for beach projects - Virginia Beach, Ocean City, Rehoboth, and Cape May?  That doesn’t make any sense.

When I was a kid and living in Maine the natives had a saying - you can’t eat scenery. Saving the Outer Banks beaches is saving a cash cow, and providing recreational opportunities for millions of people across the USA who visit for their summer vacation.  

When the beaches of the Outer Banks are gone, and are no more dunes, and the ocean has reclaimed all the land where once people swam, picnicked, frolicked, fished, and surfed it will be too late to act.  Now is the time for all of us to write to our congressmen and senators –  and ask them to support beach nourishment projects for Dare County beaches, Hatteras and Ocracoke, NC.  Some suggested wording is below:  

–Provide necessary funding and support to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to allow them to meet project deadlines for Dare County Beaches, Hatteras & Ocracoke, NC,· 

–Support increased funding of all North Carolina beach restoration projects;

–Require that the Corps of Engineers give equal weight to the economic benefits of tourism and recreation as well as storm damage reduction and the environment in formulating beach nourishment projects;

–Support guidelines that enable local governments to undertaking interim erosion control activities prior to completion of a pending federal beach nourishment project without being penalized.  

There is more wording here:

http://www.asbpa.org/pdfs/0207asbpaLOBBYcard.pdf 

Take a stance and tell your elected representative you want to save the Outer Banks Beaches. Tell them that you want our sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters to have as much fun and wonder enjoying the beautiful Outer Banks as we do today.  

Book Reviews going to the Blogs

Last week was the last class for my ENG 616 class - Non-Fiction writing at George Mason University. Beverly Lowry, the teacher (and quite a good one), said that it she had just learned that many major newspapers are doing away with their book review section.

The article, Are Book Reviewers Out of Print? , appears in the May 2, 2007 edition of the New York Times.

She asked me and my classmates what we thought of the idea of bloggers reviewing books.

Many of my fellow classmates stated that they did not personally read blogs. I spoke up for blogs, and quoted what I had heard recently - that 6,000 new blogs are created every month. My fellow classmates looked at me as if that did not matter.

I do read some book reviews in newspapers, including the New York Times. But I also read the book reviews on Amazon.com and yes, on blogs. Whereas some book reviews may actually cover whether the book is well written or not - the book reviews themselves are often quite long, dense and difficult to read.

Blogging the book reviews could be good for the book and good for the author. It might generate buzz, start conversations and create interest. Keeping the print version would be wise too, though - there is something more authoritative about words in print than words online.

2007 Government Web Managers One-Day Workshop - Web 2.0

One of the most interesting topics in this conferences was Web 2.0. What is Web 2.0?

A broad definition is that Web 2.0 is the use of the web for collaboration: rss, podcasts, blogs, wikis, videocasts, screencasting, Facebook, MySpace, etc.

All of the above have been in existence for some time, but now corporations and governments are looking at using them to expand their web presence.

One of the speakers at the Federal Governments Web Manager’s Conference was Pierre Wielezynski from the World Bank. He spoke of how negatively the World Bank is usually portrayed online in blogs (doh!), and how the organization developed their own in-house blog to create some buzz and authoritative accounts of the good work that the World Bank strives to accomplish in the world. Its authored by twelve employees within the World Bank, who blog about their work and real world experiences making loans to developing countries.

6,000 new blogs are created every month, according to Pierre. Wow!

There was a Q & A period, during which I pointed out that Facebook had recently been used during the VT Tragedy. VT Students made a page called, I’m okay at VT, to let their parents and friends know they were okay (the phone lines were busy). Anyway, Pierre mentions my comment in his blog:

“During the Q&A session, someone made a very telling comment: she created a facebook account just to see how student were coping with the Virginia Tech massacre and this led her to browsing around, finding a page about her organization   etc.. etc….This curiosity, I said, is how social media will happen in government. “