Navigating Web Caves ... How To

Did you hear the one about the two Saudis and an American who go into a cave with 25 Europeans and a Dutch guide holding a lantern? Of course you haven’t because it really happened, and I’m going to tell you about it.

The Saudis are my clients, and I’m the American consultant. We’re in Maastricht, Netherlands for a round of video interviews with their European leadership. The interviews will turn into content for the learning portal I’m helping the company build.

It’s the weekend, and I decide an outing at a popular tourist attraction might be fun for all. The St Pietersberg Caves there are famous. Approximately 2,000 passages comprising 125 miles, the caves were formed from centuries of mining marl, which was used primarily in constructing area buildings. Napoleon visited the caves, Rembrandt’s paintings and downed American pilots were hidden there from the Nazis … many stories. So, why not go there?

The three of us board a boat for the 30-minute trip down river, then a 20-minute climb uphill, followed by a 10-minute walk down inside the mountain. Before we descend, I discover that the cave tour is conducted only in Dutch. I approach the tour guide hoping that he excelled in English in school. He says curtly that, if I stay close to him and if he has time, he will translate for me from Dutch to English the information he just told the group. I will then convey his comments to my Arab-speaking clients, whose English, fortunately, is quite good.

When we arrive in the cave’s first large chamber, whose rock walls are adorned with paintings and stories, the crowd gathers around the guide. I position myself on a nearby ledge up against the cave wall to watch his body language and not block the view of children. The first words out of the guide’s mouth are directed to me in English: “Don’t touch the walls of the cave.” My companions slip into the crowd to avoid being associated with the culprit.

Think about that experience. You are trusting someone you never met to lead you where you have never been, explaining in a language you don’t know about unfamiliar writings and designs on walls in chamber after chamber. And what if your guide was to turn off his lantern and you were standing there in 50° blackness without a flashlight? How would you make your way back out?

Now, think about the website, intranet, or portal you’re building. You’re leading people who don’t know you, down paths they have never been, to rooms of information where you use terminology that is yours not theirs. Fortunately for them but not for you, if they get lost and panic, they simply click out.

Of course, good web designers and user experience experts know the standard tricks for helping people navigate sites. They can logically explain to you how those techniques will work. However, that doesn’t excuse you, the site originator and manager, from the process. Quite the opposite. Your role is to be the human in that process, the user.

Long before getting user testing underway – you will be doing user testing, right? -- you have to be the user. When your consultants and colleagues are saying, “they’ll (users) figure it out,” or “after they read all the information …” you should be thinking, “I don’t want to have to figure it out,” and “I probably would skim and grab information, not read it all.”

So, step aside from the others, realize that you’re on the tour alone, walk around the passages and chambers of your prototype site, and monitor your thoughts and feelings. Let me put you in the right frame of mind. Think cave.

3 Directions

1 Moving vertically
The homepage is the orientation center. You will spend only 30, maybe 60 seconds here. No time for hype. You’re busy, and you came to this page for a purpose: to get an annotated map. If the map is too difficult to decipher, you simply will find your own route using the search function. You have a search function on the site, right?

As you, the visitor, make your way down through a passage from the homepage to the information chambers, you should drop some breadcrumbs that show you how to get back. And you know what breadcrumbs are on a site: they’re the string of categories found consistently near the top of the screen that serve the same purpose as a “you are here” map. The highlighted “crumb” indicates where you are in relation to each step along the path. Click left on a crumb and you are back at a higher level. Keep the crumbs simple: they’re crumbs, not bread slices.

2 Moving laterally
Each chamber in the St Pietersberg Caves has distinct content. Some contain wall paintings, some plaques, and one has baking ovens that once fed people in hiding. No matter how different the content of the rooms, common to all is rock -- rock walls, rock floors, rock ceilings. Wherever tourists are, rock tells them they’re in a cave.

Diversity is good. Yet, taken to extremes on websites by organizational family members who want to establish their own identities -- often meaning separateness -- visitors who wander to those places can get confused and lost. Unless politically impossible, make sure all parts of your site share at least the rock ... that is, share common design elements and structure -- colors, type fonts, heading styles, whatever -- that visually tell users they are in the same cave, just different chambers.

Sometimes a departmental intranet was up and running before you decided to launch the central site. For example, the Supply Chain group has its own wiki-type site, which includes a learning management system and training courses. However, you have planned for a learning section on the main site for centalizing all training. Supply Chain wants its staff to link to your learning options but is unwilling to give up what took so long to build.

You can think territorially about this and wage a battle, or you can think like an employee who, frankly, doesn't care who owns what. Easy access and minimal clicks are all that matter. Consequently, build a transitional page that visually signals users coming from or to the main site that they are about to move into a different zone.

3 Moving out
Bailing out of a site is simple. Once again, think like a user. What would make you do a u-turn and linger just a bit longer, then return soon and often? Of course, the content must be engaging and applicable. Assuming that's true, you the user would want to do something with that content such as:

• rate the value of what you read or heard;
• bookmark a page using your preferred service: Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc.;
• capture and store information from various pages (e.g., Google Notebook);
• share information with others by clicking on email, print, ShareThis, and various social networking options; and
• receive email or SMS cellphone alerts on items of interest.

5 Moving Tips

1. Flash motion can add personality to pages, but sometimes that personality is narcissistic. A revolving header screams, “look at me because I’m more important than what you’re looking at."


2. Moving images -- video, animation, etc. -- add entertainment and a human touch to content. Use those formats increasingly but let the site visitor choose to turn them on.


3. The canned message on the homepage from your CEO probably won't move visitors. It's rarely read and never read on the second visit. Save the real estate.


4. Keep the user stationary by integrating all media into pages rather than separate windows.


5. Construct the homepage as a map, but realize that many, if not most visitors will move from another site directly to a page of specific interest on your site.

Richard Skaare 01.11.09
Credit: Photo by Luke Redmond

The 140-Character Resume

You’re standing silently in a field with three friends on a crisp, clear night taking in the panorama of stars. Then someone says, “Isn’t this beautiful?” and babbles on about nights like this back at summer camp. The indescribable just got trivialized. Experience over, you might as well go home.

Sometimes words – even well-intended words -- spoil. Jumbled thoughts too often don’t get disentangled before they reach our mouths and typing fingers. So we over-talk and over-write.

In a recent post on getting back to basics, I suggested the crazy notion of writing your resume in 140 characters (characters, not words). That’s the maximum Tweet allowed on Twitter. What? Forget that for now. What’s important is that forced brevity sharpens the mind and quickens the soul.

Frankly, for just about any topic, 140 characters is long enough to capture what’s important and short enough to prevent loose vowels. Restricting yourself to 140 characters should strip away most pretentiousness, stop that voice from telling you to “explain yourself, young lady.” and convince you that, maybe, just maybe you are as sharp as you want people to think.

I’m about to put you through three brief exercises, if you have the courage. The formula is not magical. When you’re done, you may revert to talking too much at times, writing too long, obsessing too much – all to spike up your self-confidence. Yet, I hope my free advice will give you a memorable taste of raw honesty and self-trust.

3X5 Thinking

3 Exercises

1. Your life in 140 characters
   I can see you’re already thinking about clicking off this page. This one is tough. I’m not talking here about gravestone stuff. Think less of your death and more about your future. What is it about your life that makes you optimistic about next month … about the next ten years?
   
   Okay, okay, I’ll go first and show you the way. Here’s my life in 140 characters:
   
   

   Navigated the rapids so far, laughed way more than cried, trying to love as much as being loved. Head down, chin up, whimsically moving on.

   Of course, you can go shorter -- “Met God, no turning back.” – if one event sums up your life-core. Brevity is only one point; truth about yourself is much more important.
   
   
2. Your resume in 140 characters
   This one’s less overwhelming but more intimidating because it forces you to look at yourself the way you want others to look at you, namely prospective employers.
   
   You could easily write down “Results-driven salesperson with an impressive track record of milestone achievements yadda, yadda.” Show that one to your buddies during half-time and watch them yawn. That’s not you, it’s every salesperson. Try again. Maybe mine will get you thinking:
   
   

   Communication experience: been there, done that. Write like I talk, talk like I write. Smart, getting smarter. Eager to give more than take.

   Sure, it sounds somewhat cocky – I prefer confident – but it’s a start. “Been there, done that” says I qualify for senior positions. “Write like I talk …” suggests I’m a natural communicator. And I make the point that I am smart but open-minded and passionate about being a valuable contributor. Seems to me that’s what employers want, and what I would want from people I might hire.
   
   
3. Your business plan in 140 characters
   Business strategists – they’re called Chief Strategy Officers -- will consider this approach frivolous. How can you capture the complexity and criticality (strategic word) of a business plan in 140 characters?
   
   You can’t. But how many strategic plans are implemented successfully? Why is this? No one reads the document, at least not more than once. It’s complex – too many data points -- and doesn’t seem to be that critical to workers who are sweating this week’s production quotas. What’s missing in the plan is commonsensical, unadulterated, gut-leading, shameless simplicity.
   
   Take my simple business, for example. Here is the 140-character strategic plan for SkaareWorks, a consulting business in communication and change:
   
   

   Get attention, get understood, get clients, get valuable, get results, get appreciated, get paid, and get asked back.
   

   Can this be done for your clients, your department, your organization? Give it a Twhirl (sorry, Twitter talk).

5 140-characters or less guidelines

1. Wait. Don’t write now. You might just copy me. Let ideas percolate overnight, then write tomorrow in your pajamas before coffee.


2. Flow, don’t glow. Write fast, not feel-good. Don’t be overly precise in your choice of words at first, or frilly.


3. Avoid swearing after the second draft. Off-color words are colorless. Get the emotion off your mind but out of sight.
   
4. Write once, edit thrice. Then let it go. Did you hear me? Let it go.
   
5. When done, combine all three exercises into one 140-character tagline for your business or person.

If you want, Tweet me @skaareworks and show me your best entry. I have time to read only 140 characters

Richard Skaare 12.22.08

Social Networking with Yourself

I ran into myself online last week.

I was connected to LinkedIn, the networking site, scanning their list of my uploaded contacts for blue names. Blue means a match between my crowd and LinkedIn’s crowd. Those are the people I want to cultivate.

There I was under “S”: blue Richard Skaare, prospect. But how did I get on my list? Was this really who I thought it was? I decided to check me out to see if I was worth contacting.

Looking at Skaare’s LinkedIn profile, the photo was a grabber. Tightly cropped, the guy obviously wasn’t afraid to get in your face. Nice smile though. You could trust that smile. What, maybe mid- to late ‘50s, maybe older? A bit gray, bald, some wrinkles. He’s been around.

It says that he’s the President of SkaareWorks – a one person shop, I suspect; “CEO” would have sounded cocky. Previous jobs showed a lot of VP titles – and, man, did he have lots of jobs. He did PR, marketing, organizational development, a whole bunch of stuff. A real corporate stiff! Wait … he’s been a consultant for years too. Guy must be more like 78.

Skaare went to Gordon College (never heard of it) and did a couple of Masters, one at Boston University, the other at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Maybe he’s a priest. Nah, I popped over to the Gordon-Conwell site. Protestant, multi-denominational, Evangelical. He was a McCain supporter for sure. But he looks like a Sixties alumnus. Maybe he’s a closet liberal.

I linked to his website and blog. This guy thinks weird, like he cares about stuff, like he knows how to solve problems. I even learned something from one of his blog posts. And he Tweets. Can you believe a guy his age on Twitter!

So, I say to myself, why not send Skaare an invitation to join my LinkedIn network? I did. Here’s the note:

Richard:
This is a bit strange and awkward but I came across me – I mean, you – on LinkedIn. We have the same name and, to be honest, similar backgrounds. I thought we could help each other out by networking. Besides, I work alone out of a home office and I need someone to chat with from time to time. What do you say? Want to link?

Your friend
Your avatar
Richard

Almost a week has passed and still no reply. That’s okay: Angelina Jolie and Steve Jobs haven’t responded yet either. Though I would like to hear from myself and learn more about me. But I’ll be patient.

How about you? Have you taken a look at yourself from the outside in?

Richard Skaare 12.20.08

Slogging through the Early Blogging Weeks

Whenever I paced nervously around our kitchen as a youngster, my watching mother would say, “You don’t know what to do with yourself.” I didn’t understand what she meant back then. I do now because I’ve been pacing nervously around the social network for a month or two not quite knowing what to do with myself. Fortunately, John Updike stepped in to help.

After bouts of intense work over the past year building a learning portal – a.k.a. a social network -- for a Saudi company, I finally had some downtime. I decided to become my own learning portal, loading up and distilling gobs of information about social-everything, and then blogging energetically and insightfully. Subsequently, I read incessantly, bookmarked randomly, blindly built a blog, peddled my best comments on discussion groups, and went to be bed most nights stressed and exhausted.

Whatever enthusiasm I had for potential blog topics was repeatedly dulled by discovering that other bloggers had beaten me to them. I realized that originality might be a myth. Successful blogs use mostly blue-colored fonts; their posts are primarily clicks to other blogs.

Blogging, I sensed, was like re-gifting: whatever one receives, just repackage and give it to others. Write for attention, write with searchable key words, blog for bloggers. So, this social media business was more akin to telemarketing than conversation?

Competing in this craze made me a bit panicky. I simply couldn’t keep up with what I saw others doing.

• Speed-feeding stories on Twitter, like an ATM dispensing cash, from content aggregators such as AllTop.
• Scattering comments across the blogosphere to generate links that would drive up traffic and SEO scores (search engine optimization). One blogger pays $25 for typing 250 quick comments on various blogs -- “Nice post. I was reading a similar article here” -- to lure visitors to his site and spike his stats.
• Bouncing from site to site, rapidly adjusting to diverse formats: video on You-Tube, banter on Facebook, archiving on Delicious.

I started to show early signs of information anxiety and social fatigue. Maybe I just wasn’t hungry enough to jump into the feeding frenzy. I felt like I was, again, anxiously waiting to board a plane at the Shanghai Airport, flesh-pressed at the gate with more passengers than unreserved seats, running to the plane when the doors opened, and finding no place to sit.

Solace finally came oddly in a short interview with novelist John Updike on a wonderfully ordinary blog called Daily Routines. Updike shared his work habits:

Since I've gone to some trouble not to teach, and not to have any other employment, I have no reason not to go to my desk after breakfast and work there until lunch. So I work three or four hours in the morning, and it's not all covering blank paper with beautiful phrases.

You begin by answering a letter or two. There's a lot of junk in your life. There's a letter. And most people have junk in their lives but I try to give about three hours to the project at hand and to move it along. There's a danger if you don't move it along steadily that you're going to forget what it's about, so you must keep in touch with it I figure. So once embarked, yes, I do try to stick to a schedule.

I've been maintaining this schedule off and on -- well, really since I moved up to Ipswich in '57. It's a long time to be doing one thing. I don't know how to retire. I don't know how to get off the horse, though. I still like to do it. I still love books coming out. I love the smell of glue and the shiny look of the jacket and the type, and to see your own scribbles turned into more or less impeccable type.

It's still a great thrill for me, so I will probably persevere a little longer, but I do think maybe the time has come for me to be a little less compulsive, and maybe the book-a-year technique which has been basically the way I've operated.

Here is what I learned (or relearned) from Mr. Updike about what to do with myself in this networked world of frenetic hustle and hyper-promotion.

3x5 Thinking

3 reminders to myself (you can listen if you want)

1. I have no option but to blog. I am genetically and compulsively a writer, a persuader, and connector. “I have no reason not to go to my desk.”
2. I do not have to cover “blank paper with beautiful phrases” but I must deliver a product that I love only a little less than my readers.
3. I need to ease up but not give up. Like Updike, I will “persevere a little longer, but … be a little less compulsive.”

5 commitments to myself (and for you, if you want)

1. Stick to a schedule; produce something every day, publishable or for my soul only.
2. Write first for readers, second for search engines. Don’t sacrifice good word-smithing for key-wording.
3. Avoid being a substance abuser: write factually, credibly, and confidently from my head and heart.
4. Borrow comments from others, but steal the best ideas from my own mind.
5. Do what I do best over and over -- and then do it day in and day out.

Emails, Calls, Meetings -- all Twitter

Depleted from the labor pains of birthing my blog, I turned for titillation to Twitter, the online, hyperventilating chat network.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t set up my “friends” network when I signed on months back, and I wasn’t sure who I would talk with. But, c’mon, of the 2.3 million people who use Twitter, surely someone would say “hello” (which is 139 words fewer than Twitter’s longest short message).

After signing on, a window popped up saying that no one was following me and I was not following anyone, and asked, “What was I doing?” In other words, “Nothing to say … no friends?”

Aren’t those the two reasons why corporate managers – the decision-makers who thumb social networking up or down -- won’t take to Twitter. They don’t have time to follow anything else nor do they want anyone following what they’re doing. And when they hear about Twitter, it strikes them as a lot of key-tapping for what amounts to trivial exchanges.

But, is Twitter really extra work and a waste of time or, strangely, could it possibly be a more engaging, and, yes, efficient way to achieve business results? Is it much different than what occupies our time now? Stay with me.

Look at what we say runs and over-runs our lives: emails, smart phones, and meetings. Why? Don’t blame technology. We choose to open emails, turn on phones, and attend meetings. We impulsively tell colleagues and new acquaintances to “keep us posted,” “call us,” and “set up a meeting about that.”

Why?

It’s because we humans crave attention, news, and companionship. We are driven to be in the know and be known, to like and be liked, and to draw power from information and people. We will even consider that information when it’s trivial -- gossip, speculations, reality TV – and from people we don’t like all that much.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Call it chatter. We chatter when we jot a few words in response to emails from colleagues, banter with customers by phone between golf swings, and when we catch up on each other’s lives while waiting for a meeting to start.

Quick-fire exchanges seem like time-wasters -- rationally thinking, that is -- but are they ever informative. The more emotional the conversation, the less posturing people do; the more babble, the more we seem to understand what’s going really going on behind what appears to be happening. That’s because, in part, the messages are short, transparency abounds, and PowerPoints are missing. Chatter is good: it informs, centers, and stimulates us. And we like all of that.

Strangely, meetings are more fulfilling than phone conversations, which are more satisfying than emails.

• Emails are one-to-one, pre-meditated, time-delayed, and impersonal.
• Phone conversations are one-to-one, spontaneous, immediate, and friendly exchanges that rely on questions for context: “What are you doing now?” “Where did you go for lunch?”
• Meetings are one–to-many, many-to-many, and yet personal. The most effective meetings involve lots of interaction, honest sharing of ideas, to-the-point questions, and concise dialogue.

Now we’re talking Twitter: one-to-many and many-to-many; quick transactions of unedited, raw-honest comments that feel personal.

But do we really want all those interruptions? Don’t we encourage that now?

• We tell everyone that our door is always open to them.
• We extol the interactivity that cubicles are supposed to provide.
• We let our staffers have our cell number on speed dial.

As David Sacks notes – he’s the founder of Twitter competitor Yammer -- we don’t want to hear five times a day what friends are doing, but we do want to hear from co-workers five times a day about what they’re working on.

If I have convinced you at all that the nature of Twitter is the nature of what we’re doing already – and want and need to do – then why not try out this new channel as possibly a more effective way to learn from each other and increase productivity.

Here are three painless ways to explore the possibilities, ranging from you as a bystander to you as a full participant:

1. Pick an enterprising staff member who is a social networker (uses Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc.) and ask her to set up a staff Twitter group. Have your administrative assistant participate. Your lead staffer will give you reliable reports; your AA will tell you if and when you should connect.
2. Set up a Twitter group among those with direct and dotted-line reporting relationships to you and who are working remotely (at home, in other offices and countries). Explain that you are exploring new, possibly more efficient and more human channels for keeping everyone informed and swapping ideas. In this scenario, you join in, at least every few days, to check progress and add comments.
3. Set up a group for an upcoming event -- a trade show, annual meeting, customer outing – and use Twitter on laptops and cell phones, primarily, to orchestrate the logistics. Here you are a constant participant by monitoring your staff’s work, adding brief revisions, and throwing in accolades.

Try out Twitter for three months with these guidelines.

• Stick with this one channel for now; jumping headlong into My Space, Flickr, and other networks will make you cool with your kids but will quickly lead to fatigue.
• Get regular staff feedback on how to customize the use of Twitter to your group's specific needs.
• Focus on results, though don’t be too rigid on making a go/no-go decision at the end of the three months. You may want to extend its use or apply it to a different situation before you add or cut Twitter.

I almost forgot. What about the concern of being followed? If you’re a leader or emerging leader, you know the formula: be transparent, dialogue honestly, show trustworthiness, be available, entertain all ideas – in short let people know you, how you think, and how you act and, perhaps, they will indeed follow you at work and on Twitter.

Resources
Set up a Twitter account
Read 11 reasons to use Twitter for business
Read Applying Twitter: How It Works For Business
Read Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter
Read The Secret to Twitter
Subscribe to TwiTip, a new blog on Twitter
Twhirl. a tool that reportedly simplifies. beautifies, and amplifies twittering
Statistics supporting the Twitter craze

A Primer on Social Networking for Boomers

While sifting through old photos at her mother’s farm last week, my wife uncovered one of those pictures worth a thousand words. It was a photo of a social network from 1951.


The phrase “social network” seems so easy to understand. Yet, whenever I bring it up with folks 45+, including business clients, and even some 20 year-olds, I get glazed looks. My tone assumes that they know what I’m talking about, but they don’t, yet they think they should so they look like they do.

For those of us who are trying to evangelize and profit from this social networking stuff, we need a simple illustration to explain to the unwashed why we obsess over this concept and why they should as well. It could be a chart or an infographic or a story. Just make sure the illustration is less complicated than the phrase.

I think I’ve found my explanation in this vintage photo.

Think of the circular, defined space of the pool as a networking site. What draws the kids there is a combination of experiencing something novel, having fun with other kids, and the possibilities of what each of them can do with the water – splash, learn to swim without fear, see what floats. The content of the pool is critical: no water, no community.

The kids picked up the buzz about the social event from overhearing their parents at supper and from the pool’s young owner, who talked it up at the playground. Plus, kids back then were always scanning for something to do, something surprising, and spent lots of time moving around. As baby-boomer author Bill Bryson remembers: "Kids were always outdoors — I knew kids who were pushed out the door at 8 in the morning and not allowed back in until 5 unless they were on fire or actively bleeding."

The pool crowd in the photo came from the same neighborhood, had similar interests, knew all of the kids on their block well, and occasionally played with children on other streets. They were nice to each other mostly, were okay with the kids who didn’t join in the group regularly, disagreed with each other at times, and always came back to the group for more of whatever glued them together.

Like social websites, they shared school pictures, loved to twitter endlessly with best pals about their experiences, told about their favorite books and Disney movies, and talked about what they wanted to be when they grew up (sound familiar?).

Like any reputable site, navigating to the pool site was easy: the kids walked -- with older siblings at this age but later alone. Everyone knew shortcuts to their friend’s house, skipping through neighbors' sites, slipping under holes in fences. Lots of links to get there.

At this pool-site, everyone was welcome. It was crowded but there was always room for one more. Once there, you didn’t have to all do the same thing. You could take a dip in the water or sit above the others along the edge and watch. You could bring toy phones and other playthings if you wanted, but who would want those things when you had cool people with whom you could gab or just be silly.

Notice the kid on the far right with the dark hair who seems to be leading the discussion. The boy in the back left with his tongue out is listening and preparing a response. The blond child at the front right who is staring at the camera is a future job-hunter trying to look good. The somewhat shy, serious girl behind her is glad to be there but doesn’t feel compelled to participate. The dark-haired girl picking her nose in the back is wondering if there is another pool elsewhere that she would enjoy more. The toe-haired boy on the left also looking at the camera is thinking what kind of pool he might want that would be bigger, better, and more diverse and inclusive.

And the adorable, curly-haired girl at the far left is dreaming about a handsome and wise knight in shining armor that she will marry some day. Her dream came true: she married me.