The fact that we were even (self) nominated was a bit unlikely. Having followed the Tekne awards during their 10 years of existence, and having seen the caliber of the winners, I was pretty sure we had exactly no chance to win, and ordinarily never would have pursued the award. Luckily Linda Finley of Trissential, a consulting firm involved in the nominated effort, kept at me until I submitted a nomination.

I mean we’re a huge, comprehensive, national career information Website run by the state of Minnesota (DEED) through a grant from the US Dept. of Labor. We’ve got more career information than anybody, from salaries to career videos to occupation profiles and way more. Yes, we always think we do good work, but we don’t have the cachet of other 2009 winners like Honeywell, Ecolab (two awards), Vast (two awards and an innovative green process), and Starkey Labs.

Luckily the award committee disagreed.

The effort that was honored was a stem-to-stern remaking of the CareerOneStop.org site involving:

• Graphic redesign
• User interface redesign
• New Information architecture
• New Taxonomy
• Audience characterization
• Usability testing
• Section 508 compliance assessment
• Search Engine Optimization
• User-Centered Design training
• Implementing an enterprise Web Content Management System (Tridion)
• Implementing an enterprise search engine (Endeca)
• Creating a new application architecture

This all involved more than 100 resources from two state organizations and 11 contracting firms. And we did all this at the same time. Yes, I’ve got a great team

So, how do you win a Tekne award?

Step 1 – Start with a great, talented and dedicated team, in our case USDOL, DEED, MnSCU, and XPAND.

Step 2 – Get a boatload of money from an unbelievably supportive sponsor, in our case, the DOL Education and Training Administration. Use liberally.

Step 3 – Hire a great branding and design firm like Azul 7.

Step 4 – Procure a great Web Content Management System like Tridion and engage their professional services.

Step 5 – Procure a great Web search engine like Endeca and engage their professional services.

Step 6 – Engage talented PMs, BAs, and architects, in our case, from Trissential, Tribeca, Tier 3, JPerzel, and Olhoft Consulting.

Step 7 – Mix well. Run infrastructure projects simultaneously while redesigning architecture and infrastructure on the fly (possibly not a best practice!).

Step 8 – Engage experts on user interface design, information architecture, taxonomy, audience characterization, usability, Section 508 compliance, SEO, and user-centered design, in our case from Azul 7, Earley & Assoc., User Strategies, UserWorks, and Frederickson Communications.

Step 9 – Stir into other ongoing projects and communicate, communicate, communicate.

Step 10 – Release WCMS and search engine within three months of each other (possibly not a best practice!)

Step 11 – Sprinkle in results and learning from SEO, audience characterization, usability, Section 508 and season with user-centered design concepts.

Step 12 – Place in pressure cooker for it seemed like forever. Serves 24 million unique visitors a year.

Step 13 – Receive Tekne award.

Gee, in hindsight, it doesn’t seem that hard. Not.

Thanks to everyone who contributed!

Please add a comment below.

The good news is, I’m in the top 4 percent of Twitterers!

The bad news is, that means my rank is 234,399 out of a total of 5,233,919 Twitterers. Now I know that being in the top 4 percent of anything is a good thing, but the ego gets dented a little when you realize there’s more than a quarter of a million folks who are more, er, more what, exactly? More betterer? More twitteringer? More in-need-of-finding-a-life-offline?

Anyway, I’m going to revel in my lofty status while seeing if I can climb that ladder.

It seems the way Twitter Grader works is to take into account the number of followers (OK, I already have a problem with that metric – could be meaningless), the number you follow (also potentially meaningless) and “friends,” which I take to be how many of the folks you follow follow you back.

I’m a bit confused on the last, so I googled “twitter friends” and was reminded that there’s a service called TwitterFriends that also assesses your Twitter status. TwitterFriends says that my conversation quotient is 33.3% (above average), but my link quotient is 100%, meaning all my tweets have links in them. This last is pretty much true. Conversation quotient means how many of my tweets are replies. I think that’s a bit high, actually.

TwitterFriends seemed like one guy’s side project, and so I was reluctant to input my Twitter password, which I guess would have made more of the features work.

Then I tried TwitterCounter, and they said my rank is 90,838! Wow! That makes me feel a whole lot better. They also predict that I’ll have almost 3,000 followers in 30 days.

From there I blundered into SponsoredTweets, which will pay you to tweet. Now that’s more like it! () Of course, Guy Kawasaki’s Adjix is trying a similar thing, combining ads with an URL shortener.

Another site, Twitoria, lets you find deadbeat followers who haven’t tweeted in a while so you can give them the boot. Exactly why you want to do this has to do with your Twitter ratio. If you’re following way more people than are following you, then you probably don’t have anything interesting to say yourself, at least so goes the conventional wisdom.

According to the Tffratio.com site:

Your TFF Ratio (Twitter Follower-Friend Ratio) is the ratio of your followers to friends (or people who you follow). The higher the ratio, the more Twitter heat you pack.

• A ratio of less than 1.0 indicates that you are seeking knowledge (and Twitter Friends), but not getting much Twitter Love in return. Check your pulse, you might be a bot.
• A ratio of around 1.0 means you are respected among your peers. Many people think that a ratio of around 1.0 is the best – you’re listening and being listened to.
• A ratio of 2.0 or above shows that you are a popular person and people want to hear what you have to say. You might be a thought leader in your community.
• A TFF Ratio 10 or higher indicates that you’re either a Rock Star in your field or you are an elitist and you cannot be bothered by Twitter’s mindless chatter. You like to hear yourself talk. Luckily others like to hear you talk, too. You may be an ass.

Tffratio says that my TFF Ratio is 1.00 – Respected Among Peer Group. This is because, somehow, recently I achieved exact parity: My number of followers is exactly the same as the number I’m following. Dunno how that happened. I’m not using a bot to manage it. However, my ratio compares poorly with Ashton Kutcher with a TFF of 15020.34 – Likes to Hear His Own Voice. Heh.

But back to Twitoria. Something seems to be wrong, since it claims none of my followers have ever tweeted. Some Twitter API failure, I’ll bet (http://twitoria.com/index.php?username=MikeEllsworth&since=5184000).

Movin’ On Up

So I figure the only way I’m going to move up is to follow more-highly-ranked twitterers. Twitter Grader claims that only one of my followers is highly ranked (which I at first thought might mean that only one of them has ever used Twitter Grader, except I found other followers in their Elite list). So if I could follow some of the top 100 twitterers, and get them to follow me back, my status would increase, right?

So I take a look at Twitterholic, which ranks twitterers by number of followers.

OK, I can’t stomach the idea of following pretty much any of the top 100, at least any who might actually follow me back. Here’s the top 10 ranked twitterers:

Sure I could follow Obama, but he’s not tweeting anymore, and wouldn’t follow me back. And most of the rest are gag-me celebs. And Oprah, with more than 3 million followers at #11, only follows 17 people!

There are some top 100s who follow lots of people, including Guy Kawasaki (hmmm, he already follows me. Why didn’t Twitter Grader list him as an influential follower? And how about another top 100 who follows me, Perry Belcher?) Other high-following possibilities include Britney Spears (not on your life), the Onion (possibly), Lady Gaga, and Yoko Ono (no and no).

I’m beginning to think Twitter Grader’s methodology is suspect, though. Two high-profile twitterers follow me, but I don’t get any influential love in their rankings. And Twitterholic seems no better, apparently basing their ranking of me at 670,705th by followers on stats from stinking April! However, they do rank me first in my hometown: ‘55426‘. But how can I believe this when they say I joined Twiter 484 months (40 years) ago!

So what am I to do? Just keep plugging away, following interesting folks and tweeting on an irregular basis. I don’t buy in to the numbers game on most social sites. Twitter is the only one, IMHO, on which the number of followers actually can do you some good, however, so I guess what I’ll have to do is – the same thing you, or even the Top 100s need to do – tweet more interesting things.

It’s obviously some sort of automated scheme, but I can’t figure out what possible use something like this could be.

Has anybody else seen this type of thing? Any ideas as to what’s up?

“We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. … I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

Seventy-eight years later, we’re waiting until we run out of oil and coal before getting serious about renewable energy. Too bad Edison couldn’t have invented a way to live another hundred years; we could use such clarity of insight from a man who was born before the Civil war.

His quote is my new sig.

“How To Get *48,828* Followers On Twitter Automatically With Just A Simple Click Of Your Mouse?”

So I signed up for Twitter List Builder about a month ago, and what happened? I got maybe 20 new follows, about a third of which I subsequently unfollowed, including several naughty girls, Penthouse, and a really high-volume spammer from Australia.

Of course, I also got lots of come ons from Twitter List Builder to upgrade my account, but I definitely expected that.

I had my doubts right from the start. The scheme appears to work just like those chain letters you got in junior high school. Well, maybe you’re too young to have gotten a snail mail chain letter, but the email versions work pretty much the same: you remove the top name in a list of seven or so, and send the chain letter out to the other six, after adding your name to the bottom. After lots of other chainers do this, like the Chinese inventor of chess who asked the emperor pay him only in grains of rice, you’ve got ungodly amounts of follower. (Don’t diss the exponent!)

Now while some may argue that I broke the chain by ditching the comely young things who wanted to sell me Webcam time, I seriously doubt that had anything to do with it. And, besides @deaffondvbb1, @Fea1eeg (a shill for a scheme that will make me $171,168.06 Per Month (and doggone it, that 6 cents is important!)), and @JessicaTrommler (who shills for survey-taking at home) still follow me, among several others who came aboard via Twitter List Builder.

At about the same time, I signed up with Perry Belcher and Tellman and Shawn, who promise I can make money on autopilot. The jury’s still out on these dudes. Belcher sure is an interesting guy, and he really does know his stuff. The two hour Webinar I attended (along with like 16,000 others, according to Perry) had about 45 minutes of killer Internet marketing techniques. If you want to see it without getting on his list, I can hook you up. Just email // <![CDATA[// <![CDATA[
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So I plan to explore a variety of other moneymaking systems such as Hits2U, Maverick Money Makers Club,  and such.

There’s one thing for certain, however: Somebody is making money using this stuff, if only the shillers themselves. Perry claims to have sold out of 500 $1K/month memberships, 250 $2K/month memberships, and 250 $3K per month memberships after the Webinar.

So it could happen to me!