WSSC Community activity includes a fishing derby

URL:  http://www.wsscwater.com/home/jsp/content/2010-09-01b.f...

I thought this was very cool as I always considered WSSC as a organization that did not reach out much. Very nice to see they used the summer weather to provide happiness to a lot of kids.

A boatload of kids and their parents participated in WSSC’s Family Fishing Derby last Saturday. But it was the youngest fishermen that reeled in the biggest catches of the day. Karen White of Olney, seven-year-old Gabriel Gersten of Silver Spring, and seven-year-old Katherine Holzrichter of Crofton netted the most fish. Karen and Katherine caught the biggest fish, too.

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Discovery Hostage Issue : The way we get our news is changing

Today I heard about the Discovery situation around 2.30 when my wife called and asked me to check for alternates routes to College Park as traffic was backed up. Here is How I checked for news:



1) Twitter : Lot of tweets

2) Google News No results

3) Washington Post : full story

4) TBD.com



Of course my wife had WTOP on and so could hear the news on the beltway. The overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms to get their daily news, according to a new survey conducted jointly by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Project for Excellence in Journalism.



What do you use first to get your news ?



Also see pictures from the situation.

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Quick checklist for things to do to improve your personal web presence

This post was the result of a phone conversation with Priya Ramesh Director at Crt-tanaka and hopefully reflects any thoughts I may have shared with you.

Amplify’d from www.livingstonbuzz.com

This post is intended to help you create and maintain a strong online presence so when someone Googles your name, you appear to walk the social media talk. If done right, you could become a successful personal brand but please note that our philosophy on personal branding is to leverage it for community building NOT to turn into a narcissist that likes to tute his/her own horn 24/7 on social networks. We have a lot of those already. So let’s get started: Read more at www.livingstonbuzz.com

 

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My friend and Analytics Guru Umesh Choori's tips

I sit next to Umesh at work in Network Solutions. He is a brilliant guy and has a lot of good advice in this article. Congrats for winning the best and brightest Web Analytics professional award

Amplify’d from blog.networksolutions.com

Top 5 things really depend on the business and situation you are trying to address. I will try to keep it more generic and broad.

Implement analytics on your site, even if it is basic site. If you are budget constrained, there are relatively functional web analytics tools in market for free. So no excuse to not to do it.

Understand where traffic is coming from – by geography, campaigns, paid search, natural search, referring domains etc…

Measure conversion rate (whatever you want the site to do i.e. sales, sign ups, lead generation forms, calls etc.)

Identify the most visited pages, and continue to improve the pages through testing (alright, this may cost in infrastructure and resources, however it is worth it, would not you train your Sales representative?)

Identify the website paths (series of pages) that drive your conversions. Improve these paths to provide better visitor experience while achieving your business goals. Read more at blog.networksolutions.com

 

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Turning Employees Into Problem Solvers @harvardbiz

THE article talks about the risk of operational failures and the advantages of using employee input to streamline processes .



Take away quote from the article : "Drilling down to discover when frontline employees speak up most constructively, and how to translate this into problem solving, should help bridge that gap"

Amplify’d from hbswk.hbs.edu

"Hospitals are enormously complex," Toffel observes. "Imagine a factory where every part has to be custom-built and can require any number of 100 or 200 services and subprocesses. On top of that, the most knowledgeable people about those subprocesses-the doctors-come and go from the factory and are not employed by it."

To shed light on how to encourage staff to share constructive feedback when using reporting systems, Adler-Milstein, Singer, and Toffel examined the influence of managerial engagement on problem solving and of an organization-wide information campaign.

First, the phenomenon of patient-safety information campaigns: Such campaigns increase the frequency of frontline workers' speaking up following an incident by 5 percent, the researchers learned. However, when it comes to sharing a solution to the problem, the campaigns had a much larger effect, nearly tripling the frequency with which frontline workers suggested a solution to the problem. Read more at hbswk.hbs.edu

 

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