When talking about social business, the new and broad beyond-the-tools term for social media, newsletters are often completely ignored as a channel. Several member interviews we’ve conducted recently confirms that email-based newsletters continue to be a highly effective and successful way to engage with the audience. A newsletter may be old-fashioned in the opinion of some, but it does provide a tested and proven way to interact with customers. Yet, apart from e-commerce sites, very few organisations seem to pay much attention to newsletters.

Headshift, a London-based everything-social consultancy has this somewhat focused definition of social business:

“The rise of the social web has taught us a lot about how we can significantly reduce the costs of collaboration and co-ordination inside businesses, and demonstrated the power of iterative, evolutionary processes driven by real-time data and user feedback. Social business is all about smarter, simpler, social tools, with the same quality of user experience we have come to expect from the web, that help people get things done”

This seems relevant in relation to newsletters, which are smart, simple and driven by data and user feedback.

Email may not be the right tool to reach 20 year-olds with. Many of them rely heavily on Facebook and Twitter and don’t check their e-mails several times a day. For the remaining 98% of the working population, email-based newsletters still do seem to have a useful place. Newsletters can be a massive driver of traffic to your website and also a very cost-effective way to communicate with your customers.

To quote Christian Peytz, a Danish expert on newsletters:

Newsletters are like Teletext: Old technology but still very used. Too few dedicate enough time and attention to newsletters, which can be used as a easy way to stay top-of-mind with customers

The usability experts at Nielsen Norman Group have an excellent report on Email Newsletter Usability. The executive summary explains, among other things why users generally have highly emotional reactions to newsletters. They moreover acknowledge that receiving newsletters is both preferable and more convenient than direct mailings in the physical world.

Many analysts are fascinated by emerging technology so I understand why they either ignore newsletters or totally seem to have forgotten about them. What I don’t understand is why so many don’t capitalize more on newsletters as a powerful marketing and communications tool?

Similar to other social business initiatives, a good way to get started with newsletters is by thinking of your audience, content and how newsletters may help support the goals of the organisation.

Delivery has been uppermost in my mind recently. My wife is expecting a second child but this one decided he doesn’t want to head in the right direction. Next week he’ll be “from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”. Consequently I’ve been thinking heavily both about caesarean delivery and about a number of projects which now share a common delivery date. If I were project managing this birth, I’d just be cajoling the baby to get into position but quite frankly wouldn’t be offering much value. Is this the same for web projects? Do project managers actually help and how can you get more out of them?

According to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the population of planet Earth was formed by a spaceship full of middle managers, hairdressers, marketeers and account executives. It’s easy to lump project managers into this mix. When Ford Prefect complains about this group’s inability to get stuff done — “This is futile! 573 committee meetings, and you haven’t even discovered fire yet!” — you can be sure that a project manager was there, maintaining the rolling action item log.

This is often exacerbated by project methodologies that foster a generic culture of project management, where all project management problems are essentially the same and if you can fix the issues around business case, stakeholders, executive sponsorship and resources you’re well on the way to project failure prevention. I’ve no doubt that these rules do apply for all projects, but I wonder that if you have a culture of just focussing on these issues you simply encourage project management by numbers where you get unthinking, standardised responses. As usual, Scot Adams got there first:

Even where you have a good project manger trying to help, it’s usually soft skills. Plant any management consultant in there and there’ll come up with the same answers without really having to get to grips with the fundamental issues. Why is the project struggling? Let’s not call lack of sponsorship a root cause when it’s just a symptom.

Sponsors are reluctant when they don’t understand project goals. You can see this for nearly any social media project. The business case is difficult to prove, the executive don’t buy into social media as reducing costs or increasing revenue, and the rigid formulae of business case definition help no one. This isn’t a sponsorship failure where the project manager can go in and mitigate against lack of funding. It’s fundamentally about whether an organisation is culturally ready to adopt social media and understand how they might use it. The project manager can facilitate this debate, but really you need a subject matter expert rather than a journalist who has read a couple of reports from the big analyst firms.

Jerry Manas recently wrote an article in which he suggests that project managers who run agile projects bring a completely different style to the table that’s much more concrete than traditional approaches. While I don’t agree with the entirety of his article, I think the main hypothesis is right. If you can get project managers who are close to the stakeholders, intimate with the issues and prove that they’re not just some glorified secretary, they can bring real value. Specialist projects require specialist experience and expertise and the world (of IT in particular) is littered with projects that have been delivered to industry best practice, but to abject failure.

The better generic project managers will continue to mitigate against failure and they’ll deliver their projects. But it the end, you’ll be judged on what you’ve delivered, not how you delivered it, and that’s where domain knowledge is essential.

My son will be just as precious to me whether he comes via forceps or scalpel. But it’s the people with the hard skills, not the soft skills, whom I’ll to put my faith in to ensure that he gets delivered safely.

Further reading

A recent presentation I made to the J. Boye community of practice on speeding up project delivery using techniques from Scrum and Prince2.

The Center for
Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth conducted a
study on social media by Nora Barnes and Eric Mattson on the usage of social
media in fast-growing corporations. All interviews took place in October and
November of 2009. The 2009 study looks again at the Inc. Magazine 500 social
media usage for the third consecutive year, allowing for a longitudinal study
of corporate use of social media.

In 2007, the study
found that the Inc. 500 was outpacing the more traditional and larger Fortune
500 companies in their use of social media. For example, with blogs, the 2007
some research showed that 8% of the Fortune 500 companies were blogging compared
to 19% of the Inc. 500. This difference continued in 2008 with 16% of the
Fortune 500 blogging vs. 39% of the Inc. 500. And it appears the Inc. 500’s
lead in blogging will continue in 2009 with the Inc. 500 now blogging at a rate
of 45%.

This research shows that
social media continues to penetrate parts of the business world at a fast rate.
In all three studies, questions looked at with six prominent social media
(blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking, message boards and
wikis).  In 2009, several new tools
were added including Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and MySpace.

Social networking continues
to be the most familiar social media tool to the Inc. 500 with 75% of
respondents in 2009 claiming to be “very familiar with it” (compared to 57% in
2008). Twitter’s has captured “share of mind” in the first year of being
studied with sixty-two percent of executives reported being familiar with it.

Looking across the three
years, social networking and blogging have have continued to grow in adoption,
the use of message boards, online video, wikis and podcasting has leveled off
or declined. The addition of Twitter (considered by respondents to be both a
microblogging site and a social networking site) in the latest study shows that
52% of the Inc. 500 companies are already using this tool for their business.

Forty-three percent of the
2009 Inc. 500 reported social media was “very important” to their
business/marketing strategy and 91% of the Inc. 500 is using at least one
social media tool in 2009 (up from 77% in 2008). In addition, as they ramp up
their usage, the Inc. 500 companies are also seeking to protect themselves
legally, with 36% having implemented a formal policy concerning blogging by
their employees.

This is consistent with
other studies I have seen in the past two years. It is nice to see the
continued increase in social media use by business. It also makes sense. 

When visiting a local company last month, I was given a glimpse of their requirements for their new Knowledge Services Framework vision and requirements.  It was inspiring and incredible.  They had mapped all the functions that they perform, identified existing systems that matched, and then had measured each of them to the following vision.

Here is their requirements as presented.  The highlights are theirs.

leverage consumer applications proven to augment existing work processes (parity plus)

specifically targeted to business requirements and opportunities

access with only a browser and an internet connection

no reliance on proprietary systems or technology

development based on open industry standards

built upon a semantic web framework

embraces and enables BYOC model

no operating system dependency

provides web service capabilities

tuned options for mobile devices

no browser dependency

no net cost increase

no desktop footprint

100% cloud ready

Vision into Reality

Okay, very pretty and exciting, but we all know from experience that idealistic visions are usually really good on slides, but falter in reality.  Can this be made to work in a large (multi-billion dollar), established company with a full suite of legacy products?

After what I saw, I would say Yes.

They had looked at their existing systems and if they didn’t meet the requirements, the vendors were told the issues and given a chance, over 1-2 years, to update their product.  When they didn’t, they were replaced.  This isn’t the act of rash adopters.  This is planned and thought-out.

For new functionality, like blogs and enhanced collaboration spaces, they identified new products, many of them open source, that met their requirements.  With open standards, like CMIS, they were plugged-in to the architecture.

They are building a private cloud that allows them to install applications into either Amazon’s platform or locally based upon their needs.  They are currently using Amazon’s cloud primarily for development now, but will start mixing it up shortly.

Someone brought in a Mac and said that he now did all his work on it.  He had one Windows image to work with a legacy piece of software that needed IE, finance related I believe, but he demonstrated the freedom from the tightly configured company-owned laptop.  With a browser and Internet connection, he was good.

They are looking into Semantic capabilities.  They want to uniquely adapt the social web with the semantic web in context of [their] business processes.  They have a firm grasp of what they are trying to accomplish and are talking to multiple people about how do execute.  They aren’t leaning on one “expert”, but seeking a complete picture.

How Do You Measure Up?

I’ve read a lot of people talking about transforming the Enterprise with new technologies.  I’ve seen them talk about enabling people to work.  This is a complete transformation.  Will users leverage the new stuff?  Well, they’ll have to use a lot of it because it will be where critical information is stored.  The champions have also been selling the idea across the company as the technology evolved to meet their requirements.

It is some cool stuff, potentially the coolest I have seen in technology world to date.  I wish them all the luck in the world and hope that I get an opportunity to help out.

This is one project I would not delegate to my team.  I’m not worried that they couldn’t deliver, I just want to play with the cool toys in the beautiful architecture.

I’ve recently been working on a number of web content management system selections. My preference is to carry these out in a two-stage process (see the one-sheet guide to selecting a WCM). The first stage pre-qualifies suppliers according to client attitudes to cost, risk and technological preferences. The second stage then gets into the real tasks that you want to perform, discovering how the WCM enforces and informs processes.

Like most other people in this business, I approach this from the point of view that there is no best WCM, just different products that may be viable for different kinds of tasks. It’s about finding a product that will allow you to get started as quickly as possible without precluding later ambitions. I try to show clients what a WCM could do for them, and in turn client aspirations suggest product features. These usually centre around a number of core areas:

Editorial interface

How is content updated? Is it through a browser, a document template, or some other application? If it is through a browser, which browsers does it work in? Does it require a plug-in? How viable are those constraints within the organisation? If the organisation is planning to devolve editing, how appropriate are WYSIWYG and in situ editors? If content entry needs to be more controlled via forms, how will users preview their work? Can the WCM offer different editorial interfaces for different types of users? And hand in hand with the interfaces, if you have lots of devolved editors, how does the WCM assure concurrent contribution and secure access for different kinds of users?

Pages vs. elements

Some WCM only really have the concept of pages and associated assets, making it hard to re-use fragments of content across the site. This simple model is generally appropriate for two scenarios: where there are many devolved, occasional contributors who would be confused by having to perform multiple tasks to get a piece of content to update on one part of the site and wouldn’t immediately understand the implications of a more complex editorial change; and for sites which have quite user journeys with little information appearing in more than one place.
For sites which need to re-use content a lot, where there’s a central editorial team assuring that changes are propagated correctly, more advanced systems that use “fragments” of content in multiple locations across the site in an “edit once, publish many” model can bring significant business benefit. These content management models usually bring more flexible templates but they can also make it more difficult to audit content: what did a given page look like on a specific day and who made the content changes? They are also reliant on robust link cohesion, so that if you move a piece of content, the WCM continues to link to its new location.

Content structures

Absolutely central to most WCM is the concept of a content type. This is the model that allows you to define which fields editors need to complete to publish a page and the constraints on those: e.g. title (no more than 200 characters), summary (plain text), main body text (rich text), location (postal code), category (list of valid values), etc. These structures are important for a number of reasons. They allow you to create business rules for linking content, such as get me the three latest news items about Germany. They allow you to create different presentations for different types of content, so am event looks completely different from an FAQ. And they allow you to contol which information must be completed before content can go live and how it will be presented on different platforms once it’s been published.
There are other metaphors that WCM use to relate complex content: hierarchical metadata structures such as folders, categories or channels enable you to group content together in more complex ways. Flatter metadata structures also allow you to “traverse” across website structures and relate content in differnt part of the information architecture that don’t sit into this hierarchy. It’s often useful to have multiple kinds of metadata, particularly faceted taxonomy, if your content is particularly complicated and needs a lot of content relationships in order to achieved desired user journeys.

Technology

Where the WCM isn’t a standalone application but needs to integrate with other systems in a web platform – user directories, CRM, eCommerce, transactional tools – you need to validate how it will communicate with other systems. Is it through the Application Programming Interface (API), web services, or some other method?
The maintenance and extensibility of the system can also be important requirements. If I need to change a content type, what does that involve? If I need to get data from another application, can I do this in a de-coupled way?

Some other factors may come into play, such as workflow, internationaisation and personalisation. If one product is particularly strong in one of these areas and it’s a key requirement, then it may get into a shortlist even if it’s weaker in some of the other areas identified above.

This all brings me to the recent debate about whether WordPress is a CMS, with numerous contributions on Twitter as well as from:

• Jeff Cram: Is WordPress a CMS?
• Ian Truscott: Is WordPress a CMS? Hardly? Barely?
• CMS Watch: Evaluating WordPress as a web CMS
• Laurence Hart: What makes a CMS a CMS?

My experience of WordPress is that it’s really good at two key features where some established content management systems are relatively poor: search engine optimisation and comments. On SEO, it ties your blog post title to a friendly URL, enables good internal linking (as long as you don’t move any pages), allows tagging and categorisation and offers some great SEO tools. Comments meanwhile can be quite tricky for some WCM that operate separate content contribution and consumption environments, but WordPress does this easily, with useful anti-spamming tools and the ability to follow the comment conversation by RSS or email.

When it comes to the question of whether WordPress is or isn’t a WCM, the best analogy I could come up with was a camera phone. A camera phone does take pictures, it is convenient, some phones even have a flash and autofocus. But would you get a camera phone specifically to use as a camera? I think not if you’re serious about photography, It is a camera, but a very limited one.

WordPress is a blogging tool with some shared characteristics of a WCM. If you apply some of the many available modules to it you can come up with a really nice proposition, up to a point. But you’re effectively hacking the software to get it to behave as many WCM already do. You can get any software to do pretty much anything in the end, but that still doesn’t make it a WCM.

WordPress is widely used by many organisations as a web content management system and there are a lot of photos taken on camera phones. But you need to understand the product’s limitations and if these don’t affect you and you’re achieving what you want, then no one should criticise you for your choice. But let’s be sensible about it and say that even if there’s no such thing as the best WCM, you know that it wouldn’t be WordPress.

Much industry discussion by vendors and consultants is driven by underlying agendas and it can be quite difficult for the interested business manager to look through the hype and find out what is really good knowing.

Based on conversations with our North American and European communities as well as input from intranet experts like Australian James Robertson, here’s our take on 5 key intranet trends for business managers in 2010:

1. Metrics; Managers need numbers to understand how the intranet is evolving and as an industry we are slowly approaching consensus on key metrics. European intranet expert Jane McConnell recently published an excellent blog on Intranet metrics: which indicators?, which is highly recommend reading.
2. Mobility; Many employees are spending a lot of time away from their desk and need to have the intranet on their mobile devices. Only three of the ten intranets in the recent Intranet Design Annual 2010 Report from the Nielsen Norman Group supported mobile access.
3. Social; The big buzzword at the moment with social business, social media and obviously also social intranets. Jane McConnell recently stated that 2010 will not be the year of the social intranet based on a survey by Toby Ward. Whether this is happening or not in your enterprise, ’social’ is a key trend that business managers need to understand.
4. Task-based; Irish intranet expert Gerry McGovern has talked about this for years, e.g. back in 2007 when he published Intranets: what staff really want. Some might call elements of this collaboration, although that term is surrounded by just as much confusion as clarity in the industry
5. Usability; Many intranets still suffer from poor usability, even though several organisations have made significant advancements. As an example the UK Environment Agency have a rare published example of an intranet persona project. Read more about intranet usability in my recent posting on Make your intranet easier to use in 2010

Lack of support in every way from management is a common issue for intranet managers. You can’t expect a business manager to know more about intranets than you do, but you should be able to expect your manager to have an opinion about these 5 key intranet trends.

You can get input on all 5 trends at our upcoming full day intranet seminar, the International Intranet Day, on March 24 in Copenhagen and on the Intranet track at our Philadelphia conference in May which is co-hosted by Jane McConnell.

“Repeat after me, this is not an information revolution, it is a relationship revolution”

Tweet by John Hagel (@jhagel)

The cool technologies that are transforming the competitive landscape and how companies operate are not prototypes in some electronic giant’s lab. They’re in the marketplace, and affordable. You don’t have to overhaul your IT architectures to implement them. If anything, they improve the value of that architecture that you spent gillions putting in place.

And, as a bonus, these technologies promise to, in the words of one CIO, “make IT fun again!” The promise of new, cool technology depends on IT-smart business leaders, who discover the potential in them through experimentation and application. These are learn-by-doing technologies that are not programmable by IT. Employees will “reprogram” how their companies operate based on how they use these technology. IT’s job is to teach, coach, observe, and scale. Imagine the impact of having everyone in the business 10% smarter about IT? It’d do a lot more good than making everyone in IT 100% smarter about the business.

Often the best source for innovation is the team within your business. A great leader can turn them into entrepreneurs who are hungrily looking for new opportunities. The key is empowerment. By empowering people you enable them to achieve goals through their own ideas and efforts. The leader sets the destination, but the team chooses the route.

Of course not. For years, the prevailing practices for productivity were project and process management. Now that we’ve begun to recognize the critical role of collaboration, and collaborative software for improving productivity….(Good) Collaboration software helps connect geographically dispersed teams, dramatically improves communication, and creates a shared workspace where team members can contribute, aggregate and iterate information and work. Shared workspaces help the team create and maintain a shared view and understanding of their problem space – the military calls this a “common operating picture”. The logical (and critical) next step is to enable this team to plan, track and execute with the same level of ease and convenience as they can now communicate and aggregate work.

Keith Errington: “Web 2.0 – Collaboration vs. Control“

…this leads us to the more fundamental problem behind Web 2.0 adoption. The people making the decisions at a strategic level, need to understand these technologies, what they mean and what they can and cannot do. Then they have to see how they can be used to meet their organizational objectives. And then they need to implement them to the depth appropriate to the proposed strategy and with the right level of control. They need to understand the implications of the success of such projects to both the budget and the corporate culture. But one of the strengths of these technologies is that often their effect adds up to much more than the sum of the parts – that they generate new paradigms and evolve into systems that defy strategy and planning. They cross departmental boundaries and break down barriers between the organization, its customers, and its suppliers. And once users get the taste of openness and collaboration, they generally want more – it’s difficult to get that genie back in the bottle.

The management within a company finds it needs to replace their existing, custom developed ERP system with a modern standard ERP system. A major ERP vendor brings their best sales people to a meeting with the management, equipped to the teeth with the most impressive product PowerPoint slide decks they could up-bring (that is, bullet-rich slides with a lot of interconnected 3D boxes that makes the ERP seem very advanced and capable).

The sales people manage to convince the company management to buy the most expensive license of their ERP system. All modules they could possible use, and a few more, are included in the price. As an extra bonus, the license agreement also contains a few “Easter eggs”, including a free license of the vendor’s state-of-the-art and very versatile portal software.

The company – some folks at the IT department – discovers the Easter-egg with the portal software. Like boys with toys, they can’t wait to open it and see what it does. So, they install the software on a server – “for evaluation purposes”.

Sometime later, a business unit identifies a need for aggregating all the information and tools they need in one place. They’ve heard that some competitor does that by using a portal solution, and that a portal solution is just what they need too. So they turn to their IT Department, telling them they need a portal solution.

The boys at the IT department (not many girls around) get all fired up. They tell the business people that they in fact already have a state-of-the-art and very versatile portal software in their enterprise software portfolio. Since the ERP system is a corporate standard and is mandatory to be used by all business units, so must the portal software that came along with it. Besides, it is free of charge. In fact, it is already installed on a server. With an IT strategy having consolidation as a key component, introducing new enterprise software is simply out of the question (even if you could argue that the portal software is not officially introduced and used).

The business people understand they don’t stand a chance against this strong setup. Besides, when looking at the slide decks that the vendor left them with, the portal software seems to be pretty much what they are looking for. So, they decide to skip the part of the process where they define their needs and requirements in more detail and start looking for different alternatives to evaluate and eventually purchase. Instead, they invest their money in an implementation project, seeing the promise of a short time to platform and quick and tangible business results.

The implementation project is executed and eventually a portal solution is launched. Soon enough it turns out that they did not really get what they expected, but to ensure return on their investment, they decide to force adoption with directives and policies. Maybe they will also work out some the kinks, possibly by purchasing a bunch of 3rd party software.

It does not take very long until the following has happened: The users are unhappy and frustrated and do whatever they can do to find reasons for not using the portal solution. The expected results are nowhere to be seen, and the portal solution quickly enters maintenance mode. It is just too expensive to develop it any further. But as some people have invested a lot of prestige and their entire careers in this thing, nothing can be done about the situation.

A couple of years later, the business people identify a need for aggregating all the information and tools they need in one place. This time, they don’t need a portal solution. Obviously, portal solutions are not the recipe for success. Now success is spelled differently. Instead, they need a versatile platform with a lot of capabilities, from search to business intelligence.

So, they turn to their IT department…

It would be very interesting if you could list 5 faults you find in this story, and come up with 5 things to make it right.

(thanks @letterpress_se for inspiration)

In today’s economic environment business and marketing professionals are having a difficult time justifying technology spending- and that includes the purchase of a brand new web content management system.

The justification for this major investment might seem hard to make, but delaying the purchase or piecing together an in-house solution can cost you more in the long run and severely impact your brand. Here are four rock solid points to help you make the business case for an investment in an enterprise web content management system (WCMS).

1.  Demonstrate Increased Revenue

By streamlining and centralizing content creation, a new or revamped WCMS boosts your revenue by allowing content reuse and re-purposing across multiple websites, channels, and, if you’re a global enterprise, in multiple languages.  Additionally, a WCMS simplifies workflow and provides robust analytic measurement capabilities to keep you focused on the timely updates of content that makes you money rather than wasting it.

A best-in-class enterprise web content management system will also have an integrated suite of online marketing tools that will help you achieve business objectives, like increasing conversion rates and building brand loyalty. Here are a few examples:
Brand management tools Email campaign tools Target audience marketing Website personalization Another revenue generating benefit of a top-rated WCMS is faster time to market.  Imagine launching a multichannel marketing campaign or a new product in just a few days, rather than a few weeks or even months.  What would this mean to your business in terms of increased sales or leads/

2.  Demonstrate Decreased Operational Costs

With the right WCMS, you will spend less money on updating your website and avoid the inefficient practice of copying and pasting content across various pages. Centralized design elements and templates can be created once and then instantaneously integrated across your website. WCM helps you save money on labor, protect your brand and get it right the first time. Most enterprise web content management systems are easy to use.  One of the major reasons organizations invest in web content management is because it empowers content creators (marketing teams, for example) to create, manage, modify, and publish content themselves- without IT involvement.  Consider the savings of hundreds of IT hours on an annual basis, not to mention the increased efficiency

3.  Calculate Probable ROI

Due to the economic environment, the concept of ROI is on the tip of everyone’s tongue when discussing technology investment. Don’t worry: an best-in-class enterprise web content management system almost always provides a sizable ROI. In addition to saving costs and boosting your revenue, a good WCMS interface comes with a high degree of usability. This means you can accelerate and simplify projects such as site development, implementation and content creation.

4.  Think Beyond ROI

In addition, a WCMS can provide benefits that supersede ROI.  Next generation web content management systems can really help to protect brand equity online and across multiple channels. For large companies, branding remains one of your most important assets and good customer perception is integral for continued success.  A next generation WCM system allows you to build and maintain your brand with minimal hiccups. Even if you come up with initial ROI figures that are lower than you want, maintaining your brand equity and providing the ideal user experience across multiple channels is enough to make the business case for updating your WCM strategy today.



I am interrupting the usual business oriented weekday posts to ask
you a favor.  Artsetter is a Paris based online art gallery. I like their approach as they take the risk out for
the buyer and the seller. When you purchase an art work, Artsetter holds the
money through a French bank. Then the artist ships to the buyer. Once the buyer
receives the art work, Art Setter releases the money to the artist taking what is a very
modest commission for the industry. They allow each artist to set up their own gallery. Art Setter is creating a community as each member can vote on others and create favorites. Any one can apply to join.

I am trying to set up an online gallery for my art on the site. I
have applied and now need 50 votes over the next 30 days. Can you vote for me?
You have to first register at their site but it is quick and there is nice art
by a number of artists. Here is the home page of the site.

My five paintings have been cropped by the site to fit a square format.
This is one They are all rectangles. However, once I set up my gallery I will
be able to display the full painting. You can see the complete images of five I
submitted below. You can click on any image to make it large.

Once you get to the site go to the candidates tab. Be patient it
takes a few moments for the first one to appear. I have been coming up first as
I was the last one when I last looked but someone may have come in after
me.  In the case I do not come up first, scroll through the others to find
my application.

There are quite a few excellent painters and photographers. I voted
for a number of them myself.  This
Is not a competition. You can vote for as many as you want.  Thanks for your consideration.  Let me know what you think.