I recently published my ‘Testimonial’ page, although in true Jacob Aldridge fashion I named it ‘Shameless Praise‘.

The motivation should be obvious (testimonials and recommendations about my amazing work add credibility to my writing and proposals), and some recent submissions from the KPI Enterprise program and a few newspaper articles prompted me to complete this.

But I wanted something more compelling than a list of quotes from people you’ve never met.

To make it slightly more interesting, I included some humorous (real) comments I’ve received over the years – from the sarcastic (Nadine from the amazing Bright Conferences suggesting an inflatable doll would be a reasonable substitute for me) to the honest (being called an “imitation Tony Robbins” at an event in London). But it still looked dull.

.@tugggently? RT @fmu an imitation tony robbins is standing in for pg tonight. #hnlondon

— Mark Littlewood (@MarkLittlewood) August 25, 2011

And then I had a breakthrough! Several years ago, the amazing CEO and coach John Rosling shared Wordle with me as a visual way to demonstrate feedback. He was using it with clients, particularly projects where we undertook some market research by interviewing their client base – and the visual aspect can be quite telling in a way that data alone fails to be. The more common the word, the larger it appears in the image.

So I fed my testimonials into Wordle.net… and created this.

The feedback on that element has been outstanding (though you may need to click the picture on this page to read it all). If you’re considering doing the same, here were some things I noticed (before and after):

1. Change everything to lower case first – otherwise Wordle will view ‘business’ and ‘Business’ as different words
2. Consider grouping key notes – I tried changing “business coach” to “BusinessCoach”, and in some representations (see below) I quite like how it worked
3. Remove possessive apostrophes – I noticed this too late, but you can see on close inspection that “uk” and “uk’s” are both in there separately
4. Don’t include the names of the recommenders – again, I missed this so you can see single instances (so smallest words) of the names of people who gave me these glowing reviews

It’s tempting to remove a lot of the small words like “the” or “and”. Do this if they appear way too big in your finished product, but not before – you need the less relevant words to ensure the most relevant words appear large.

Lastly, use the Randomise feature to find different ways to present your data. Here are a variety of other ways I could share these great testimonials [Click to embiggen].

 

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