I’ve selected the finalists, and I want you to pick the winner.

Go to our Facebook page and vote now!

This website was a complete overhaul: new design, new navigation, new way to tell stories, and a new content management system.

To give you an idea of what they had before here a screencap of their old website:

I chatted with Amy Hayden Watertowns webmaster about the website and the project.

“We wanted to re-do the website for a few reasons. First and foremost, we wanted to freshen the look. While our old site was only three years old, it felt a bit ancient in terms of looks and functionality. Also, the navigation was clunky when trying to navigate. We also wanted a CMS system that was more flexible and would enable us to grow our website with our business.”

Amy further discussed the goals of the new website.

“We wanted to ease navigation, and allow our users to quickly find information with just a few clicks. We also wanted a better platform to highlight our patient stories, and a better Find a Physician feature. It also allowed us to have pinpoint content that was useful, easy to understand, and all while targeting our key demographic of Females ages 25-54.”

“We are now integrating more video into our site because it better accomodates. We are also constantly placing new patient stories throughout the site to enhance and continue to evolve our website.”

Recently, there was a big uproar over the new Facebook Timeline additions. Most of my “friends” on Facebook complained and moaned that “they are ruining facebook”. Or “they are turning it in to MySpace”.

I sat back and questioned it, but I do believe in two very solid ideas when it comes to all things web: Google and Facebook rarely make mistakes.

Now that I’ve “lived” with timeline for a few months. I’ll admit it, I’m a fan! For business, it’s a great way to promote and market your business.

Timeline for personal use, well this is where it really hit me recently. For the past two weeks, I’ve been on vacation in Maui with my wife and one year old son (and luckily his Aunt Katy–so mom and dad could get some alone time). As a new parent, one of the many “warnings” I’ve heard is how fast time goes by. I couldn’t agree more. The first year of my son’s life has gone by so fast, even with all the sleepless nights! I decided I wanted to really post a lot of our trip on Facebook, to really chronicle our time here. So maybe in a couple of years when my son wants he can “flip thru” Dad’s timeline and see the amazing trip we had. Ultimately, to me, Timeline is like an amazing virtual scrap book and photo album rolled into one.

So my point…give Facebook the benefit of the doubt when the next change rolls around.

Mahalo,
Ryan

Ryan:  How did you build your listenership? (As of posting Jason and Karen’s podcast had 134 reviews on Itunes with 5star rating out of 5 stars)

Jason:  A huge part of it is just podcasting about a subject that already has an audience. These days anytime a new TV show debuts—especially if it’s genre TV—people go to iTunes looking for podcasts about it. 

Beyond that, we just try to make a quality podcast. We think genuinely having fun with it and including listeners in on the fun helps attract people to our show. We do all the social media interaction I mentioned above, which is a pleasure for me. We hold contests every now and then, and rather than force people to, say, like us on Facebook to enter the contest, we like to base it around something we think is funny or fun. We had a long-running “best zombie haiku” contest, and right now we’re giving away a set of limited edition zombie posters to the listener who sends in the creepiest zombie sound. 
And it’s important to balance having fun with giving good, critical, enthusiastic analysis of the show, and hopefully increasing people’s appreciation of it. I watch each episode twice and spend a lot of time thinking about how I can provide a deeper perspective. When I pull news about the show to present to listeners, I only talk about the stuff that I genuinely find interesting.

Finally, we invite cast and crew members on for interviews, which probably gives us credibility as a good source of information for The Walking Dead, but more importantly it’s fascinating to be able to talk directly with these people and have them answer our questions about the show.

Ryan:  What was you process for getting members of the show on your podcast?  (They have had on Robert Kirkman creator and several members of  the cast)

Jason:  When I want to interview someone, I simply contact his or her agent or publicist and request an interview. I keep my communications short and to the point. If I don’t hear back, I might try again later, and mention any interviews with other cast members we may have had in the interim.

In the beginning, I think it helped that we were pretty popular out of the gate, and as time goes on and we get more interviews under our belt, I think that helps people feel good about coming onto our show.

Ryan:  How do you utilize social media?

Jason:  We have a WordPress blog, a Twitter account, and a Facebook page. Every time I post a new episode, I create a blog entry about it, and that automatically gets pushed to Twitter and Facebook. I also like to interact with the listeners as much as I can. I respond to most tweets and comments on our site, and we have a pretty active conversation going on on Facebook.  We also read listener emails on the podcast and play their calls (which we get using a Google Voice number).

 —If you are thinking about starting a podcast, I would suggest re-reading all of Jason’s answers.  He provides a very good how-to guide. Oh and I did ask him one final question.

Ryan:  Who would survive longer in a zombie apocalypse you or Karen?  And why?

Jason:  Well, Karen’s a runner and has a lot more stamina than me. And she’s prettier so she’d get more help. But, eh, I’d say me

To give a little background, The Walking Dead started off as a comic book (a great read in graphic novel form), and instantly became a must read by true die hard comic geeks. The stories being told were emotional, creative and compelling. The writer draws you into his zombie apocalypse world in an interesting and frightful way. But the story is more than zombie gore. At it’s heart it’s about people, and that’s what makes it captivating. I could go on and on about the comic, but I don’t want to get sidetracked. AMC (the channel that brings you Mad Men and Breaking Bad) picked up The Walking Dead and just wrapped up Season 2 with a bang. The season finale brought in 9 million viewers! What’s amazing is AMC is a cable channel which makes that number all the more impressive. To give you a comparison of a broadcast (over the air-free channel) CBS’s Two and Half Men average about 11 million viewers, and thats one of CBS’ top shows.

I just couldn’t get enough of The Walking Dead, so I went trolling Itunes for a podcast. I found a ton, but a few caught my eye. I downloaded 6 and started listening. Some were so bad, I turned it off before the 5 minute mark. First tip, don’t pull a Chris Farley from SNL and just say “that was awesome” over and over. Then I started listening to The Walking Dead’Cast by Jason and Karen, and I knew I found what I was craving within the first few minutes. Jason and Karen do the podcast the next day following the show, and then post it to Itunes (more on that later). I was astonished at a variety of things. The chemistry, Jason and Karen provide a good balance to each others personalities. The technical quality of the podcast. But what really caught my attention, Jason and Karen had interviewed cast, crew members and creators of the show. So think about that for a moment, these are two fans of a popular tv show interviewing the stars! I was amazed. I love the idea that this is possible in our internet age.

I shot Jason an email asking him if he would be willing to answer some questions for my blog. He gave an immediate yes, and the wealth of information he provided is astounding. So much so that I’m going to break this up over two blogs. If you are thinking about starting a podcast, this will give you a pretty good roadmap.

Here’s Part 1:

Ryan: How did you get started podcasting?

Jason:  I was a Lost fanatic and had been addicted to a couple of Lost podcasts, most prominently “The Lost Podcast with Jay and Jack.” As time went on I started thinking it would be fun to do my own podcast. I liked the idea of building community and connecting with an audience over something I was interested in. But I didn’t want to do it unless I had just the right thing to talk about. When I found out they were making my favorite comic book, Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, into a TV show, it seemed like the right topic.

I needed a co-host, and my friend Karen was the first person who came to mind. I had gotten her into Lost and she listened to Lost podcasts, too. She and I also had watched a bunch of horror movies together. And even better, she has a bright and energetic personality, which I thought would complement my laid back, sometimes monotone style.

Karen was into it, and so I started researching how to do a podcast. There’s a lot of information online about how to set up a podcast, what equipment to use, how to connect with listeners, best practices, etc. We also got a lot of ideas and inspiration from Jay and Jack and other podcasts we listened to.

About a month later, we recorded our first episode. We were nervous at first, but it was a lot of fun. We decided to keep doing it until it wasn’t fun anymore. That was about a year and a half ago, and we’re both still loving it.

Ryan: Can you take me thru your process of putting together your podcast?

Jason: I spend about five hours prepping for each episode, about an hour and a half recording, and about three and a half hours in post. While the TV show is on the air, we do one a week, and in the off-season, we go bi-weekly, more or less.

To prep for a regular episode, I watch the show, then I watch again and take lots of notes. I collate listener emails and calls, usually editing them for length. I gather news about the show and edit it for length. I sometimes prep sound effects and usually prep a sample from that week’s episode to play at the beginning of the podcast. Sometimes I prep music and bits of audio from the news. If there are any contests, I prep updates for those. I write an agenda that has everything that’s going to happen in the episode.

We quickly go over the agenda. This year, we’ve started doing live broadcasts with a chat room, so we fire all that up and say hi to the chat room members. Then we start the recording. We have a couple of nice condenser mikes hooked up to an audio interface that’s connected to my Mac. I also use an iPad to trigger sound effects and audio clips.

During the recording session, I follow the agenda, but leave a lot of room for spontaneity. It’s important to me that the podcast feel authentic and in-the-moment. When broadcasters speak in a sing-songy voice and don’t sound like real people, I get disengaged. Sometimes I think talking like real people, flaws and all, might make us sound amateurish, but I’d rather that than be stiff or overly rehearsed.

Once we’re done with the recording, I listen to the episode and edit out any big slip ups or sections that didn’t go anywhere. I smooth out all the transitions between segments, add in music and sound effects, and make sure all the audio lines up. I run the audio through an app that levels out the sound, so there aren’t any jarring volume spikes or parts where the sound is too low to hear us. Then I export an MP3 file and an AAC file. AAC is an Apple format that lets you skip around through the different chapters (important when I’m about to reveal a spoiler and I can tell people who don’t want to hear it to just skip to the next chapter). The MP3 file is for listeners who’ve requested it because they don’t have iProducts or don’t want to use iTunes.

I write up a show description and give links to any URL’s we’ve referred to in the episode. I post the MP3 file to our site so people can download it directly if they want, and I upload the AAC file and update both RSS feeds. I ping Feedburner to update with the latest information from our feed, and finally I download the podcast in iTunes to make sure it’s all working correctly.

Stay tuned for Part 2 or as Jason and Karen would end their podcast: “Don’t get bit”…you’ll have to listen to their podcast for that to make sense

Teaching Graphic Design to our youth…

As I scanned the room and saw 19 attentive children gazing up at me, eager to hear what I had to say, I realized I didn’t have my computer monitor to hide behind. I had unknowingly agreed to teach a group of adolescent Third Graders about my job as a Graphic Designer.

When you’ve been designing logos, brochures, ads, magazines and websites every day for 6 years, you very rarely have to explain to someone the process involved.  Knowing all of the fundamentals of Graphic Design, I was forced to do something I’ve always had difficulty doing…simplifying. I was going to have to put myself in the shoes of a Third Grader and figure out how they might comprehend Graphic Design. Without going into too much detail. What was even more challenging…no computer! Then I recalled the first semester of Graphic Design in college that involved no computers.

Creating a lesson plan brought me back to the days of learning about Typography and the importance it plays into how we interpret things graphically. I knew that I probably wouldn’t keep their attention for long by only talking about Typography, so I decided to start them off with a simple question…

What is graphic design? I had 8 random objects spread out on a table and asked the students to tell me which found objects contained elements of graphic design. They each came up and pointed to what they thought and looked at me with an expression of confusion when they realized it was a trick question. All of the items contained aspects of graphic design, (baseball cap with team logo, kleenex box, macaroni and cheese box, book, pen, brochure, book, and newspaper). I explained to the students that Graphic Design is all around them. I then went on to explain Graphic Design as being the combination of colors, type, images, textures, shapes, lines, and words to communicate an idea visually.

In order to elaborate on how I use graphic design in my profession, I explained that using different type and color communicates certain emotions and ideas that we are able to comprehend subconsciously. By displaying different typeface themes (scary, western, techno, fantasy) I was able to aid in their understanding of this concept. I also chose to display different colors and asked them to yell out what that color expressed to them. They realized that many of their answers were the same. YELLOW…Happy! Excited! Bright!  To tie it all together, I showed them examples of branding that displayed both color and typography we discussed. When I saw head nods and looks of amazement I was relieved.

It was time for me to present to them an art project where they could be creative using their own imaginations and the fundamentals of graphic design I taught. Since I was informed that they all loved to read, what was better then having them design their own book covers! The students were filled with excitement as the crayons, colored-pencils and markers spilled out onto their desktops.

Overall this experience taught me that…I actually know a thing or two about Graphic Design. More importantly when you are teaching a classroom full of youngsters, it’s important to not only make sure your teaching at their level of understanding, but also do things that will keep their attention. If asked to volunteer to be art teacher for the day again, I would have a very difficult time declining because of how much I enjoyed it.

Wikipedia definition:

Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as “tweeting”.

Well that should clear it up for you correct?!

Twitter now has over 300 million users that generate over 300 tweets per day, but the interesting stat is the amount of searches done on Twitter per day 1.6 billion.  Yes billion!  Yes that is a lot of searches.

Here are some common uses for Twitter:

1.  News Source-This is one of my most common uses for Twitter.  I’ve set up my Twitter feed into separate lists of things or people that I am interested in.  I have a “Sports” list that I follow various sports reporters and athletes.  I’ll check my sports list prior to looking at the newspaper to see whats going on right now.  Reporters and people are using twitter to make major announcements.

2.  Content Sharing and Discovery-I can’t count how many times that I’ve learned a new web technique by some random person off of Twitter.  I get a short blurb of “Google changes how it analyzes websites….”  I click on the link and learn how I need to adapt how we do SEO for example.

3.  Reputation Monitoring-I love love love when a company is monitoring their twitter feed and keywords.  I’ve gotten a quicker response off of DirectTV by tweeting to them instead of calling customer service.  Smart companies are monitoring and responding to customer complaints and inquiries.  United Airlines could use a little help in this area (see prior rants about United).

4.  Deal Notification-Kind of self explanatory.

5.  Getting Advice and Feedback-stumped on something?  Throw a tweet question out there.

This is just a handful of uses for Twitter.  It takes some time to get used to so be patient.  Also, establish your own lists of people that you are interested in following.

“The internet and that Facebook thing is just for kids”

For the past several years, I’ve been told this over and over again.  It became like fingernails on chalkboard to me.  I would counter with statistics and demographic information, but it always seemed to be a lost cause.  I decided maybe it was just to help me become a poker player and help me control my body language when someone said that to me.

At the end of December 2011, Facebook had 845 million users.  Over half the users log on to Facebook daily and over half use a mobile device to view Facebook.  Quick side note, if your business has not figured out a mobile strategy or a facebook strategy, it’s kind of like missing out on the yellow pages when the telephone first came out.  Especially with Facebooks latest announcement of how business can insert in on mobile feeds.  Check out the link for details, I’ll rant about that later.

Okay so heres my point of today’s rant.  Have you checked out your Facebook page Insights?  If not, please do so, you might be shocked at the information that is contained within.

Just a sample of the details you can find out:

Demographic breakdown

Where your traffic is coming from

So take a look and let me know if you find something interesting!

• I put this list together for a good friend of mine who has an upcoming trip to Las Vegas.  He asked me for some ideas on what to do and where to go.  Karen (my wife) and I put this together this morning over a pot of coffee.

• Use opentable.com to get dinner rez–even last minute.
• Dining:
• Stripburger-casual good for lunch and a drink.  Burgers and appetizers are great.  It’s located on the strip on the corner of the Fashion Show Mall.  You can eat outside and people watch.
• Olives-casual but cool.  Located in the Bellagio.  Can do either dinner or drinks.  They have these vodka fruit infused martinis that are incredible.  I’m not a big fruity drink guy but this is really good.  When you go, make a reservation or if you are popping in, ask if you can sit on the deck or at the bar.  The deck overlooks the Bellagio Fountains.
• Koi-sushi place inside Planet Hollywood. Make a reservation and specify one of the sofa tables with the view. Karen gives her personal endorsement to their Asian Pear Martini. Great late night as well as dinner.
• Hugo’s-if you do “old Vegas” Fremont St area. Lower level of The Four Queens casino. It is sort of hidden, and you will have to ask someone to point it out to find it. Great old-school steak house with GREAT service.  Tom a good friend of mine gave me this as a suggestion, and it’s a must do on every trip now.
• Tao-inside Venetian. Dinner and/or club. For dinner, have to have the Peking duck. Make reservations. Hotspot.
• Alize-top of the Palms. French, romantic, great view of the entire strip. Incredible wine list and crazy antique bourbon/scotch? We are not versed in these, but they had some that pre-dated the civil war. $$$ Jacket required. Excellent service. If choosing between Mixe and Alize, pick Alize.
• *Speaking of the Palms–well worth the cab fare just to hang out. They have the Playboy club, and their two lounges are indoor/outdoor, not crazy busy, but have amazing views of the entire strip. Relaxed vibe. Their Club, “Moon” is just ok though.
• Border Grille–Mandalay Bay. Good organic Mexican. Chef is one of the top chefs. Patio for lunch.  Say hi to Jill the manager for me!
• Clubs/Shows:
• If you’re going to see one show, see O in the Bellagio. Theatre is cold (note from Karen). Bellagio also has a seasonal huge floral display that you have to take a few minutes to walk through and also has the famous art glass ceiling in the lobby. Cool piano lounge. Fixe is fun trendy/casual (think mini donuts) for pre/post-show in Bellagio. Bellagio restaurants are not on Opentable.com but you can make rez through their website. Not as easy to get last minute. Many other Bellagio options…depends on how dressy of a night you’re having.
• Zumanity in NYNY. Um…risque, but good.
• Comedy Club at Harrah’s
• Rio has a neat wine cellar as a after dinner option. Closes 10-11ish.
• If you are “going out” try Tryst in the Wynn. Go earlier if you don’t want to wait forever in line. Or have a couple drinks so you don’t notice so much…or shell out for table service, but that’s usually $500+ for two, so unless you plan to stay in only one place…more fun to club hop.

• Any other ideas?