Wowza

Wowzamade featured on One Page Love!

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:11:07 -0600

We are proud to be featured on One Page Love! Recently redesigned wowzamade.com is now one of the “best single website designs from around the world!”

A Rabbi, Confucius and Thomas Jefferson walk into a bar…

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:08:00 -0600

Here at Wowza we’re starting the year off with a new app. The first one we’ve shipped off to Apple headquarters is a nifty little novelty app called Bar Sages. Launch the app and it provides instant insights from Jewish proverbs, good old Confucius and Thomas Jefferson. Why, you ask, would anyone want to have an app that generated these thought-provoking profundities? Well, that’s where the bar-finder feature comes in. With your Bar Sages App you can find a nearby bar and use the sage wisdom to either amuse yourself or strike up a conversation with anyone.

We’ve made a great discovery: Our creative skills in advertising – copy and design–plus our deep experience with data equals a perfect combination for app making. Watch for it on the App store, and keep checking back because we have more on the way.

In a previous post on search engine optimization I suggested...

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:18:00 -0500

In a previous post on search engine optimization I suggested that we need to think of SEO as SCO: Site Content Optimization. This fantastic infographic makes that point really well. Make a great website with valuable and unique information and not only will the search engines find you more easily, the users who find you will be happy they did.

Happy Health Care Quality Awareness Week! Download a PDF of this...

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 10:00:05 -0500

Happy Health Care Quality Awareness Week!

Download a PDF of this postcard here.

Happy Health Care Awareness Week! Download a PDF of this...

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 11:31:23 -0500

Happy Health Care Awareness Week!

Download a PDF of this postcard here.

Happy Health Care Quality Awareness Week! Download a PDF of this...

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 10:35:08 -0500

Happy Health Care Quality Awareness Week!

Download a PDF of this postcard here.

Happy Health Care Quality Awareness week! Download a PDF of this...

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 09:16:10 -0500

Happy Health Care Quality Awareness week!

Download a PDF of this postcard here.

Happy Health Care Quality Awareness Week! Download a PDF of this...

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 14:55:00 -0500

Happy Health Care Quality Awareness Week!

Download a PDF of this postcard here.

Analyzing tweets

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:03:00 -0500

We’ve been hard at work reinventing an old favorite tool of ours: Tweetvolume. Working with the updated Twitter API as well as other tools in our collective toolbox, we’ve been developing a new tool that we hope will provide more insight into Twitter users and the way they think about things.

Over the weekend we collected about 1% of the roughly 400 million tweets posted for some ad hoc analysis and testing. If we assume that a 1% sample is statistically significant enough to provide any insight, we can guess that Twitter users “thought a lot about people,” as the words “think” and “people” topped the list, mentioned roughly 2.97 million and 2.83 million times respectively, followed by the ‘<3’ emoticon with 2.75 million mentions. The word ‘happy’ fell far below those, only receiving 1.09 million mentions.

So how are we using this information? Check back on Tweetvolume as soon as it’s live (don’t worry, we’ll let you know) and find out.

Survey says…

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:21:00 -0500

You may have heard that our very own Melissa Hillmyer was a contestant on Family Feud recently. She was sworn to secrecy, so we have no details yet on how her family fared, but we here at Wowza fully expect her to show up on the day after it airs in her brand new car.

Family Feud is an interesting show – it’s about the only place you’ll ever find market research as entertainment. Here at Wowza we love doing research, and of course we think surveys are loads of fun. Conducting surveys used to be a lot more difficult, but now any organization can use online surveys to generate insights that will improve both marketing and operations.

Here are a few well-regarded online survey tool suggestions from SocialBrite, well suited for non-profits with limited budgets but unlimited curiosity. You can also check out MarketingProfs for a good article on how to write survey questions. It’s often a good idea to have a third party administer your survey so your participants feel comfortable being candid.

When you’re ready to start your next survey project you can also consult with a national survey celebrity – just give Melissa a call. Maybe she’ll even sign an autograph.

50 Reasons Why

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 08:42:00 -0500

50 Reasons Why:

A long time ago we built a goofy little web tool called 50 Reasons Why. It’s a brainstorming tool for creative folks to get them thinking about why people buy things. It combines randomly generated images from flickr with a list of Geoff Ayling’s 50 reasons people buy, from his book Rapid Response Advertising. It’s sort of fun, even of you really don’t know what it’s supposed to do. Let us know what you think and tell us how we can improve on it.

Stock photography rarely wins awards

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 08:18:00 -0500

The much-anticipated design annual issue of Communications Arts arrived today. Looking through the pages of excellent design work I noticed the lack of royalty-free stock photography. There were plenty of ads for stock photography companies, but the award-winning designs gracing the magazine were executed with custom photography, illustration and typography.

There are often times when cheap stock photos are all you need to solve a problem – and sometimes they can be the best solution. We once did a fun brochure for Illusion Theater using stock photography that I don’t think would have been any better with custom images. But if at all possible, creating your own artwork best expresses your concept.

Yes, hiring a photographer and directing a shoot, paying models and gathering props can be expensive, but not all custom photography requires high levels of production. If the creative team knows there’s a tight budget, they can come up with ideas that can be shot or illustrated within it.

If you want to stand out and get noticed, using custom art, even on a budget, is worth pursuing. Even if it doesn’t make it into Communication Arts, it will make an impression on your audience.

Ten Tips for SEO

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 09:57:00 -0500

I was invited to contribute an article on Search Engine Optimization for a publication that AHRQ is creating for their CVE Learning Network. I won’t spill the beans here – you’ll have to wait for the publication to come out – but I will share tips from the webinar that I conducted this week with Diane Stollenwerk, from the National Quality Forum, on the same topic.

Ten tips for SEO on health care quality data reports:

1: Think SCO: Site Content Optimization. Make a great site with unique and useful content.

2: Mine for Gems. Use online tools to find keywords that are frequently searched but not too general or competitive.

3: Welcome the Spiders. Make sure your site is easy for spiders to find. Don’t hide keywords behind Flash and Javascript.

4: Think Like a Spider. Design your site architecture so it’s logical and easy to understand. Even for a robot!

5: Master Geek Poetry. Use keyword gems and accurate and precise language within your source code. Focus on crafting keywords for the important stuff, like URLs and page titles.

6: Foster Link Lovability. Load your site with useful content in multiple forms to help grow external links back to your site.

7: Page Rankings: Glance, Don’t Obsess. Searches vary from search to search and person to person. Use rankings as a guide but don’t waste your time on page rankings. It’s content and keywords that matter.

8: Link New Friends. Form partnerships with related websites but don’t bother exchanging links with sites that aren’t a good fit with your content.

9: Enter the giant popularity contest. Social media, like Twitter and Facebook, is not the same as SEO but it can improve your rankings. Use social media as a promotional strategy with SEO benefits but before you jump in, make sure you’re committed to doing it well over time.

10: Measure then Manage. An SEO program is an ongoing process. Use your site analytics data to monitor your progress and keep making improvements over time. Remember: A website is never done.

The beer bottles and empty pizza boxes filling our trash mark...

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 13:23:00 -0500

The beer bottles and empty pizza boxes filling our trash mark the birth of our newest baby: UtahHealthScape.org. A lot of complicated data made for a pretty long gestation period but the delivery went well. We share our pride in this new site with Ancilla Partners. Working together as “Wowzilla” we built a data portal and public site that we’re sure will grow up to be a great leader.

Wowza makes people healthier.

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 23:00:00 -0500

Maybe we can’t take all the credit for improving health care in Minnesota and Detroit, but according to a recent article from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the data websites we designed and developed for MN Community Measurement and the Greater Detroit Area Health Council have had a positive impact on the quality of care. That’s good ROI.

Wowza is improving health care quality. Really.

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 23:00:00 -0500

The zillions of hours Wowza has spent poring over health care quality data is making an impact on health care. The proof is in this recent article in the Star Tribune. Thanks to the hard work of the great team at Minnesota Community Measurement, providers are using quality data to make real changes that are improving care.

One can only surmise that if it’s working in Minnesota, our health care quality data reports must be improving health care quality in Detroit, Humboldt County, Utah, Kansas City, Puget Sound, Cincinnati and Memphis as well.

Permaculture Shangri-La

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:30:00 -0500

Permaculture Shangri-La:

When it comes to increasing SEO there’s nothing like an article in the New York Times to juice up the numbers. Michael Tortorello, A Times Home and Garden reporter, spent 4 days in June at the Permaculture Design certification course held at Jeff’s farm, Crazy Rooster Farm and Amish Telephone Booth. Michael’s terrific article hit on Thursday and the Crazy Rooster Google analytics went crazy.

Unfortunately you don’t hit the NYT lottery very often, which means doing a lot of regular work to get site traffic.

Countless conversations have occurred in the Wowza creative...

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:24:00 -0500

Countless conversations have occurred in the Wowza creative department about the best way to translate a designer’s choice of typefaces into clean CSS for the web. Proving that we’re not all talk, we’ve just launched TypeZA, an exciting new web tool that brings designers and developers together – making it possible to generate a web typeset with clean CSS in just a few clicks.