John Raymond

I was browsing status’ on facebook yesterday and saw a really funny response to a status. The status said “I’ll have to take down my Rocky Horror pics because my dad is now on facebook.” The response was simply a link to http://www.sadtrombone.com.   Upon clicking on the link and playing the trumpet sound, I erupted in laughter.  My dog was a bit frightened and disturbed at my outrageous laugh but I was inspired.

Back in the day there was a show on NBC called Blossom.  One of the character’s played by Joey Lawrence had this trademark saying “WHOA!”  I immediately wanted this packaged and at my disposal like sad trumpet.  After a few hours of research, photoshop design, flash work, and html coding I created http://www.joeywhoa.com.  I didn’t want to spend too much time on the design but I wanted to have a little 90’s flare to it.  So I used some old Saved by the Bell promo materials to inspire the logo and background.  I also threw up an old school hit counter for fun.  Check it out and make sure to follow up a outrageous, moronic, or ordinary tweet or fb status with a Joey Whoa.

I’ve been so busy lately but I wanted to pass along an update. I had a pretty productive weekend and am working on building a number of web sites for myself. They are all experiments in SEO. Here’s a list of them:

• http://www.couponland.org – formerly carlscoupondiscounts.com
• http://www.athensohiohotels.net
• http://www.progressivesflo.com
• http://www.wordpresshosting1.com
• Bowling Green Ohio Hotels

They are all in production so please don’t judge them too harshly. I’m showing them not only to you but also to google (so google will start indexing them). I’ll have more for you soon. Feel free to contact me with questions.

Facebook Campaigns and Campaigns on Facebook are new ways to promote your Columbus Ohio business. If you don’t have a presence on facebook, I would encourage you to create one for your business. But John, what’s the most effective way to utilize facebook? That really depends on the type of business you are in. Let me address a few questions that you may have:

Why should I start one? Who should I befriend?

Treat facebook as another email list. As you build your following of friends, you can email them and update them on any happenings or events with your business or product.

By now some of your real life friends will be on facebook. Go ahead and befriend them and possibly befriend employees (depending upon if they feel comfortable) These people will help you build your companies friend list.

But what’s the best way to start? Should you create a facebook profile or a fan page?

This is a tough question to answer. In the summer of 2008, my intern Danny Cox and myself both debated this question when working on internet marketing strategies for athenshub.com. We decided to go with a profile. The reasoning is that it’s more likely that you will appear in a “news feed” section. Sure, when “fan” profiles make updates, you will see an “update” notice on the news feed page but that’s about it.

What kind of exposure did you get by creating a facebook profile?

We would appear on our friends news feed when we were invited and chose to attend people’s events. You can also show up by befriending other people, posting pictures, and posting a status. These are all great ways to create awareness of your company and increase your following of friends.

Another advantage of creating a profile rather than a fan page is that you can join groups. Research groups on facebook and identify which groups would contain your target audience. Athenshub.com is a free classfieds site and in the Summer of 2008 we were targeting students looking for rentals for the 2009-2010 school year. We wanted to show students that we were a resource to find information on rentals. We did some research on groups and found groups of students that would be looking for rentals. We then joined the group and then emalied the group administrator and asked that they would pass along a message to the group (1000 + members) that the website was a resource for them.

This strategy paid off huge dividends as these admins passed along word to group members via facebook email. We saw large spikes in traffic both on the days the email went out and in days going forward. And there’s nothing better than having the group admin market for you.

These are a few tips to get you started. We plan on doing some more great interactive things with athens hub and for my new coupon website. Happy facebooking!

A goal of mine for grad school was to challenge myself as much as I could on all levels. I participated in a student produced sketch comedy show called Fridays Live. I wrote sketches, helped with their e-marketing campaign, helped get sponsorship for the show and also did a little acting.

This is one of my favorite commercials from the show that I was in. It’s for Fharmony and parody’s those e-harmony commercials.

This is another commercial that I wrote and directed for Playhouse Square. It was to help promote their 2007 Broadway Series website. More details on the contest to come.

The Education Department at Playhouse Square asked me to come up and produce a commercial to promote their lunch-time “Speak Up Classes.” These classes help working professionals with public speaking. They wanted something outside the box and funny. So we shot this in the winter of 2007.

In the fall of 2006, I was charged with coming up with some kind of interactive contest to target a “younger audience.” The typical target audience for Playhouse Square is women age 60-65. We felt that Spamalot was a great show to test out this sort of contest.

After doing some research, I came up with a Viral Video Contest. This was a relatively new thing at the time. I carefully studied some of the successful campaigns and broke down the elements that got the campaign off the ground. With no budget, I had to get creative and wrote and starred in an edgy viral video to help promote the contest.

We launched a mini-site (which I designed and constructed) along with the video. The video got over 1000 views in the first four days of launch. We utilized html email blasts, myspace and facebook to help promote the contest.

The contest lasted a month and got 5 submissions. Here’s an archive page that contains some of the submissions from the contest: http://www.playhousesquare.us/spamvideocontest/.

Playhouse Square’s upper management saw the potential in the work we had done with no budget. The non-profit organization committed over $5,000 for a high end digital video camera and an internship to help us continue to do more of these types of videos.

I was accepted into the Graduate program at Ohio University in 2007. I decided to pursue an M.A. in Interactive Multimedia. The cost of college was going to be expensive. So I created a Web site where people could sponsor the homepage for a fee and I would put the proceeds toward my masters. While I was not able to raise funds beyond the costs of the web site, this was a great exercise in learning about internet marketing. I was able to get traffic to the web site initially, however, I could not sustain it. Ultimately, this drove me to learn more about search engine optimization.

The Center for Student Legal Services at Ohio University chose me to redesign their Web site in the Winter of 2007. I worked with them to come up with a design that would reflect the marketing strategy and goals of the firm. Having updated content on their Web site was critical to the firm’s strategy. Understanding that I implemented a content management system that enabled the staff to easily log in and update the site on a regular basis. I also helped them set up google analytics and showed them how people were getting to their website.

The redesign has helped the Center spread the word to students to sign up for their services. In the future, they look to expand the website.

The Soul of Athens 2008 Web site was a special project completed by students in the School of Visual Communications at Ohio University. The project was started and completed in a span of three months during Spring of 2008.

My role was to coordinate the marketing strategy of the site and help with other small aspects such as the construction of the youtube.com video player. Please check out the Web Site. It’s a truly amazing piece of work and the stories, images, and videos on the site are excellent.

I worked with Search Engine Optimization professional Jennifer Gaglione to redesign her business web site – GMC Internet Marketing. My role on the project consisted of consulting and design. I made sure to build out the web site in a search engine friendly format. I also integrated a content management system so that Jennifer could update the web site at any time. The site also contains a blog with an RSS feed that will help her drive traffic to the web site.

I worked at Playhouse Square as the Online Marketing Coordinator for almost three years. Playhouse Square is the largest performing arts center outside of New York City and they own and operate seven theaters in downtown Cleveland, Ohio

I was in charge of managing their website and their mass html e-blast campaign. While there I implemented several mini-sites which helped market special events and many of their subscription series.

One of the most important projects I worked on was the redesign of the Playhouse Square external website. When I came on board in 2004, the site had just been redesigned. The goal of that redesign was to allow people to search through and purchase tickets for shows.

By 2006, the PSC website had expanded and the site needed to be changed to allow people to more easily navigate the website. I sketched out a redesign in photoshop and had implemented the redesign in December of 2006. I implemeted a javascript pop up navigation as well as restructured the homepage to showcase all the different things that were going on at Playhouse Square. The image show here was what I launched in 2006. If you go to the current site, http://www.playhousesquare.org, you will see that the structure of the site remains.

Designing a web site for a attorney or law office can be a challenge. David Chernosky approached me in the Winter of 2008 and challenged me to create a Web site for him. David is a Lemon Attorney in Ohio and wanted start an interactive web site to generate online case leads. After evaluating several top lemon lawyer websites, I proposed this design which included several elements geared toward generating leads. The site was launched in late January of 2008 and I continue to do periodic maintenance and SEO work on the web site.

In the fall of 2004, I joined the Cleveland OU Alumni Association. At the time, the group was targeting young alumni in the age range of 22-35. At the time, their biggest problem was getting people to come to events.

I volunteered to create a internet marketing campaign for them. I redesigned their website to include a dynamic event calendar, a local email sign-up list, and included more information about membership. I then began to send out e-vites and html emails to the people who signed up for our events. Shortly after launching the website and sending out e-blasts event attendance went from 11-12 people overall to 50-60 people. Our email list grew by 200 in the first year and we were able to raise over 1500 dollars to put toward a scholarship fund for OU students. Prior to that the group had never raised any money. The image included in this post is an old page I designed for the site around 2005. Many of the additions to the website that I made are still in place today.

Because I now reside in Columbus, Ohio, I no longer participate in the Cleveland OU Alumni Association. You can visit their current website here: http://www.clevelandbobcats.com

I designed my flash portfolio website in fall of 2006. It was mostly to demonstrate my abilities in graphic design and in flash.

As I got more into search engine optimization, I added a blog to the front page and made my flash portfolio a link within my website. Click on the image to see my old flash portfolio website