Today, I introduce a new level of web 2.0 integration by incorporating social medial channels on every page of my website. Watch the short video I shot in my vlog section on this idea.

As many of you know, I relentlessly post videos on YouTube. However, you have to go to YouTube to find these videos or scour my site for the newest video that I have shot. Two things will rectify this encumbrance. First, the updates section will tell you when a new anything (video, text, section, etc.) has been posted with a direct link to it. Second, I will now have a link on every page to my YouTube videos. (Btw, another option is to subscribe to my videos on YouTube if you don’t mind an email sent to you that I have a new video shot and uploaded).

In addition, I have made a lot of changes to make this website a truly aggressive Web 2.0 platform, meaning fully integrating social media into this site with the incorporation of Facebook (a new group that I just created on Facebook dedicated to LFP’s shenanigans) that facilitates more easily my posting photos and other stuff that my staff and I are doing, e.g., thoughts that lie outside of my blog entries, vlogs, and forum postings. (Btw, you must register for Facebook to see the page). Twitter updates from my staff and me. (We’ll see how successful this is, but my staff is already getting crazy and loving to submit “tweets” [that is what short updates are called].) A direct link is also now displayed on every page to my podcasts (far right icon) that I publish in iTunes for your iPhone and iPod. Hopefully, these changes will encourage a broader sense of community, participation, and integration into what LFP has to offer our global tribe of followers.

Btw, as you probably would surmise, I really haven’t “completed” anything. This is just the beginning of the journey over the next 6 months and beyond.

Satisfaction and complacency are not words that I know. I am grateful for the stellar reviews of this website, but I want to continue to refine and make this website more user friendly and more extensive in its scope. With that, I am rolling out the beginning of some major additions and changes to this site that will probably take 6 months to a year to complete in full. I have been working on some of these preliminary elements for over 6 months now with my webmaster with a focus specifically to help out-of-town patients get in and get out of Dallas more easily and to make their stay more seamless, enjoyable, and less difficult.

As a huge percentage of my patients come in from out of town, I am trying to help them out. In fact, I cannot remember a day in the last 3 to 4 months that a patient did not come in from somewhere out of town, state, or country. With that in mind, I have aimed to streamline this large percentage of my practice in a unique way through a custom-built “hospitality kit”. I would like to thank Jeff from Chicago who came up with and executed in great detail his idea of a “hospitality kit”, which in short is intended to help the out-of-town visitor truly be able to visit Dallas effortlessly and with less trepidation. He was the $5000 contest winner with his elaborate idea of the hospitality kit, which I am presenting today.

Some of the features of the hospitality kit include 360 virtual tours of the various hotel rooms in Plano and the immediate surrounding area that I personally shot and edited; a video tour through the hotels and attractions as well as my building to familiarize you with the Plano area; a custom-built map that permits you to view Plano and attractions that include restaurants, hotels, laundry services, tech services, atms, banks, book stores, etc.; full menus from area restaurants that feature takeout and delivery focused on the recovering patient; a peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing on travel assistance so that an experienced patient can help a prospective one; a list of DVD movies that you can rent from me including a player for no charge; a new concierge service that is both reasonably priced and offers such amenities as fully stocking your refrigerator with items you request in advance of your stay; and the whole shebang can be downloaded as a single pdf file for your convenience to help in planning your trip to DFW (the pdf feature should be live within 1 to 2 days).

Btw, even though my hospitality kit launches today, it is already in need of an update! I just learned of two new hotels opening in West Plano that I have not had time to explore but look absolutely amazing: Aloft and Nylo. For the first time, West Plano is getting extremely COOL hotels here! I am really excited. I have already made some comments in the new Patient Submitted (in this case I submitted) Travel Assistance section.

In addition, you can now see additional features (that we are still working on at this time) including web tutorials in which I personally navigate you through parts of this website that may interest you but you cannot find given that this website has now expanded beyond 3,500 total pages (I have just finished shooting all those videos last night. My webmaster just needs to upload them and put the page together). An updates section that automatically lists each day what sections have been recently updated (this should be up today or tomorrow). Besides the blogs and forum section, I update many sections almost daily so you might not know, for example, that I added a new video testimonial or photos from Emina’s trip to Tibet (which i just did) but now you will not have to scour the site for those changes. It will be listed with a direct link to the change in the updates section. Many thoughtful visitors have sent an email to me or my staff about problems they were facing with videos, text, pages, etc. not loading correctly. Now, that problem can be sent directly to the webmaster through “Report Bug” in which the problem page is already flagged when the message is sent. (Also, I will be radically overhauling your video experience in the coming months to make some of the infrequent problems much less frequent or eliminated all together.) I hope these changes will make your visit to LFP a much more enriching, educational, and enjoyable experience!

Our spa event last night was tremendously well attended (with over 200 people) and was truly a success. Watch the video of the event. In order to enhance your experience with our spa, I have spent the past 2 weeks tirelessly expanding and creating an improved website for my spa (www.spawb.com). I put together 21 Quicktime Virtual 360 tours that I think you will enjoy perusing. I also put together a single 18 minute video tour of the spa that I segmented into 11 shorter clips that highlight each of our wonderful services. I expanded and updated our team section so that you can get to know our wonderful team, and I took the promotional photographs for our spa as well (since the photographer we hired did not live up to the expectations I had). I also just started putting together a new section entitled, “Spa Video Demos/Tutorials” in which the members and my team discuss with you our unique services (including one video of my taking a hydrotherapy bath!) I hope you can come to our premier spa and enjoy a non-virtual experience. We look forward to serving you.

I am interrupting my blog for today (the 2nd part on defining culture, which will be postponed until tomorrow but this blog is actually rather on target for this theme) to announce the results from Allergan’s independent patient satisfaction survey and the rare distinction we received for our 2008 Patient Satisfaction Award. Congratulations to all of my hard-working staff members at LFP for their great work and for winning this prestigious award.

We scored almost perfect 5.0s across the board and received incredible written words of support from our randomly selected patients. What is great is Jan, our Allergan rep, said our results look so good that it almost looks as if we “cherry picked” the best patients for opinions. But she witnessed several times how the surveys we sent out were entirely random. Just as a reminder our STAFF satisfaction score last year was a perfect 10: Jan said that was the first time in her 12 year history doing this job that she every saw a perfect 10 across the board from every staff member on satisfaction.

Too often, many companies pay lip service to quality customer service but they have no metrics on defining customer satisfaction. Here at LFP, customer service is job #1 and we have proved our merit with the 2008 survey results, which I have published in their entirety. Also, watch my video log summarizing the results.

New Flash Before and After Gallery

In an effort to move this website forward to as state-of-the-art as possible, I have converted my entire before and after gallery (no small feat. thanks mike!) to a now flash-based system so that it becomes more interactive. Hopefully, it will not only be more intuitive but also more fun. I have always been inspired by the beauty of everything Apple. I loved the scrolling you can do on the Apple site and I have recreated that look here. I hope that it will be fun to navigate through the new before and after gallery. If you don’t see the new gallery, like on an iPhone, you don’t have flash installed, and you will automatically default into the older html version.

As part of a preview of things to come, check out my new web tutorial that will show you how to navigate through the new before and after gallery (below). I shot a 5 minute video of my narrating how to go through each page.