Resources consumed:
-Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet article
-Off Target mp3
I enjoyed the concept of the advertising article as it relates to the internet since it continued the discussion that we have been having from earlier in the course. The idea of monetizing internet business models is something that we hear about all of the time, and it seems that companies like Google have gained enough scaled economy to corral the profits from their business model, leaving little room for a competitor like Bing. How many people do you know that use Bing? I know I used it a couple of times to see what the ads were talking about, and didn't recognize enough difference in the results and/or usability to ever return to it. The phrase, "oh just Bing that" instead of Google it sounds ridiculous because there is nobody that says it. A very difficult position exists to assail the Goliath of internet search and ad revenues that is Google. He mentioned Google several times in the article and their entrenched position being safe, which is something that I agree with now that I know a bit more about how their Adwords program works.
His rebuttal in the end of the article to the inevitably emotionally charged reactions was quick witted and right on point. The internet changed finance and travel booking industries overnight when they were replaced with something that had much lower overhead, removed a middleman, and gave a great reward to anybody who put the slightest effort forward to learn how to conduct their own trades in an OTC market or book their own cruise directly from the website. For the people in that industry not to see that trend coming meant they were wearing self-applied blinders and we will continue to see other industries change dramatically as the internet and technology improves. Just as we discussed the improvements in targeted advertisements in my last post, it is a stupid position to take that advertising will remain on course in the mass media paradigm for the long term. It just is not an educated position to take, given the underlying psychology that the author purports that people don't like ads and could do without them. The simple example of the DVR in my own limited TV viewing means that I never see any commercials, which directly affects my knowledge of new movies coming out. I am perpetually out of the loop on both, and I am better off for it. When we do see the rare movie we look up reviews online in our own educational efforts and then decide. We don't need to waste 30 seconds to a minute every of our lives every time an ad comes on for a movie that we don't want to see. He is correct in his argument on almost every level; the execution will just be a matter of time.
Speaking on the issue of advertising and its improvement in the last decade, I like how the discussion of this mp3 dovetailed into my recent posts in the class. Again I wanted to throw in a quick compliment for the design of the course and how the course materials complement each other well. The behavioral marketing puts a fancy label to the concept that I have been elaborating on, and I can see it being a benefit now where more ads are directed and useful to the customer but I understand the somewhat irrational fear of invasion of privacy from the same ads. I think people value their privacy a bit much at times given most peoples' lives are actually pretty boring and would not make a good diary for some unethical business executive to read. The reason things like People magazine exist is to highlight the not-so-boring antics of celebrities which have no legal expectation to privacy at all. They gave that up when they entered the public eye, but laws like libel and slander, while not applying to celebrities unless egregious, do protect the common citizen and for good reason. I don't see any reputable corporations actually using any single packet of data on any random individual and using it to invade privacy but more as many computers crunching streams of data that are sold for legitimate business purposes to target ads, for instance. Now how a computer can creep somebody out without actually being the Dave computer for 2001 is beyond me, but I get the Orwellian paranoia that exists when Google seems to be reading your private email and recommending a good or service. As I mentioned last week, I actually am one of those people who might provide more click-through for targeted ads since they actually appeal to me, and I don't think that my law-abiding privacy is so valuable that a company like Google would even care to invade it. But the future is another thing; technology can easily reach a scary intrusiveness drawn long enough out.
I enjoyed the class!
Signing off,
Glen
Friday, May 27, 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Week 6: Final Week Advertising, Promotion and PR
Resources consumed:
-Secret of Googlenomics article
-Camtasia videos on in game advertising
I began the week's activities for this final portion with what I found to be both academic and practical description of the Google AdWords that we hear so much about. I was interested mostly in the concept of how the system is set up as an auction, and how the amount of data that they have access to is finally lending a positive reinforcement system to learning what is and is not effective advertising. The old marketing phrase that I remember goes something like this: I know that something like half of my advertising dollars are completely wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half. What a difference some mathematicians and statisticians make. I was extremely impressed at the concept that it is a learning system and that it was brought about by tweaking an already popular and profitable system.
On a personal note, I have noticed over the last couple of years that Google's algorithms and the presentation of the AdWords have dramatically improved for me to actually consider clicking them once in a while, not that I do. I found it almost inconceivable some years back how ridiculous both the content and appearance of the supposed vaunted AdWords looked to me. I consider myself to be pretty good at spotting irony and it seemed that was almost Google's intent with some of the ads that would appear next to my email, where it was clearly reading the words in the mail and blanketly pulling similar subject ads to appear. In once instance I was making plans for a friend's funeral and the AdWord displayed several casket and other macabre ads which at that time I could only laugh at as a computer version of a sick joke. I thought to myself how far they had to go to make that an effective advertising algorithm that targeted the individual, not just some random keywords one email to get the elusive click.
The Camtasia videos are always wonderful tools to tie in videos, slides, and audio to a pretty seamless and professional package. These were no exception as they were perfectly suited given the subject matter. I personally think that the advertisements snuck into games can be done well or they can be done poorly and could cause empirical harm to the brand. Of course I say these things with no stats or background to pad my position, but the gut reaction of one consumer is at least telling. The free games that are brand centric or offered at insanely low prices for the quality of the game like the BK King game seem to be overwhelming hits and certainly should be an area worth continued effort. The games that consumers pay for are probably the most likely to receive negative reactions from customers if the ads are blatant and take away from gameplay. I think a parallel runs with something like satellite radio, where one has to pay to subscribe to the service and would expect that consequently all stations are ad-free. The cruel reality, and incidentally why I did not opt for a subscription even as an avid music fan, is that not all stations are ad free. It is always an interesting thing to note that another subscription service, cable TV, does not offer any promise of ad-free channels and they get away charging large fees to get those ad filled channels. Perhaps because they are an established paradigm that was spawned from ad-supported network TV or the medium wouldn't be supported by subscription fees alone given costs of producing shows. An interesting argument nonetheless. The only weak point of the videos was that they left me hungering for closure on analysis of the questions posed at the end concerning if advertising in games is effective or not. I would venture that there are studies that could answer these questions and hoped the video would shed some light on the subject.
More to follow tomorrow!
-Secret of Googlenomics article
-Camtasia videos on in game advertising
I began the week's activities for this final portion with what I found to be both academic and practical description of the Google AdWords that we hear so much about. I was interested mostly in the concept of how the system is set up as an auction, and how the amount of data that they have access to is finally lending a positive reinforcement system to learning what is and is not effective advertising. The old marketing phrase that I remember goes something like this: I know that something like half of my advertising dollars are completely wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half. What a difference some mathematicians and statisticians make. I was extremely impressed at the concept that it is a learning system and that it was brought about by tweaking an already popular and profitable system.
On a personal note, I have noticed over the last couple of years that Google's algorithms and the presentation of the AdWords have dramatically improved for me to actually consider clicking them once in a while, not that I do. I found it almost inconceivable some years back how ridiculous both the content and appearance of the supposed vaunted AdWords looked to me. I consider myself to be pretty good at spotting irony and it seemed that was almost Google's intent with some of the ads that would appear next to my email, where it was clearly reading the words in the mail and blanketly pulling similar subject ads to appear. In once instance I was making plans for a friend's funeral and the AdWord displayed several casket and other macabre ads which at that time I could only laugh at as a computer version of a sick joke. I thought to myself how far they had to go to make that an effective advertising algorithm that targeted the individual, not just some random keywords one email to get the elusive click.
The Camtasia videos are always wonderful tools to tie in videos, slides, and audio to a pretty seamless and professional package. These were no exception as they were perfectly suited given the subject matter. I personally think that the advertisements snuck into games can be done well or they can be done poorly and could cause empirical harm to the brand. Of course I say these things with no stats or background to pad my position, but the gut reaction of one consumer is at least telling. The free games that are brand centric or offered at insanely low prices for the quality of the game like the BK King game seem to be overwhelming hits and certainly should be an area worth continued effort. The games that consumers pay for are probably the most likely to receive negative reactions from customers if the ads are blatant and take away from gameplay. I think a parallel runs with something like satellite radio, where one has to pay to subscribe to the service and would expect that consequently all stations are ad-free. The cruel reality, and incidentally why I did not opt for a subscription even as an avid music fan, is that not all stations are ad free. It is always an interesting thing to note that another subscription service, cable TV, does not offer any promise of ad-free channels and they get away charging large fees to get those ad filled channels. Perhaps because they are an established paradigm that was spawned from ad-supported network TV or the medium wouldn't be supported by subscription fees alone given costs of producing shows. An interesting argument nonetheless. The only weak point of the videos was that they left me hungering for closure on analysis of the questions posed at the end concerning if advertising in games is effective or not. I would venture that there are studies that could answer these questions and hoped the video would shed some light on the subject.
More to follow tomorrow!
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Week 5: Web Metrics and Marketing Research Wrap up
Resources consumed:
-Chapter 4: of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
-Video: Kimberly Clark and Virtual Reality Simulations
The wrap up to this week was easy again as I found a couple of interesting optional learning links to bolster my nascent knowledge of web metrics. My team and I are busy wrapping up our online marketing assignment and I think we will be ready to turn it in tonight, after a bit of final editing. I am enjoying the assignments intermixed with the blogging and normal learning assignments but I think I will be glad when I am not trying to juggle both on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.
I read the chapter concerning web analytics and found it useful for my e-commerce professional development as a resource that I will most likely either do myself or hire out for my own business. Given the costs quoted in the article as well as an IT estimate that my friend sent to me when I outlined the business plan from the IT perspective, these things can cost a lot of money! I will have to be very good at providing a high volume of sales given my low margin business model. Through this article as well as some of the research on web analytics companies that I mentioned in my last post, I am getting a feeling that if you can draw more useful traffic to your site than the next guy, you will be better off competition wise. Of course, the old adage applies that you have to spend money to make money, but some of the scales of money needed to be spent in producing a quality website, marketing it effectively, and then analyzing traffic to further increase the customer flow were, I admit, a bit off by several magnitudes in my head. I was happy to see the author use actual example numbers for a hypothetical position for a large firm because at least that puts some ballpark numbers in my head. The article was very informative for a large company looking to hire a senior analyst, and I can certainly glean the lessons such as the 10/90 rule but as a small business owner, would have trouble applying his exact advice and would more likely go the consultant route to initiate traffic and analysis if I couldn't do it myself. The final aspect that I enjoyed about this article was the fact that in the very least, he blows apart the notion that extremely costly and complex analytics tools are always necessary and free tools such as Google's can easily produce usable results. And free is always my favorite brand.
I enjoyed the video on Kimberly-Clarke and was impressed first off, with the quality of the video and the editing to include seamless slides and videos. I think the Kelley school productions are far superior to most of the KD videos that professors provide and I don't know if the trend is towards a production quality like this or if it just a resource limitation normally allocated to videos like the GLN network. It really does provide for a much better learning experience and I was glad to see a type like that again in this course. I have had videos, not in this class, where the professor looks about 8 years younger that in his photo in the syllabus, and the video is grainy, misaligned audio and video, and the content is years out of date with current events such as the Great Recession. Moving on to the content, I thought he was an engaging speaker since I became attentive in a subject that I have not any experience in and came away impressed at the ideas and the news coverage that they garnered. I was a neuroscience undergrad and we studied the physiology of the eye and tracking eye movements and I was excited to see the connection they drew in the video between what people will say they are interested versus what they unconsciously fixate on. The best part of the video is that some of this biology based research that could not have been possible several years ago is producing good statistical results and enhancing branding in extremely low margin, competitive shelf stores. There is always something to be enhanced by technology, even something as seemingly settled as fast moving consumer goods marketing.
Ready for the final week.
-Chapter 4: of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
-Video: Kimberly Clark and Virtual Reality Simulations
The wrap up to this week was easy again as I found a couple of interesting optional learning links to bolster my nascent knowledge of web metrics. My team and I are busy wrapping up our online marketing assignment and I think we will be ready to turn it in tonight, after a bit of final editing. I am enjoying the assignments intermixed with the blogging and normal learning assignments but I think I will be glad when I am not trying to juggle both on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.
I read the chapter concerning web analytics and found it useful for my e-commerce professional development as a resource that I will most likely either do myself or hire out for my own business. Given the costs quoted in the article as well as an IT estimate that my friend sent to me when I outlined the business plan from the IT perspective, these things can cost a lot of money! I will have to be very good at providing a high volume of sales given my low margin business model. Through this article as well as some of the research on web analytics companies that I mentioned in my last post, I am getting a feeling that if you can draw more useful traffic to your site than the next guy, you will be better off competition wise. Of course, the old adage applies that you have to spend money to make money, but some of the scales of money needed to be spent in producing a quality website, marketing it effectively, and then analyzing traffic to further increase the customer flow were, I admit, a bit off by several magnitudes in my head. I was happy to see the author use actual example numbers for a hypothetical position for a large firm because at least that puts some ballpark numbers in my head. The article was very informative for a large company looking to hire a senior analyst, and I can certainly glean the lessons such as the 10/90 rule but as a small business owner, would have trouble applying his exact advice and would more likely go the consultant route to initiate traffic and analysis if I couldn't do it myself. The final aspect that I enjoyed about this article was the fact that in the very least, he blows apart the notion that extremely costly and complex analytics tools are always necessary and free tools such as Google's can easily produce usable results. And free is always my favorite brand.
I enjoyed the video on Kimberly-Clarke and was impressed first off, with the quality of the video and the editing to include seamless slides and videos. I think the Kelley school productions are far superior to most of the KD videos that professors provide and I don't know if the trend is towards a production quality like this or if it just a resource limitation normally allocated to videos like the GLN network. It really does provide for a much better learning experience and I was glad to see a type like that again in this course. I have had videos, not in this class, where the professor looks about 8 years younger that in his photo in the syllabus, and the video is grainy, misaligned audio and video, and the content is years out of date with current events such as the Great Recession. Moving on to the content, I thought he was an engaging speaker since I became attentive in a subject that I have not any experience in and came away impressed at the ideas and the news coverage that they garnered. I was a neuroscience undergrad and we studied the physiology of the eye and tracking eye movements and I was excited to see the connection they drew in the video between what people will say they are interested versus what they unconsciously fixate on. The best part of the video is that some of this biology based research that could not have been possible several years ago is producing good statistical results and enhancing branding in extremely low margin, competitive shelf stores. There is always something to be enhanced by technology, even something as seemingly settled as fast moving consumer goods marketing.
Ready for the final week.
Friday, May 20, 2011
Week 5: Web Metrics and Marketing Research
Resources consumed:
-Branding Assignment research: Alterian company slideshow on tablet computers
-Chapter 1 of the Numerati
-Brief history of the Internet video
I began this week's class work with research and investigation into the digital marketing efforts of the tablet computer market. My team is currently involved in research and writing to compare the Motorola Xoom with their competitive set and to evaluate their online marketing efforts. I was tasked with identifying Motorola's competitors in this product arena and to judge their use of digital marketing, citing worst and best practices. In the course of that work I cam across a very interesting company that parallels the work of people described in "The Numerati" chapter, discussed below. The company is called Alterian and their efforts are centered in web analytics and digital marketing statistics to include social media and websites. Once I found that site and a product that they produced in the form of a slideshow, I was energized for two reasons: first, it seems that this company can produce web stats on virtually any customer segment and product and their slideshow was exactly the kind of data that we could use for our project, since it related exactly to the latest tablet releases and their online buzz. Secondly, I think any internet based business can certainly benefit from the type of data that these Numerati companies generate, and in two years when I want to effectively target my company's niche consumers, this type of company will certainly be worth a cost/benefit debate for my marketing aims. I turned in my portion of the assignment to the group for review, and looked forward to consuming the required reading and video of the course.
The reading assignment was extremely well written and engaging, and mirrored my feelings of the discovery of Alterian. I found the level of detail to be informative and found the author to relate what could be a boring recount of internet statisticians with the requisite flair for history and perspective. I knew the basics of how cookies worked and could predict that companies would develop that would be able to mine that data in the aggregate to produce targeted marketing results, and I am seeing those more frequently every day in my own internet surfing. An example is where lately I have seen ads online that I am actually interested in, and they seem eerily tied into a shopping club I get emailed about, or reflect the information I have input for interests and likes on social networking sites. It seems that even a year or two ago, internet banner ads were not targeted at all and I could see how the mass-media mindset of marketing had lazily transformed itself to the online arena without much thought for the nuances of the new media. Or perhaps, the technology was not there yet to allow targeted ads. Then Google came along with their Adwords and changed the face of banner/targeted web advertising, although I am not as sure on the details of that revolution as I should be. I remember the discussion about how "creepy" it was that Google ads could surmise a summary of your email to your friend, for instance, and put targeted ads containing the subject right alongside the email while you read it. I recognized then what a difference that made and now feel a bit more read up on the scope of that mindset in all areas.
The video on the history of the internet certainly was informative and served to highlight the important people and organizations that brought it into being. And here all this time I thought that a congressman had invented it in his spare time! Ha Ha. I really enjoyed learning about the creation of ARPA, which is now known as DARPA and is a ridiculously well credentialed and prolific advancer of science. I knew that they were involved but did not know the whole story. I don't know if the video is fully useful to all students for marketing on the internet as it exists today as it is a bit academic, but I certainly enjoyed it and it played to my science passions well. The converse argument for its usefulness is that several facts that I just know from general knowledge, such as how the data is transferred in data packets over TCP/IP and the aspects of lossless digital communication, may not be known to all students of the class and could open a new door of IT discovery to somebody who hasn't had much experience with computers.
Will consume some more resources, continue to work on the Marketing project, and wrap up this week on Sunday.
-Branding Assignment research: Alterian company slideshow on tablet computers
-Chapter 1 of the Numerati
-Brief history of the Internet video
I began this week's class work with research and investigation into the digital marketing efforts of the tablet computer market. My team is currently involved in research and writing to compare the Motorola Xoom with their competitive set and to evaluate their online marketing efforts. I was tasked with identifying Motorola's competitors in this product arena and to judge their use of digital marketing, citing worst and best practices. In the course of that work I cam across a very interesting company that parallels the work of people described in "The Numerati" chapter, discussed below. The company is called Alterian and their efforts are centered in web analytics and digital marketing statistics to include social media and websites. Once I found that site and a product that they produced in the form of a slideshow, I was energized for two reasons: first, it seems that this company can produce web stats on virtually any customer segment and product and their slideshow was exactly the kind of data that we could use for our project, since it related exactly to the latest tablet releases and their online buzz. Secondly, I think any internet based business can certainly benefit from the type of data that these Numerati companies generate, and in two years when I want to effectively target my company's niche consumers, this type of company will certainly be worth a cost/benefit debate for my marketing aims. I turned in my portion of the assignment to the group for review, and looked forward to consuming the required reading and video of the course.
The reading assignment was extremely well written and engaging, and mirrored my feelings of the discovery of Alterian. I found the level of detail to be informative and found the author to relate what could be a boring recount of internet statisticians with the requisite flair for history and perspective. I knew the basics of how cookies worked and could predict that companies would develop that would be able to mine that data in the aggregate to produce targeted marketing results, and I am seeing those more frequently every day in my own internet surfing. An example is where lately I have seen ads online that I am actually interested in, and they seem eerily tied into a shopping club I get emailed about, or reflect the information I have input for interests and likes on social networking sites. It seems that even a year or two ago, internet banner ads were not targeted at all and I could see how the mass-media mindset of marketing had lazily transformed itself to the online arena without much thought for the nuances of the new media. Or perhaps, the technology was not there yet to allow targeted ads. Then Google came along with their Adwords and changed the face of banner/targeted web advertising, although I am not as sure on the details of that revolution as I should be. I remember the discussion about how "creepy" it was that Google ads could surmise a summary of your email to your friend, for instance, and put targeted ads containing the subject right alongside the email while you read it. I recognized then what a difference that made and now feel a bit more read up on the scope of that mindset in all areas.
The video on the history of the internet certainly was informative and served to highlight the important people and organizations that brought it into being. And here all this time I thought that a congressman had invented it in his spare time! Ha Ha. I really enjoyed learning about the creation of ARPA, which is now known as DARPA and is a ridiculously well credentialed and prolific advancer of science. I knew that they were involved but did not know the whole story. I don't know if the video is fully useful to all students for marketing on the internet as it exists today as it is a bit academic, but I certainly enjoyed it and it played to my science passions well. The converse argument for its usefulness is that several facts that I just know from general knowledge, such as how the data is transferred in data packets over TCP/IP and the aspects of lossless digital communication, may not be known to all students of the class and could open a new door of IT discovery to somebody who hasn't had much experience with computers.
Will consume some more resources, continue to work on the Marketing project, and wrap up this week on Sunday.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Wrap up to Week 4
Resources consumed:
Video: Will Twitter Ever Make Money? Twitter CEO Evan Williams Responds (sort of)
Video: Disrupters: eCommerce Presentations by Charlie Kim of Next Jump, Inc.; Jen Beckman of 20X200; and Tebecca Thomsen of Alice.com
I first started with the article centering on taxonomy of internet commerce and found the following quote most prescient when thinking about their main idea: “The native Internet culture has adapted to this imaginary Internet space, which is by definition abundant. Information - the predominant property or commodity - is abundant and largely free. So the native Internet economy is based not on scarcity but on abundance, this is the primary difference between the Internet economy and the real-world.” We all know from general theories of economics that the rule of scarcity drives things like supply and demand and that is the reason that diamonds are more expensive then say, rubies, since one is much more scarce than the other. Not that the internet changes the availability of raw materials or finished goods available to the consumer, but I found the idea of the abundance of information to be a staggering thought that I had not really considered on a fundamental level.
The video on Twitter was enlightening considering my last post concerning the monetization of internet companies. I think that the Professors titled the video well when they alluded to Williams “sort of” answering the question posed very directly to him about how the company will make revenue. I read about these companies all the time that are in the news, are truly groundbreaking in regard to their service or business model but if there was for some reason a temporary vacuum of venture capital, would simply not exist. They can raise money in multiple rounds of VC to keep the employees paid and the lights on but it is a bit baffling that companies like Twitter and Facebook (in the case of FB living up to its monetization potential given its user base) are unable to be successful cash flow machines given their virtually limitless customer base. Every type of person I know is on Facebook and that seems like a great advantage over say, a Wal-mart or Neiman Marcus that attracts only a certain segment of any population. I thought the host of the video was simply asking what a lot of people are wondering with regard to a high profile company like Twitter and it seems even the CEO in the best position to spin an answer, any answer, about summed up his feelings with a statement that Twitter cares about revenue, but not as long as VC funding continues to prop them up. My final thought on this subject is how traditional stocks pay out dividends and conduct splits to maintain more even valuation but the newest type of IT stocks don’t normally pay out dividends or conduct splits and the investor that buys in is rewarded in theory with a faster future growth model than a traditional blue chip. I always find it interesting in that case to study the IT bubble of the 90s as well as note the joke of the “hot IT stock” that turns out to decimate an unwitting investor. Are there parallels to the current social networking problem of monetization from an investor’s standpoint?
I really liked the entrepreneurial San Francisco video featuring the CEO’s and senior members of small e-commerce start ups since I feel like each person that presented had a concrete understanding of how the business would make money, and how each model had a competitive advantage over the traditional model. As a future entrepreneur I am always on the lookout for good advice for avoiding mistakes made along the way so I enjoyed the Next Jump CEO’s take on less is more, which we had studied for Operations Management in regards to overwhelming the customer with too many choices, simply to show off the capability of a computer system. I remember how we had studied how grocery stores went off the deep end for a while stocking too many SKU’s and actually adversely affecting sales since customer’s couldn’t make a choice.
Some key lessons learned, looking for more!
Friday, May 13, 2011
Week 4: Business Models and the New Era of Competition
Resources consumed:
-Gil and Frank Discuss Business Models video
-Business models on the web article
-Business model history, both brick and mortar and virtual at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_model
This week I think that I will continue to enjoy the content of this course as it continues to give me a better perspective on internet marketing, and helps to frame my thoughts on my own small business idea that will be base on internet listing and advertising. As a first time entrepreneur in a couple of years, I plan to get a small business off the ground with myself alone (and some controller and accounting help from my wife) and each subject that I can apply towards that aim will only help give me a better reference for research. For now, it is just an idea that I toy with, but subjects like this on the subject of monetizing an internet business are interesting for me especially. While my idea does not base in internet dealings alone, it just uses the internet as a method to connect customers with my tangible products, I can see the challenge in any model related to a normally "free" information source like the internet.
The video discussion was a great overview of what, in my mind and most other business followers, is an issue that is constantly being debated: how to monetize a service or new web feature that is past the initial euphoric days of exponentially growing traffic and buzz. A lot of the ground-breaking types of businesses like YouTube and Facebook have been surprisingly hard to call profitable in the nuts and bolts sense, even amid wild valuations like Goldman Sach's recent private valuation of the company at a staggering $50 Billion dollars. So it seems that yes, some monolith companies can convince the investor world that their companies are ultra valuable, but what about the rest? I enjoyed the iTunes discussion about its interaction with the music industry and learned a couple of new things like certain artists have withheld their song licensing from iTunes. I also enjoyed hearing about the Radiohead example: I was one of the fans who chose to pay for the album in 2007 and I dug a little from the Wikipedia page about that album and found that "According to an Internet survey conducted by Record of the Day of 3,000 people, about one-third of people who downloaded the album paid nothing, with the average price paid being £4." Now, I didn't go so far as to back up the euro to dollar conversion rate at the time, but I think we can see that 4 Pounds is a bit less than the normal album. Interestingly, their latest album "The King of Limbs," they chose to charge a set price on their website and iTunes. Certainly was a newsworthy new business model for the "In Rainbows" album and I think we might see more things like that in the future as we shift ever towards a virtual market.
I was surprised somewhat at the depth and breadth of models present in the article, although I should have seen it coming given the diversity and growth of internet based businesses. I liked the layout of the pdf since it allowed me to quickly click on links to models of businesses that I had not heard of and learn about the model with a practical example. I learned about several models that I had not heard of before and got to learn a bit more about models that I had heard of, such as Priceline.com and the most surprising thing from the article is that some of these models are patentable. The idea of that had never really occurred to me but it seems that it really falls under the realm of intellectual property just like anything else. Any innovative person with enough gumption to get a business off the ground and make it work enough that others take notice should be able to also protect their proprietary model.
Finally, I did a quick recap of the Wikipedia site to see if I could learn any more about the model of my own business idea and picked up a few interesting ideas. It is hard to believe that a couple of years ago Wikipedia didn't exist but it sure is useful now!
-Gil and Frank Discuss Business Models video
-Business models on the web article
-Business model history, both brick and mortar and virtual at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_model
This week I think that I will continue to enjoy the content of this course as it continues to give me a better perspective on internet marketing, and helps to frame my thoughts on my own small business idea that will be base on internet listing and advertising. As a first time entrepreneur in a couple of years, I plan to get a small business off the ground with myself alone (and some controller and accounting help from my wife) and each subject that I can apply towards that aim will only help give me a better reference for research. For now, it is just an idea that I toy with, but subjects like this on the subject of monetizing an internet business are interesting for me especially. While my idea does not base in internet dealings alone, it just uses the internet as a method to connect customers with my tangible products, I can see the challenge in any model related to a normally "free" information source like the internet.
The video discussion was a great overview of what, in my mind and most other business followers, is an issue that is constantly being debated: how to monetize a service or new web feature that is past the initial euphoric days of exponentially growing traffic and buzz. A lot of the ground-breaking types of businesses like YouTube and Facebook have been surprisingly hard to call profitable in the nuts and bolts sense, even amid wild valuations like Goldman Sach's recent private valuation of the company at a staggering $50 Billion dollars. So it seems that yes, some monolith companies can convince the investor world that their companies are ultra valuable, but what about the rest? I enjoyed the iTunes discussion about its interaction with the music industry and learned a couple of new things like certain artists have withheld their song licensing from iTunes. I also enjoyed hearing about the Radiohead example: I was one of the fans who chose to pay for the album in 2007 and I dug a little from the Wikipedia page about that album and found that "According to an Internet survey conducted by Record of the Day of 3,000 people, about one-third of people who downloaded the album paid nothing, with the average price paid being £4." Now, I didn't go so far as to back up the euro to dollar conversion rate at the time, but I think we can see that 4 Pounds is a bit less than the normal album. Interestingly, their latest album "The King of Limbs," they chose to charge a set price on their website and iTunes. Certainly was a newsworthy new business model for the "In Rainbows" album and I think we might see more things like that in the future as we shift ever towards a virtual market.
I was surprised somewhat at the depth and breadth of models present in the article, although I should have seen it coming given the diversity and growth of internet based businesses. I liked the layout of the pdf since it allowed me to quickly click on links to models of businesses that I had not heard of and learn about the model with a practical example. I learned about several models that I had not heard of before and got to learn a bit more about models that I had heard of, such as Priceline.com and the most surprising thing from the article is that some of these models are patentable. The idea of that had never really occurred to me but it seems that it really falls under the realm of intellectual property just like anything else. Any innovative person with enough gumption to get a business off the ground and make it work enough that others take notice should be able to also protect their proprietary model.
Finally, I did a quick recap of the Wikipedia site to see if I could learn any more about the model of my own business idea and picked up a few interesting ideas. It is hard to believe that a couple of years ago Wikipedia didn't exist but it sure is useful now!
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Wrap up to Week 3
Resources consumed:
-mp3 of Gil and Frank's take on the long tail
-The seven Segment System for online marketing
-Disney world marketing tactics given our family trip to Disney
The required lecture component of the class was the mp3 where the Professor's discussed their takes on the long tail theory that I blogged about last time. I was secure in my foundation of knowledge of the long tail theory from the last course resources from last time. The professors hit on an example or two of how the long tail products might proliferate themselves and I came up with the following aspects of normal media channels that I use to expand my music knowledge: the iTunes "Genius" sidebar, cable TV digital music channels, Pandora music stations, and finally ever more-informed friend networks sharing their "likes" on Facebook. Each one of these is a relatively recent innovation in each of these areas and I find myself always using any one of these in complementing fashion to traditional band writeups in magazines or heard on the radio. Each of these methods is ripe for long tail proliferation where a pseudo-indie listener like myself can find themselves leaning more and more indie and less mainstream simply because there are so many more choices available than were before with only profitable hits being broadcast. Each type of music that I am interested in can be accessed individually, with no commercials and serves to augment my knowledge of each genre. As a point that I will expand on below, I can see that I am a bit less satisfied overall with all of the music choices available, as referenced to traditional hits broadcast that have been vetted through multiple layers of the music industry before release.
I was interested to hear about contra-theories of the long tail such as social commentary exposing the box office sales of a new blockbuster that influences the masses that haven't seen it to view it. I think this was/is the traditional way that most people heard of the new media coming out and based their viewing decision on word of mouth or professional critics' opinions before the committed to consuming it. Until the internet becomes the main vehicle for distribution for things like media, I can see this method remaining to be a powerful influencer. I also enjoyed hearing about The English Patient rule and other evidence pointing towards more dissatisfaction with customer in the long tail as I hinted at above. Occam's razor points to the simplest explanation for an occurrence and it should follow that: if all of the media, lets use music as an example, in the long tail is not a hit for whatever reason, some of it will be a gem and most of it will frankly be crap. I can easily see in that case how the advice to a digital marketer to refrain from putting all of your eggs in one basket when marketing in the long tail is warranted.
I read the 7 segment system for online marketing and found it to be a bit boring and outdated but still conveying some wise principles to think about. Since some of the pop references in the article were to Ricky Martin and the Backstreet Boys, as a 30 year old I do not think it is a timely article to read today, since those guys were popular when I was in high school, and my 10 year reunion was several years ago now. However, that does not change human nature and different motivations when web surfing. As I learned about each type of web customer, I found myself thinking of examples of my own web surfing and how I had fit into each one of the categories that they mentioned and realized their point that not any one person sticks in any category to be completely true. With the advent of mobile surfing, I think this fact can only be more true today as our collective attention spans shortens to the length of a picosecond and we should now have the technology to accurately switch gears on our web marketing to effectively target each type of shopper.
I am currently on a family trip to Disney World in Orlando, and I thought of the subject of this class while walking around the park with family and debating how crowded it is and theorized on how many people are carelessly spending their vacation money. After finding some statistics on the net, it seems that in 2007, around 130,000 people are present in all the Orlando parks on an average day, with around 50 million people visiting all the Orlando parks in 2007. With these vast amounts of numbers visiting and many of them self-proclaimed repeat customers, I just wanted to reflect on the power of their marketing campaigns where the entire park is based on the media that we all have consumed and know which is a wonderful synergistic relationship. As it turns out they are not just traditional marketing geniuses but online also, with Disney's various sites garnering awards from Market Week and other respected sources for their digital marketing initiatives. It seems that they mostly code their sites as family friendly information stops but the juggernaut that is Disney can effectively transition a potential kid customer from a free online game to enticing their parents to "learn more" about an expensive Disney cruise.
As a final reflection I asked several questions as to why Disney needed to take so much information down from me when they issued my multi-day pass, and they answered back that they could better track a lost ticket but all they would need for that would be my name and phone number but they took my driver's license as well. It seems that they now can track everything about me through my resort card purchases and can better target advertisements at my house, for the next time I feel like spending thousands on a Disney vacation.
-mp3 of Gil and Frank's take on the long tail
-The seven Segment System for online marketing
-Disney world marketing tactics given our family trip to Disney
The required lecture component of the class was the mp3 where the Professor's discussed their takes on the long tail theory that I blogged about last time. I was secure in my foundation of knowledge of the long tail theory from the last course resources from last time. The professors hit on an example or two of how the long tail products might proliferate themselves and I came up with the following aspects of normal media channels that I use to expand my music knowledge: the iTunes "Genius" sidebar, cable TV digital music channels, Pandora music stations, and finally ever more-informed friend networks sharing their "likes" on Facebook. Each one of these is a relatively recent innovation in each of these areas and I find myself always using any one of these in complementing fashion to traditional band writeups in magazines or heard on the radio. Each of these methods is ripe for long tail proliferation where a pseudo-indie listener like myself can find themselves leaning more and more indie and less mainstream simply because there are so many more choices available than were before with only profitable hits being broadcast. Each type of music that I am interested in can be accessed individually, with no commercials and serves to augment my knowledge of each genre. As a point that I will expand on below, I can see that I am a bit less satisfied overall with all of the music choices available, as referenced to traditional hits broadcast that have been vetted through multiple layers of the music industry before release.
I was interested to hear about contra-theories of the long tail such as social commentary exposing the box office sales of a new blockbuster that influences the masses that haven't seen it to view it. I think this was/is the traditional way that most people heard of the new media coming out and based their viewing decision on word of mouth or professional critics' opinions before the committed to consuming it. Until the internet becomes the main vehicle for distribution for things like media, I can see this method remaining to be a powerful influencer. I also enjoyed hearing about The English Patient rule and other evidence pointing towards more dissatisfaction with customer in the long tail as I hinted at above. Occam's razor points to the simplest explanation for an occurrence and it should follow that: if all of the media, lets use music as an example, in the long tail is not a hit for whatever reason, some of it will be a gem and most of it will frankly be crap. I can easily see in that case how the advice to a digital marketer to refrain from putting all of your eggs in one basket when marketing in the long tail is warranted.
I read the 7 segment system for online marketing and found it to be a bit boring and outdated but still conveying some wise principles to think about. Since some of the pop references in the article were to Ricky Martin and the Backstreet Boys, as a 30 year old I do not think it is a timely article to read today, since those guys were popular when I was in high school, and my 10 year reunion was several years ago now. However, that does not change human nature and different motivations when web surfing. As I learned about each type of web customer, I found myself thinking of examples of my own web surfing and how I had fit into each one of the categories that they mentioned and realized their point that not any one person sticks in any category to be completely true. With the advent of mobile surfing, I think this fact can only be more true today as our collective attention spans shortens to the length of a picosecond and we should now have the technology to accurately switch gears on our web marketing to effectively target each type of shopper.
I am currently on a family trip to Disney World in Orlando, and I thought of the subject of this class while walking around the park with family and debating how crowded it is and theorized on how many people are carelessly spending their vacation money. After finding some statistics on the net, it seems that in 2007, around 130,000 people are present in all the Orlando parks on an average day, with around 50 million people visiting all the Orlando parks in 2007. With these vast amounts of numbers visiting and many of them self-proclaimed repeat customers, I just wanted to reflect on the power of their marketing campaigns where the entire park is based on the media that we all have consumed and know which is a wonderful synergistic relationship. As it turns out they are not just traditional marketing geniuses but online also, with Disney's various sites garnering awards from Market Week and other respected sources for their digital marketing initiatives. It seems that they mostly code their sites as family friendly information stops but the juggernaut that is Disney can effectively transition a potential kid customer from a free online game to enticing their parents to "learn more" about an expensive Disney cruise.
As a final reflection I asked several questions as to why Disney needed to take so much information down from me when they issued my multi-day pass, and they answered back that they could better track a lost ticket but all they would need for that would be my name and phone number but they took my driver's license as well. It seems that they now can track everything about me through my resort card purchases and can better target advertisements at my house, for the next time I feel like spending thousands on a Disney vacation.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Intro to Week 3: Microsegmentation and Social Media
Resources consumed:
"The Origins of Social Media"
"The Long Tail"
Learning objectives this week: I hope to gain a better understanding of social media outlets and uses as they relate to marketing in the digital age, and, since I am unfamiliar with microsegmentation, learn first what the term means and then apply that new knowledge towards the same goal of an improved marketing mindset. I am interested to see the Professor's perspectives on these trends as they have pointed out several terms already that I have not been terribly familiar with and I am looking for more ways to think about marketing.
The origins of social media article was great. I was aware of phenomenon like viral videos and blogger's contributing to things like the alleged falsity of the Bush Draft documents, but I really enjoyed learning about the trials on one blogger's experiences with AOL and trying to cancel his account. For personal reasons as well I liked to see the downfall of those practices because who really these days can say that they have never been victimized by some sort of "employee retention specialist?" The classic case in my experience has been with trying to cancel credit cards, and you inevitably end up on the phone with an obviously Indian representative with a completely unrealistic American connotative name like Billy not listening to your appeals for cancellation and talking over you. Perfectly annoying at best, and it appears downright damaging to a company if exposed at worst.
The other thing that I took away from this article is the shift of conventional wisdom away from the rule of thumb that a dissatisfied customer is powerful since they will be excited to tell as many as 10 people about their bad time and admonish others to stay away. More and more frequently we will see large clouds of discontent on web 2.0 develop into thunderstorms of customer rage, multiplying that one customer's voice many times over. Businesses now more than ever need to take steps toward constant improvement of service as well as avoidance of cover-ups of mistakes or any move to block transparency. Any business large or small that uses the internet for any aspects of its operations should heed this advice. I take great pleasure in knowing that even business that don't use the internet at all, are still not safe from bad customer reviews. The classic example of the home improvement contractor that is unreliable, doesn't finish the job, or worse steals from their customers is now up for review on sites like Angie's List and will not stay in business long. This movement serves to help both the customers that use contractors as well as the honest contractors to vet themselves and earn extra business. Win win for everyone.
The vast majority of the products are not available at a store near you. This is the main point of an extremely interesting article and theory that I had never heard about before. I vote for this article as my favorite in the class so far since I had never heard of it and it was very well written to explain the concept and how it is affecting popular consumable media and how it will continue to work in the future. I have a great belief that the future of business in most arenas will continue to tap the power of the internet and its vast resources to get better at selling to its segments that it serves. We have already seen the demise of the travel agent, the undercutting of traditional media companies like Blockbuster and Tower records, and the theory behind the power of taking a large number of unpopular items to the mainstream but multiplying that number by the many different types of idiosyncratic customers is a great concepts that is supported by the data presented in the article. I always love the ability of a program like iTunes to be able to offer any type of music I might be interested in, but the "long tail" of the non-hits is substantially more than I would have ever thought. For my own small business and entrepreneurship ideas, I think I will be better armed to change my mindset of identifying my long tail and niche customers from thinking about microsegmentation.
"The Origins of Social Media"
"The Long Tail"
Learning objectives this week: I hope to gain a better understanding of social media outlets and uses as they relate to marketing in the digital age, and, since I am unfamiliar with microsegmentation, learn first what the term means and then apply that new knowledge towards the same goal of an improved marketing mindset. I am interested to see the Professor's perspectives on these trends as they have pointed out several terms already that I have not been terribly familiar with and I am looking for more ways to think about marketing.
The origins of social media article was great. I was aware of phenomenon like viral videos and blogger's contributing to things like the alleged falsity of the Bush Draft documents, but I really enjoyed learning about the trials on one blogger's experiences with AOL and trying to cancel his account. For personal reasons as well I liked to see the downfall of those practices because who really these days can say that they have never been victimized by some sort of "employee retention specialist?" The classic case in my experience has been with trying to cancel credit cards, and you inevitably end up on the phone with an obviously Indian representative with a completely unrealistic American connotative name like Billy not listening to your appeals for cancellation and talking over you. Perfectly annoying at best, and it appears downright damaging to a company if exposed at worst.
The other thing that I took away from this article is the shift of conventional wisdom away from the rule of thumb that a dissatisfied customer is powerful since they will be excited to tell as many as 10 people about their bad time and admonish others to stay away. More and more frequently we will see large clouds of discontent on web 2.0 develop into thunderstorms of customer rage, multiplying that one customer's voice many times over. Businesses now more than ever need to take steps toward constant improvement of service as well as avoidance of cover-ups of mistakes or any move to block transparency. Any business large or small that uses the internet for any aspects of its operations should heed this advice. I take great pleasure in knowing that even business that don't use the internet at all, are still not safe from bad customer reviews. The classic example of the home improvement contractor that is unreliable, doesn't finish the job, or worse steals from their customers is now up for review on sites like Angie's List and will not stay in business long. This movement serves to help both the customers that use contractors as well as the honest contractors to vet themselves and earn extra business. Win win for everyone.
The vast majority of the products are not available at a store near you. This is the main point of an extremely interesting article and theory that I had never heard about before. I vote for this article as my favorite in the class so far since I had never heard of it and it was very well written to explain the concept and how it is affecting popular consumable media and how it will continue to work in the future. I have a great belief that the future of business in most arenas will continue to tap the power of the internet and its vast resources to get better at selling to its segments that it serves. We have already seen the demise of the travel agent, the undercutting of traditional media companies like Blockbuster and Tower records, and the theory behind the power of taking a large number of unpopular items to the mainstream but multiplying that number by the many different types of idiosyncratic customers is a great concepts that is supported by the data presented in the article. I always love the ability of a program like iTunes to be able to offer any type of music I might be interested in, but the "long tail" of the non-hits is substantially more than I would have ever thought. For my own small business and entrepreneurship ideas, I think I will be better armed to change my mindset of identifying my long tail and niche customers from thinking about microsegmentation.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Week 2: Crowdsourcing
Resources consumed:
-Interview with Andressen
-Interview w/ Pandora founder
-Twitter followed on Motorola
-Crowdsourcing chapter one
-Brand Communities lecture
-CIA crowdsourcing article
-MySpace auction article
-15 Year Wows London with Memo on Media
The first point I would like to make is that when in New Orleans for a vacation with the family, beware of the parking gods! Our troubles on this trip did not allow me to post on my blog this week until tonight. This is the second time that we have had major issues with parking our car while in that city. The valet at our hotel lost our entire set of keys, including 2 laser cut keys that are expensive and only the dealer or factory can make. When they couldn't find them, we were forced to stay 2 extra days while we worked on several options on how to get home. We eventually decided on having a friend in town (Florida) break into our house, get my set of keys, and drive several hours to drop them off. The hotel will foot the bill for the set of keys and we got home much later than anticipated. Of course I did not bring my laptop with me as this was a family trip and as luck would have it, the write-up I completed earlier in the week was on my home computer. I will include all of my thoughts in this post for the week and apologize that I didn't space them out more.
The major theme of this week was crowdsourcing and putting the power of the voice of the consumer in the businesses hands, for better understanding their feedback, whether positive or negative.
After reviewing the topics, my learning goals were to better understand the term of crowdsourcing, which I had heard of and knew there was a book with that same title, to watch 2 more videos on the week one CEO's that I admired, and to better understand how companies were using Twitter and which tactics were more effective.
I was able to complete all of my resources without any technical difficulties but did find it interesting that one Charlie Rose interview was able to be viewed full screen while the other was not. Perhaps this was a bandwidth issue or something else, but the full screen experience was much better than an embedded video, which translates to watching any online videos, such as YouTube.
Before I cover this week's theme, I first caught a couple of interviews to catch up from the copious materials last week that I found interesting. My planned career transition in around 2 year will focus on finance, and more specifically, private equity and business development. I always like to hear an entrepreneur's story and especially enjoyed the different paths and personalities of Pandora's Westergren and Andreesen Horowitz' founder. Each of these guys serves as a role that I would like to one day fill: running a business, or several businesses as Andreesen does, that they truly are passionate about. They both touched on financing rounds of venture capital, whether receiving them for start-ups or giving them to promising ventures. In that same vein, I was also happy to read later in the week about the private equity auction of MySpace, and the diametric views on that company's future. It seems that the world of private equity and alternative investments are murky at best and not everything can be a financial winner, but it is interesting to know that those guys are can turn around some pretty unprofitable/sad businesses. I suppose they apply many of the lessons we read about in business cases more effectively than the next guys and use the power of leverage.
Crowdsourcing is something that I have seen more and more without formally studying it, in places like Facebook and YouTube, and especially for years on sites like EBay. I believe Ebay was the first major site to operate strictly on community feedback as a basis for online reputation, which was an exciting time. I have been purchasing items (and occasionally selling) since 1999 on Ebay and have a habit of telling wary friends and family that in all that time, I have never been burned by some crooked transaction. Everything I have ordered arrived as ordered, and on time, and if it wasn't, I was duly informed of the problem. The power of the crowd to work in this fashion has understandably moved to things like customers reviewing products on a website as to overall grade as well as more nebulous aspects such as the "fit" of a shirt relative to its purported size. I find the power of a product getting 4.5/5 stars by thousands of interested reviewers a wonderful testament to that product, since those are all unpaid minutes taken out of the day of that customer to generate that review. I even find it extremely helpful that the newest trend has been to parse the crowd reviews by most relevant, or some other metric so that I can view the most universally helpful information first when making a decision.
From the marketing perspective, I thought the chapter of Crowdsourcing as well as the video lecture were effective in opening up my eyes to the many applications of the crowd's opinion, as well as highlighting the rapid changes in the industry that I have only observed some of thus far. I think that the Twitter assignment was a great application to teaching us to observe an actual company do their best to interact with their customer base, as well as showing us the right and perhaps wrong ways to do it. We discovered several things about the structure of Twitter, such as putting newer posts on top of a user's feed, that benefits the more loquacious tweeter, and harms the glib. The company we followed only tweeted 4 times over 5 days, which we all agreed was not going to show up on their crowd's dashboard as much as needed to strengthen their brand. The CIA application of crowdsourcing and the article's mention of DARPA's use of forecasting terrorism events served as a parallel to the criticisms of the financial derivatives market being more like gambling, which I enjoyed noting.
In conclusion, I didn't find any of the materials consumed this week to be boring, but perhaps less enlightening then the others was the article on a 15 year old "wowing" media with his "revelations" on how teens consume media. Many of the thoughts that he put out, such as individuals not really needing both a twitter and a Facebook account since only friends would follow you on twitter is not mind-blowing to someone like me perhaps, but might have been to an traditional ad exec who hasn't been keeping up with the
rapid changes. In all, a good week to get better acquainted with the processes behind all of those "likes" that we click in Facebook and how that information is being used by smart marketers.
rapid changes. In all, a good week to get better acquainted with the processes behind all of those "likes" that we click in Facebook and how that information is being used by smart marketers.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Wrap-up of week 1
Materials read:
Do you trust this face by GQ
Video conversation with Reid Hoffman
Does the Internet make you smarter/dumber?
I had no technical issues in consuming any of the media and found the amount that was suggested to complete a bit overwhelming as just looking at the hours from the videos alone would take up an entire weekend day. Luckily though, I felt that I did enough reading and video watching, in addition to the podcasts, that I now feel pretty comfortable with the materials and a general introduction to things like twitter and blogs.
I especially enjoyed the conversation with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman to see what that site will develop into in time. I think it is a useful site, and especially since I am planning a career change in the next couple of years, I am extremely interested to see how that site can serve my goal to network effectively.
In fact, as the professors point out, as I have my eyes open to web marketing, I have noticed several things announced this week surrounding the materials that I have consumed. The first was an announcement email by LinkedIn that they are tailoring their job path tools on the site to make them more useful for people in different stages of networking. For me I see this as a better use of the vast networking opportunities present with the data that LinkedIn controls, to help somebody move up the ladder or into a new career, for example. These are exactly the types of products that Reid mentioned would be coming out and it is cool to see the manifestation of his comments. The other thing that I noticed as relates to web marketing was an older issue of Bloomburg Businessweek that I had around the house talked about the massive effect Google's Adwords have on companies' availability to generate revenue from online search results. The interesting aspect was that with a simple and routine tweak of their software, they can literally gut a company's revenue stream from reliable web results where their top tier return is lowered dramatically. Even if Google didn't intend that result, it can devastate online commerce sites overnight and there is a power struggle with Google and its business customers to prevent those sorts of conscious or unconscious rewrites. In the macro aspect, it truly shows how powerful Google is in its control of the internet, raising some questions about monopolies and non-compete issues.
That is about all the reflections I have this week, I will probably watch a couple more Charlie Rose videos since I find his interviews interesting and informative.
Do you trust this face by GQ
Video conversation with Reid Hoffman
Does the Internet make you smarter/dumber?
I had no technical issues in consuming any of the media and found the amount that was suggested to complete a bit overwhelming as just looking at the hours from the videos alone would take up an entire weekend day. Luckily though, I felt that I did enough reading and video watching, in addition to the podcasts, that I now feel pretty comfortable with the materials and a general introduction to things like twitter and blogs.
I especially enjoyed the conversation with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman to see what that site will develop into in time. I think it is a useful site, and especially since I am planning a career change in the next couple of years, I am extremely interested to see how that site can serve my goal to network effectively.
In fact, as the professors point out, as I have my eyes open to web marketing, I have noticed several things announced this week surrounding the materials that I have consumed. The first was an announcement email by LinkedIn that they are tailoring their job path tools on the site to make them more useful for people in different stages of networking. For me I see this as a better use of the vast networking opportunities present with the data that LinkedIn controls, to help somebody move up the ladder or into a new career, for example. These are exactly the types of products that Reid mentioned would be coming out and it is cool to see the manifestation of his comments. The other thing that I noticed as relates to web marketing was an older issue of Bloomburg Businessweek that I had around the house talked about the massive effect Google's Adwords have on companies' availability to generate revenue from online search results. The interesting aspect was that with a simple and routine tweak of their software, they can literally gut a company's revenue stream from reliable web results where their top tier return is lowered dramatically. Even if Google didn't intend that result, it can devastate online commerce sites overnight and there is a power struggle with Google and its business customers to prevent those sorts of conscious or unconscious rewrites. In the macro aspect, it truly shows how powerful Google is in its control of the internet, raising some questions about monopolies and non-compete issues.
That is about all the reflections I have this week, I will probably watch a couple more Charlie Rose videos since I find his interviews interesting and informative.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Beginning week one
Resources complete:
-Chapter 1 Age of Engage
-Podcast Newspaper 1, 2, 3
I was interested in the Age of Engage overview which appeared to be a opening chapter of a book centering on the new marketing, what they term marketing 3.0 and how we got here. I particularly enjoyed the history of marketing and the various iterations it has taken; especially since this will only be the second marketing class I have ever taken, and will most likely be the final given I am an MBA/MS Finance dual degree.
For this week, my learning goals: To better understand the tools, sites, and impact of web 2.0 and 3.0 on marketing practices
Projected outcomes: to learn more intricately the above topics and apply them to my formerly robust knowledge base of the web. Lately, I have not been able to keep up given the rapid pace of development in the web coupled with work, school, and family commitments occupying the bulk of my time.
Initial questions that I would like to have answered: What are the newest social media and web 2.0 connectivity sites that can be useful in my future career? How can I best learn given the various course materials provided in this course? Will I be able to get through a majority of the recommended readings, podcasts and videos?
Other materials: none as of yet
Long time lurker, first time Blogger
Hello X501,
I'm looking forward to seeing the results of our forays into the blogosphere
I'm looking forward to seeing the results of our forays into the blogosphere
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