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.
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