DanShea

MK 405 JIT Blogging

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Wrapping Up MK 405

1) 

“Why has social media had such a powerful impact?”

Social media has had a powerful impact for many reasons. For one, every demographic can use it. Opinions are not limited to certain groups. Broad audiences in many age groups can make assessments on products. Second, social media is a powerful tool for advertising and gaining customer feedback. Companies can find general opinions on their product offerings for free. By a simple search, people can see what the general masses think about something/someone.

“Should companies allow executives or other employees develop personal brands as representatives of the company?”

Yes and no. Some companies allow their employees to develop personal brands based on events that happen within the company. For example, people at Bayer celebrated Bayer’s 150th anniversary by making songs and having competitions to make the best congratulatory videos. It was a great way to extend the brand to the employees to show Bayer’s value. Conversely, companies like Abercrombie and Fitch create bad press through their executive’s brand image. Mike Jeffries, A&F’s CEO, chastises bigger people saying they do not belong in their store. He creates a bigoted brand image for Abercrombie and Fitch as well as negative publicity about his company’s target demographics. 2)

“How important is personal branding?”

Rick Krentch, a social media marketing director at Luna & Associates said that personal branding is everything today. He said that we are basically our own company that holds a reputation. He says young professionals must be proactive in making our brand the strongest it can be so others see us as an asset.  3)

The question; “What will the Internet look like three years from now? Ten years from now?” is tough to answer. Our world has changed drastically in last ten years with the introduction of social media. With advances in technology, it is hard to say how the internet will adapt to our changing lifestyles. Looking forward to seeing you in class on Monday! (We will spend the class time working on your class presentation for Wednesday.)

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SMM ROI=Can't Be Quantified. Intangibles Matter Though

1. I somewhat agree with Hoffman and Fodor’s position on social media marketing metrics. True, a company might recognize their social media ROI through consumer investments such as Facebook likes and Twitter retweets. However, social media ROI remains impossible to quantify. Hoffman and Fodor only list intangibles that make ROI seem tangible. I do not see correlations with more Facebook likes leading to more sales.

2. As I said before, we can only list intangible metrics that we think will lead to more sales. I could add other metrics such as what days of the week people are @ing companies and what time of day consumers are liking and retweeting company posts. In the end there is no way to quantify results. This is not to say social media is unnecessary. It is very necessary. Social media provides credibility to a company. Consumers who see their page and # of followers will not shy away from the product because of its popularity. A social media page builds trust in a brand. This trust is necessary in all consumer decision making process.

3. If someone is starting a Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube campaign for their band, they would figure to use followers, retweets, and likes as measures to track its success. Also, the band member should make sure that these followers are not just his friends and or family. He should make sure they are branching out to people he/she doesn’t know.

DS

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Successful & Unsuccessful Mobile Marketing

1. Chipotle’s mobile ordering app has been great addition to its business model. The campaign emphasizes the luxury of skipping long lines that consume Chipotle restaurants, especially around the lunch and dinner hours. The app allows consumers to find their nearest Chipotle location and pick exactly what they want on their burritos, burrito bowls, and tacos. When customers place their order, they are told exactly when to come pick it up, enabling them to be in and out of the restaurant within minutes. Chipotle has a large consumer base so this was a great way to make their product more accessible. They do not have to deal with the long lines.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-03/chipotle-wants-to-speed-up-with-mobile-payments

2. Facebook seems to be failing its mobile marketing relative to Twitter, Instagram, etc. Facebook’s mobile app is far too complicated. It requires the user to locate through multiple pages to see notifications, profile updates and pictures. I have an iPhone 4, and the app is nearly unusable because of my slower processor. While iPhone5 and 5s users have an easier time, my Twitter and SnapChat apps works the same as their phones. The key to making the Facebook app better is simplifying it. The article below shows that Facebook plans on improving the app in its next update. The new update will have to adapt to all the iPhone and Android processors to keep their mobile marketing accessible to broader audiences.

http://gizmodo.com/5921767/the-reason-why-facebooks-iphone-app-is-so-slow-and-how-its-going-to-get-blazing-fast

3. As a millennial consumer, I think mobile marketing will be responsible for increased purchases across all industries. So many different needs are already being filled by mobile apps. I can buy sports tickets, Megabus passes, Jimmy Johns sandwiches, etc. spending just a minute on my phone anywhere. In the future, I expect to see brick and mortar traffic to decline as companies become more mobile savvy. Who wants to go to stores when they can sit on the couch and order? Teenage girls?

DS

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Gamification In Retail

1)    I play social online games on both my phone and video game consoles. I used to have more games on my phone, but now I only play Bike Race. As for Xbox 360, I play Halo 3 and 4 online as well as FIFA 2014. All of these games allow me to communicate with others while playing. As with my First Insight example, people can feel the gaming experience without the traditional game. Customers will build trust in a brand they feel engaged in. My gaming motivations align with McGonigals’ TED points because I feel like I am solving problems while playing a game.

2)    In my crowdsourcing presentation, I mentioned First Insight uses gamification to help retailers price and place their products. First Insight’s game “What Would They Pay?” allows consumers to predict the price of the product and rate how much they like it. The goals of this game are to gain insights for retailers to find out what products they should put on their shelves (and for what price). First Insight’s “What Would They Pay?” creates the experience of engagement and power that consumers enjoy. Basically consumers get to be the creators and decide on a product for themselves.

3)      Gamification involves giving the consumer what they want. We the students could use applications that effectively relate the material to us. Also, similar to “What Would They Pay?”, we could get a list of topics and decide what order we want to learn them. Or if we want to learn them at all! (Just kidding). Additional iPhone apps relating to school would be good start though.

DS

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Travelers' Guide to Brand Community

1. TripAdvisor, Inc. is a great example of a company using crowdsourcing to its advantage. TripAdvisor identifies with a community looking to ‘plan their perfect trip.’ The website enables users to find their ideal hotels, transportation means, and destination hot spots to plan a trip or vacation. TripAdvisor leverages their website’s value through their community’s input. Consumers interact with one other via reviews on aspects of different destinations. With over 40 million reviews and assessments, TripAdvisor has become the first site many travelers use when trying to find information. It has become a glorified blog where consumers trust each other’s thoughts.

2. TripAdvisor, at its core, is its own blog. Users can immediately see reviews on hotels and popular locales at their location or nearest city. When I log on, I can see reviewed hotels and lists of popular places in Cleveland, OH. Users create a profile and submit reviews on various things. The community reacts to reviews by marking them either helpful or unhelpful. This establishes credibility for a review. Additionally, a hotel or hot spot has a ‘traveler rating’, where it lists the number of reviews in order of ‘excellent,’ ‘very good,’ ‘average,’ ‘poor,’ and ‘terrible.’ TripAdvisor also ranks these and gives a percentage grade out of 100%. All of this is influenced by its brand community.

3. One specific crowdsourcing project TripAdvisor recently did was ‘World’s best beaches.’ This allowed TripAdvisor to tap into its brand community on a higher level than simple experiential reviews. This was TripAdvisor using mass crowdsourcing. Its credibility and effectiveness is measured by its hundreds of thousands of reviews. As a result of this project, TripAdvisor was published by many websites as a credible source for which beach people really think is the best (on a world scale).

4. TripAdvisor’s ‘World’s best beaches’ goals are to gain more web traffic and more users in its brand community. Solution generation is present in that TripAdvisor can distinguish what beaches appeal most to people. With that, they can advocate these beaches on the front of their website as most popular destinations. Solution evaluation will come next. TripAdvisor has the potential to partner with agencies advertising these beaches and gain additional web traffic. In sum, TripAdvisor succeeds regardless because of its high credibility. A blog is only as good as the number of people who review on it. TripAdvisor accomplishes its goals with its massive brand community that trusts in it to find their ‘perfect trip.’

DS

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Google's Wrath Ain't Nothin to Mess With

1.  “White hat” SEO techniques focus on a human audience. These techniques always follow search engine policies and rules. They rely heavily on relevancy and organic ranking to get looks from consumers.

Three examples of “white hat” SEO techniques:

Valuable and lengthy content. An end user looks for the most informative website on their search topic. A website that describes a specific topic in length compels users to spend more time on the site. It can also compel users to search deeper on the website. For example, if I am looking for new skis, I would like to know all about the mold of their skis and what they are made of. This is a value added feature. A website with less content is not likely to pop up above this one.

  Titles and meta data. Web page titles carry a lot of weight. The HTML title name and meta data must reflect the content for a website if it should rise to the top of a search. From the previous ski example; the content could be great, but if the website title is vague like www.wintergear.com, the content will not be reflected and the site will come up lower on the search list.

  Keywords. Web content must include single words. However, content must also include all possible phrases that could possibly come up in a search. For example, if a consumer searches a keyword phrase that is in a website’s content with “” marks, the website will be at the top of the search list. Consumers searching with “” will likely pick the website with that exact “” phrase.

2.  “Black hat” SEO techniques focus solely on search engines instead of human audience. Converse to white hat SEO, black hat SEO techniques do not obey search engine rules. Black hat SEO websites can sometimes be banned from search engines.

Three examples of “black hat” SEO techniques:

Hidden content. This is content invisible to the end user. Websites usually accomplish this through stuffing their coding with keywords and key phrases outside of the web content. For example, a ski retailer using black hate SEO may use comment tags (<!- Comment Tag ->) to stuff keywords like “skis”, “goggles”, “poles”, “bestskis”, etc.

  Link farming. Link farming is a form of search engine spamming that puts websites in cliques with unrelated websites. This can give companies an unfair advantage in search results. Google, Bing, and other search engines ban websites that participate in this type of black hat SEO.

  3.       Meta Keyword Stuffing. Similar to hidden content, meta keyword stuffing is a misuse of HTML standards. Meta keywords are supposed to be a small list of words that display the focus of a webpage. Webpages who use this type of black hat SEO will stuff dozens of words onto the meta keyword section. Many search engines’ algorithms don’t even pay attention to meta words anymore because of meta keyword stuffing

3. Two companies that use(d) black hat SEO:

a)       JC Penney: JC Penney was a culprit of Link Farming. For several months in 2011, JC Penney topped every search for “skinny jeans,” “home décor” and “furniture” among others. This was because thousands of links were placed on hundreds of websites that led straight to JCPenney.com.

  http://google.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=google&cdn=compute&tm=7&f=00&su=p284.13.342.ip_p504.6.342.ip_&tt=3&bt=3&bts=80&zu=http%3A//www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html

  b)       Amazon: Although not proven, many believe Amazon was a culprit of posting hidden content. Amazon encouraged its sellers to list as many keywords as possible (up to 40) on their site. These keywords did not show up on the site however, and this could be construed as invisible content for the sake of higher listings on search engines.

  http://www.dailydot.com/business/amazon-black-hat-seo-hurting-small-businesses/

Two companies that use(d) white hat SEO:

a)       Dicks Sporting Goods: Representative title, good keywords and key phrases throughout the website. The name of the website is dickssportinggoods.com. How much more relevant can you get? Dicks is at the top of almost every search relating to sporting gear, sporting apparel, athletic shoes, etc. Effective content has also helped them rise to the top of organic results.

  b)       ESPN.com: Every single professional and collegiate sports player is loaded into the content of the site. Any search for any player is going to have ESPN.com near the top of a list. Sports news also has ESPN at the top. There are also tons of links back to ESPN created by others without cheating. ESPN has engineered their website to return espn.com in almost anything sports related.

      I would recommend all these companies not use black hat techniques. While they are not illegal, it would be horrendous for Google to ban them from search results. Google searches basically run the internet. A website’s absence from it would have disastrous implications on web traffic and ecommerce.

    A company is better off adopting white hat techniques. They should mainly focus on improving their webpages’ content. Over time, website reputations will build and companies URL will appear on other sites. This will boost their organic search rank. Better to do it fair. No company wants to face Google’s wrath.

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JIT 3

1. My Facebook Klout score is currently 13. This is a low score from where I used to be on Facebook. My score shows that I have only made six posts in the last 90 days, and most of these posts are other people tagging me in pictures. Resultantly, I do not have a high degree of social influence on Facebook anymore. I have moved almost exclusively to Twitter.

 My goal for the end of this year is a Klout score of 20. I would like to become more consistent in posting on Facebook to let my friends know I am still an active member of Facebook. To reach this goal, I will post once a week.

   2. I learned through network visualization that some friends hold higher importance for trying to introduce a new brand or product. I have three main networks; The John Carroll community, my community of friends in my high school, and other friends in the Pittsburgh Area. Some friends span more than one network, and have the opportunity to help me reach out to the most people I know. For example, my roommate is from Pittsburgh, and we have a couple hundred mutual friends in both the Pittsburgh Area and the John Carroll community.

In a business setting, finding people who are in more than one mutual large network is important for spreading messages. I plan to use network visualization in my career search.

  3. My action plan for Facebook is to delete childish things of yesteryear. My Facebook spans all the way back to when I was a sophomore in high school, and I do not see it as a means of networking professionally. If I can delete the garbage, it will become more useful to me.

My desired personal brand is less personal information and more posts about things I am interested in. In the end, personal information on Twitter and Facebook is useless to everyone. If I post things I am interested in, people will be more receptive to my social media presence.

-Dan Shea

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1. United Airlines’ response to Mr. Carroll’s video was too little too late. Carroll mentioned that United Airlines initially refused to refund his expensive guitar and only after his viral video came out did they offer him a refund. Carroll denied these incentives, as he probably did not want to...

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JIT Exercise 1

1. United Airlines’ response to Mr. Carroll’s video was too little too late. Carroll mentioned that United Airlines initially refused to refund his expensive guitar and only after his viral video came out did they offer him a refund. Carroll denied these incentives, as he probably did not want to look like a sell out in front of the massive viewing audience. United Airlines did not handle the incident well because they didn’t do justice in their customer service duties. Ultimately though, United Airlines got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Airlines are notoriously stingy for their lack of responsibility in these types of situations. United Airlines happened to cross the one person who could generate viral-negative buzz about them. United Airlines’ attempt to reconcile with Mr. Carroll only embarrassed them more too, as Carroll told everyone he denied their incentives.

2. This video was seen by so many people so quickly primarily because of the song. Social media users caught it and shared it through many different means. The song may also have resonated with so many people because many may have had the same experiences awith Airlines as Mr. Carroll, and thought it funny to share it with other people who had the same faulty customer service by airlines.

3. In situations where negative buzz is created, corporations should do the same as United Airlines and offer incentives to those who have been victims of bad customer service. While this did not resonate with Mr. Carroll, most others are quick to forgive in exchange for something. Ultimately, good customer service will make this a non-issue and companies will not have to struggle for damage control for bad press.

-Dan Shea