Guest Speaker Part 2

The last class we had one of our previous guest speakers came back to talk about search engine marketing. He started out by discussing the reasons why people use search engines. These reasons are for research, business, comparison shopping, entertainment, etc. After we started to get into the actual search engine marketing information.

The first thing to do when designing a site is to have a strategy. When developing the site strategy there are many things to consider:

• What is the site objective?
• What are the specific goals to use to measure success?
• Who is the audience market?
• Who is your competition?
• What can you offer visitors?
• Is your site creative and have content people want to see?

Also when it comes to goals for your site you need to make sure of several things.
The goals need to be; specific, measurable, attainable, and in a realistic time frame.

Then when your site is created you need to market it to get visitors. The search engine industry has three major ways to get your site on their list. These three are pay-per-call, vertical search, and sponsored link impression. It is important to get in the top sites listed because many people do not look past the first 10 or 20 listed sites. But to improve your chances of getting in the top 20 you need to do some marketing of your own. Some of these methods are: pay-per-click, paid inclusion, email marketing, and blogs.

When it comes to getting noticed there are two methods. One is the use of keyword ads which is search engine marketing. The other method is to design the website to be noticed indexed which is search engine optimization (organic method). Either one works fine, but using a combination of both can increase your chance of being listed higher.

Near the end of the lecture he gave a quick overview in search engine optimization. The basic concept i got was that you need to balance the trade offs between having a site that benefits the user or a site that benefits the search engine (resulting in better search results). One example of this would be to decide if you want to use a graphic headline (user benefit) which looks better or a regular text (search engine benefits) that a search engine can read.

This lecture in my opinion was a lot better than last time. The content was directly related to the class. The only thing that I might complain about was that it started off general and a lot of the more interesting stuff we had to quickly go through. I understand that he had only half a class to go over all the information and that he needed to give a background on the search engine industry before search engine optimization. May be next time they can omit the direct marketing lecture and replace it with search engine industry. Then on the next lecture do search engine optimization.

ClickZ.com

At FTC Hearing, Privacy Policies Bomb

This article discusses the concerns of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about protecting the privacy of consumers. Marketers in this data-driven world are able to target niche audiences by using cross-media tracking and segmentation. Alan Shulman, chief creative officer of creative agency Brand New World, said that marketing has gone from the mass marketing world to a micro marketing world.
The users of today are able to get what they want on demand and have instant gratification. Advertisers are forced to think of ways to get advertisements to these consumers. One way that can improve ways of providing better on demand service and advertising is through gathering more information. The technology used today enables never-before-seen tracking creating more robust database. The problem with all this tracking is how to protect individual privacy and security. Two consumer watchdog groups have written to the FTC to investigate in to online advertising practices and the efficacy of privacy policies.

I chose this article because it deals with how companies deal privacy issues. It was interesting how there isn’t much done to protect our privacy. These companies have privacy policies, but the policy can be a complex document. Many consumers don’t read the complete document and may have a false feeling of their information being kept private. I never read the complete document I usually just click the box and move on. Now I wonder how much of my information is actually kept private.

The importance to e-commerce is how to balance privacy and data gathering. It is important for advertisers and companies to gather more data to provide better service. The drawdown to all this data collecting is that consumers must give up some of there privacy so that there can be data collect. In closing the article said that this issue need to be addressed in the next decade.

Usability

Show Prices for Common Scenarios

This article addresses the issue of B2B and some B2c sites usability when it comes to finding prices. In previous years it was either the site had prices or didn’t. Today the issue is how convenient is it to find the prices relevant to your needs. The example in the article compared how prices for shipping companies could be found on their sites. One site uses a complex method to give a price. The inquirer would need to input the zip code of pick up and destination locations, size, weight, and method just to get a price for one box shipment. The other site provided a simple table of most common shipping scenarios. The result was that the simple table of common scenarios was more helpful to the business/consumer who is just doing research to find a shipping company to do business with.

I agree with the author in that listing prices for common scenarios improves a site’s usability. There have times when I wondered about how much and how long it would take to ship a package. The problem was that at the time I didn’t know the destination zip code, box size, and weight. Just a table of common scenario price would have sufficed for the research.

The implications of this article would hopefully result in easier research in finding prices from business websites. The favorable method would be to list prices for common situations. The site may also use the more complex price calculator for specific jobs.

Guest Speakers

The guest speakers gave a lot of information about direct marketing. One thing that I didn't know was that Experian did more than track credit. Experian also provides a portal for SMEs. It can be used by businesses to buy mailing list to suite their particular needs. A concept that is important in direct marketing especially online directing marketing is that it is not enough to drive traffic to the site but to convert them to more than just visitors. One way to do this is by driving the right target market to the site instead of just a large number of visitors. An example of this would be to attract people interested in attending a college to visit the site of Bryman College instead of just any person. Since it is important to find the right target group one must consider that 40% of the success of direct marketing depends on the list. Lastly, the concept of the four P's was reviewed, but they expanded it to 7 P's; price, place, product, promotion, process, physical evidence, and people. These were some of the key points from the guest speakers that interested me or caught my attention.

Assignment #2

1) I chose the Kenneth Cole Reaction T-Flex.
2) I found out that these pair of shoes has a slightly longer break in period compared to other shoes. Many of the reviews agreed that Kenneth Cole shoes are great looking and feel solid.
3) Yes, for these shoes the reviews did help me to decide buy the shoes. The reviews said the shoes have a good fit, look great, and get compliments. The only drawdown to the shoe is the break in period may take awhile.
4) The advantage of having reviews can let future consumers know how a shoe is. The first information you see on Zappos.com are several standard ratings; overall, comfort, look, shoe size, shoe width, and shoe arch. After the standard ratings the person writing the review may add more comments about the shoe, like for this shoe many reviewers added that the shoe was nice but had a long break in period.
5) The advantage for Zappos.com to offer reviews adds that extra service that other retailers may not have. Information about how a shoe fits is very important when buying online. If you usually buy a certain size but the reviews say that the shoe fit is tight then you would know to buy a larger size. I believe that even with bad reviews at least Zappos.com would not have to deal with as many unsatisfied customers (i.e. Returns).
6) I would recommend that a site like KenCole.com have at least a simple way of letting owners let future buyers know what to expect when buying their products, such as quality and fit.
7) Yes, I have gone to other sites to check on reviews on many things I have bought online and offline. The products I have checked reviews on have mostly been on electronic products and videogames.
8) I believe that sites should have some form of a review. It could be as simple as a rating system on characteristics or one that the consumer may add comments. I find reviews very helpful in determining if I should buy the product and if the benefits are better than the drawdowns.

Assignment 1

3) There are many potential business uses for blogs: 1. It gives some businesses a face or a more personal touch. An example of this is how Scoble had a blog on his opinions on things in the tech world and into the inner workings of Microsoft. 2. It gives companies a way to market a product or service by creating hype. 3. Companies may also use blogs to get feedback on their products or services.

4)No, blogs should not feel or look like traditional advertising because blogs are mostly opinions. If it looked traditional it would lose the feel of being genuine opinions from consumers, but if it did look traditional it would feel like just another marketing ploy from the company.

5)In a way blogs are a fad, but I think they will be here for a while. Blogs seem to be the next evolution of forums, which are also still being used today. Blogs are really big right now and in the future blogs will still be used but lose some of its marketing power when a new exciting way is found to market to consumers.

6)Yes, a blog for marketing or management would be great. It would allow students in the major to communicate with each other and also give those not in the major an insight to events, news and people in that department.

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