Brian Plotke

My group members and I compared the two most popular sports drinks Gatorade and Powerade. We use different tools to measure the company’s social media presence and how successful it is. The Specific measurement too that I used is called How Sociable and it measures social media visibility from all the popular social media sites like: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Google +, and more. The site measured visibility by presence (number of sites the brand appears on), brightness (how many times the brand is mentioned), Audience (number of people reached). Gatorade had a much higher score at 1464 compared to Powerade at just 617.

Another tool we used is Twitter screen graphs which determines the keyword of a brand and what time people are tweeting them. This leads to the next tool we used is Tweet feel. Tweet feel determines if they are positive or negative by looking at keywords like, bad and terrible for negative tweets and awesome and great for negative tweets. Powerade had a higher percentage of positive tweets at 72% compared to Gatorade at only 58%. We also used Google Insights. First of all we found out which countries searched for these brands the most. Powerade’s top countries were United States, Venezuela, and the DR (Dominican Republic). Powerade was searched the most in Costa Rica, New Zealand and Philippines.

Overall this presentation was useful because it gave us a chance to examine how a company uses social media and how they can improve. The social media tools are a way to learn how the company needs to improve on social media sites and also get feedback from customers and gain free information about the company.

This Blog is about Monster Energy’s social media strategy and their use of Facebook. Monster Energy has well over 12.6 million followers and over 71,000 talks about where users have mentioned Monster in their posts. Monster Energy has something called Telekom live stream where it appears that users can watch live action sports video.  Monster also tries to engage the users by allowing you to vote on the woman you want to be the next monster girl. This gives monster a chance to connect with their fans and create the next Monster girl. This promotion works for their target market of an energy drink of teenagers to early 30’s year old males but would not work for a company with a family oriented customer base like Wal-Mart.  Another part of their page that I like is the Friends activity tab that shows what your friends are posting about Monster.  Word of mouth is one of the most effective advertising and who do you trust more; the company trying to convince you to by the product or your friends?  Monster also has a Monster news tab that posts videos, photos, news stories, twitter feeds and more relevant Monster content.  Most of Monster’s posts have to don’t with extreme sports cool events that they are a part of. They also post about new products but their posts aren’t obvious advertisements like “Buy Monster Energy drinks now!” but engage the customers with posts they might be interested in.

The way to judge whether a social media strategy is successful on Facebook is: the number of likes, how many people are talking about you, is what they say positive or negative, and how many likes or comments do you receive on your posts. Unless you’re selling something using social media ROI isn’t the best way to judge a Social media campaign. It’s tough to determine what sales lead directly from your page. You could however have a deal where your fans on Facebook get a special deal that you can directly track and this could be measured.  One of the best things to get out of your Facebook page is interest and Brand awareness.

Monster does a decent Job with 3 of the 4 C’s: Create: Videos, Photos, and events. Connect: relevant posts, friend’s activity tabs. Compete: really cool page, Monster Girl contest. Control: couldn’t find any examples

Monster should start responding to people’s posts positive or negative. I couldn’t find one example of where Monster commented on someone’s post. Monster doesn’t have the need to defend itself bec

ause it has a loyal customer base and it such a cool brand. You’re either going to like Monster Energy or not and most fans on Monster’s Facebook page post something positive but a friendly response Is a good way to gain goodwill and show that you care about what the customer has to say.  A

All in all, Monster has a really cool page and it fits their brand image. I do feel that they could be a little more personal with their post and show their customers that they care about them.

When you’re at home searching the internet by yourself you are the only one who can see what you are doing right? You are very wrong, I wouldn’t say privacy on the internet is dead but you have a lot less of it then you think. Below is a quote from the article in the Wall Street Journal titled “The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets”

“It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.”

If the title and the fact that it’s from a very credible source doesn’t scare you enough companies a know way more about you than you would ever expect. This information is even sold at auction. It his makes me worried about not only what I post or even what I browse. Some of the top internet sites use tracking and cookies to gather information on the user. The information is however not assigned to a specific person but a number assigned to a specific computer. Online sites use third party tracking devices that can track what a viewer does after the first time they view the site. Guess who installed the most third party tracker? YES!! You guessed it Dictionary.com of course. Ok, I probably could have given you a hundred guesses and you wouldn’t have guessed it. The explanation behind this according to their president is that they work with a lot of networks who add their own cookies.

The thing that worries me the most about the lack of online privacy is identity theft and individuals stealing your information and against you and your credit card for purchases. Online privacy should be mandated by the government and the consumers should be more informed. The downside of this could hurt online advertisement and marketing. Online advertisement could be harder to track and it would be more difficult to sell over the internet because you target market would be more difficult to find.

Privacy vs. Security has always been a controversial issue and with the growth of the internet a similar debate has been made but it internet effectiveness vs. privacy.  The internet is run by cookies and advertising, without either of the two the internet would not be available due to the fact that sites would not be able to make any money.  There are 2 main ways to make money using the internet Sales and selling advertisement space. In a large part cookies help the internet remain free.

My biggest concern about the lack of internet privacy is if the companies know too much and information that you don’t want to be out there is without you knowing it. This could change what I say or do on the internet. The Government should also look deeper into this and make sure the World Wide Web is safe for all users.

Google Analytics is the ultimate tool to determine the success of a blog site. I would be different is I was trying to sell something but since I’m only interested in the different aspects of people going to my site Analytics is extremely useful. First of all let’s look at how many visits look at my site. Since the site was created there have been 52 visits (I’m sure the vast majority is just me). If you only count each person once there are 9 unique visitors (I still think I’m counted at least twice when I use different computers). Next I’ll look at page views 169 times a page has been views. Each time a visitor has looked at a page it counts as a page view. The Average time spent on my site is 7 minutes and 43 seconds. Bounce Rate is how often to users click on the site and leave right away and my bounce rate is 53.85%. This is much higher then I’d like it to be. The lower the bounce rate the better.

Most of my visitors are local Google Analytics allows me to locate where the visitors are coming from and people from 4 different cities have viewed my site: DeKalb (Obvious if you’ve been reading my previous blogs), Naperville, and surprisingly 1 view from Tulsa Oklahoma and 1 view from Dubayy, United Arab Emirates; go figure.

Most of my site traffic came from search (16) or LaurenLabrecque.com (14) but one came from search. The top keword for searching for my site is my name Brian Plotke.

I wouldn’t say anything surprised me but I was a little disappointed in how little traffic my site has been getting.

Giant Halloween Fortune Cookies
http://www.fancyfortunecookies.com/Giant_Fortune_Cookie_Halloween_p/ghalloween.htm 

26 Oct 2011 – Halloween Is coming up and a unique gift for friends is a giant fortune cookie covered in white chocolate and sprinkles. Buy one today

The demographic I chose to target is Halloween gift buyers. Halloween isn’t celebrated by all but it is a popular holiday. Most buyers aren’t going to buy a giant fortune cookie for themselves it’s going to be bought as a humorous gift.  My call to action is “Buy one today” I used the beginning of the ad as the description and the end is a very short call to action. My landing page is the page where you can buy the cookie that I am trying to sell.

Keywords, fortune cookies, gifts, giant fortune cookies

Google Adword keyword= fortune cookies: Competition=Medium, Global Monthly Searches= 246,000

Two other good keywords would be fortunecookie, and a fortune cookie. Fortunecookie would be a good keyword because there is a lot of searches 135,000 and low competition. This is basically a typo search and the users are trying to search fortune cookies and these are potential customers. A fortune cookie has a medium amount of competition and 246,000 monthly searches. These searchers are also searching for a single fortune cookie and that’s exactly what I’m selling.

Max Cost per Click (CPC)=4, Average CPC= $1.02, Local Monthly Searches= 135,000, Estimated Ad Position= 1.05 Estimated Daily Clicks 164.13

Search Engine optimization is important because it enables users to find your site through search engines, most notably Google. SEO is conducted through having quality content and relevant key words and appropriate titles. The difference between a site being on page 12 of Google when a search is done compared to being on The first page. Most users will never see a page that is more than a few pages back.  The goal of SEO for business is to maximize the potential customers to visit and usually by something from the  website and for users to pick your site over others.

One Keyword: want, intern, internet, blog, market, search

Two Keywords: posted Brian, read full, full article, tagscategories uncategorized

The Results do surprise me  I wouldn’t expect want, intern in my top words. It kind of confuses me and the words tagscategories uncategorized are one of my top phrases.

Earlier this evening I had the Privilege to hear a guest speaker CEO of AT&T Mobility and former NIU grad Ralph De La Vega. First of all if you ever get the chance to hear him speak go! His story is amazing and inspiring. In this blog I’m not going to try and be him and tell his story but here is a brief synopses; Mr De la Vega Talked about  4 life changing events that made him stronger and made Merging AT&T and Cingular look like Child’s play.

Event 1: As a 10 year in Cuba during the 1950′s a revolution was taking place his family lost their business and they decided to move to the United States. His family was about to board a plane when the militia looked over their papers and only Ralph was allowed to board. His father then made the decision that it was best that he went. His father made a few phone calls and found some friends in the States to look after him. Ralph was then told by his parents that they would see him in a couple of days. He didn’t see his family for 4 Years.

Event 2: as a young  High School school student he had the dream and the goal of becoming an engineer.  He was talking to his counselor,  remember he is an immigrant who barely speaks English, and his grades aren’t very goods and he tells her that he wants to be an engineer  she gives him the advice that he is more fit to be a mechanic. He drops out of regular high school  and enrolls in mechanic school.

Event 3, 4:… You have to go hear him speak I’m no going to spoil all of his stories.

All in all it was good to hear from an NIU COB grad who became a powerful CEO of a huge company who breaches integrity, risk taking and always being prepared. He approach tough topics like the potential merger with T-Mobile  that he can’t talk about with class and integrity and I can  with a lot of confidence that Ralph De La Vega is someone that should be looked up to and a fantastic role model for all.

In this blog I will be talking about the usability and function of the McDonalds website.

The task I had was to figure out how easy it was to find information on a IT career with McDonalds. I counted the clicks and it only took me 4 to find information on Information Technology careers in the state of Illinois. Searching for relevant career Information was actually very easy. I could search by category, keyword search and narrow it down by state. The keyword search is useful and the two main purposes that is should serve it does. The search should allow the user to search for a specific job and by a skill that they have.

It’s easy to critique the design and usability because we’ve in class we learned that white space equals old and outdated which is does to a point, but when you think of McDonalds you think of Yellow and Red and that’s what needs to stand out. The site is kind of boring with not much to look at but practical and without clutter.  The more I look into the site though the more I notice  how there is just so much wide open white space with nothing to fill it. McDonalds pretty much owns the color scheme of red and Yellow and the site uses it but not as effectively as they could. It should be redesigned.

The side bar could have a drop down menu if you drag your mouse over it. This could make site navigation quicker because you can figure out exactly where to go instead of clicking than clicking back. The site could have more engaging material.  It is practical and you can find out what you need but for example when I look up the McDonalds Museum I want more than one picture and a brief description I want to be engaged.  Something else I found is the spacing for corporate accolades are inconsistent and id doesn’t look good. Another Idea is to ad a video with a high level worker talking about the benefits and why you should want to work for McDonalds. The AboutMcDonalds.com site should build off the more updated McDonalds.com.

Finding an IT job at Kraft takes much longer. It took me about 12 clicks to find what I was looking for and I had multiple pages I had to go through and when I finally got where I wanted to go there was five different pages to search through even with only 19 results. I would not say that I wouldn’t want to work for Kraft because I really need a job but when comparing the 2 sites and how they are designed McDonalds wins in a land slide. Neither site looks great but the usability of McDonalds is way superior to Kraft. In today’s age of an internet controlled world. If your site functions like garbage than it says a lot about your company and a huge market of internet sales can be lost due to poor design and usability.  The one thing I liked about the site is the drop down menu. I thought it was poor design and actually kind of funny that I lost the bread crumbs at one point.

I chose to do an Advertisement for PAWS Chicago; this is the center where my dog was adopted from. These two advertisements are designed around a picture of my dog Chloe. This is such great picture of her and when you Google dog images this photo should be the one coming first. But enough about my dog what I really wanted to test is the use of friendly, light hearted ads. As you could tell the ads have different goals. One is for adopting a dog and another is for volunteering at the animal shelter.

When I see ads for animal shelters they seem to always be depressing with the goal of you acting because you feel bad for the dog. But my ads are different: They both focus on what the viewer and what they want. The first ad focus on the viewer’s joy of owning a dog, while the second ad focuses on the viewers joy of getting to play and help out friendly dogs.  I also added in the company’s and their Acronym that pets are worth saving. The company wants to help animals and this should be displayed in the ad. The landing page for the first ad is the PAWS adopt a dog page on their web site and the second ad it is the volunteer page on the same site. It’s pretty logical why these are the landing pages for the ads. You don’t want to make viewers have to search for what they want; the landing page should be exactly what they are looking for.

The criteria I would choose for the determining effectiveness is click through rate. The ads aren’t meant to be a deciding factor. Adopting a dog is a big decision and PAWS requires that the entire family come and meet the dog before they let you go home with it. PAWS cares about the dogs as much as they do the potential adopters they want to find the right home for the dog. It goes the same for the volunteers. They want someone who is going to love and take good care of the dogs when they help out. The ad is mainly to draw attention to the shelter and find help a better home for the dog.