Casey Eischen

Tweetfeel is a nice tool to use to get a broad sense of how a company viewed by the public. The software is free making that a bonus for companies to use but companies should take caution when to come to interpreting the data. The data collected does not count for sarcasm and it might count the same post in both positive and negative categories.  When our group searched Skittles for the first time using Tweetfeel we found a debate about gay people. Some people were saying that Skittles was using the rainbow and they support gay people and there seemed to be a debate about the rainbow.  When we went back to Tweetfeel, we could not refine those comments so we left them out of our PowerPoint.

Google insights is a cool tool that is also free to use, it allows people to search for key words and graphs the amount of activity on the web on that key word. Company’s can use this information to see how they fair in the industry that they are in, to see if people are talking about their product or service.  Google insights do not do a great job of distinguishing between positive and negative comments.  Google insights do put the most recent comments at the bottom of the page to see if the comment was positive or negative.  When our group put Skittles in the search box, we got a large spike at the end of the graph and as a group, we were trying to understand what caused this to happen, we did not have an answer.  Google insights maps of the globe is cool to see which countries are most talking about the product and the direct comparison is nice to see how the competition is doing against your product or service.  Companies can use this map to see which marketing plans are working and which ones are failing so the company can change their tactics in the negative areas.

How sociable is tool that allows the user to type in a keyword into the search box and gets results about which social networks are most talking about that word.  A visibility score shows up on the screen to tell that person that your keyword most appears on these sites.  A company can use this tool to look up their company or brand name and see which social network is most talking about them, once the company knows the information they can work with that social network to advertise on their site. When our group searched Skittles, we were able to see which social network was talking the most about Skittles. This information allowed us to reference those sites and see if we could find any information on the social site about Skittles.  As a group, it was hard to go into the history of the site to see what people were talking discussing.

Using all the sites together a company can see get a sense of what people think about their company, which geographic region is working with their marketing plan. The company can see which sites most people are talking about their company or brand.  This information could help a company in an expansion project, which country to spend advertising money, and which sites might be the best to advertise on to get a strong ROI.

Malls track shoppers’ cell phones on Black Friday By Annalyn Censky@CNNMoneyTechNovember 22, 2011: 11:01 AM ET

On Black Friday two malls will track people but not by using their camera system but by the customer’s cell phones.  The two malls are located in Promenade Temecula in southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Virginia. The malls want to see people shopping habits and see if there are cold spots in their mall.  Since cell phone broadcast a signal, they are not breaking into your phone and tracking you.  The two malls want to see what stores are most popular and how long people spend in those stores. Instead of having someone count people as he or she walk into a store that costs a lot of money, they can just track your cell phone.  Stores want to know if a person shops at their store, which store is the next most likely for people to go to, so they could collaborate up with that store and both stores could sell their products or promotions.

The malls are giving customers notice that they will be tracking their phones but in order to opt out you have to turn off your cell phone while shopping.  The tracking system being used by the malls is called FootPath Technology.  The Footpath uses small antennas throughout the stores to capture each phones identification number like an IP address on a computer.  The system cannot get the names or phone numbers of the people because of laws in place; to get a number usually that means a court order.  Several other countries are already using this technology in their malls and many of their customers do not opt out of the tracking of their phones.  Two stores are going to use this technology in their stores to track people movements and
they are JC Penney and Home Depot. Home Depot is looking into this technology
but does not use it in any of its stores.

Malls are saying that Google and Apple stake us why cannot malls track us; they track our movements before using different methods like cameras, heat maps, people counters, and even undercover researchers who follow shoppers around.

People need to realize that companies are tracking them and the more they know about what is going in the tracking the world the better they will be defend themselves if they want out.  The tracking companies are worried about the security systems that are in place at these companies, were hackers can target this information, and use it in a harmful way against people.  Last year AT&T was hacked and exposing the unique ID numbers and e-mail addresses of more than 100,000 iPad 3G owners.

The future of the matter is that more people are going to get cell phones and the number of tracking technology is going to increase so the next step is to make the option to allow people to chose if they want to be tracked or not with a click on their cell phone.

1)   Describe what they are doing.

American Eagle Outfitters Facebook’s page is has multiple pages their wall page is the most used and American Eagle Outfitters can monitor the conversations about their company and provide talking points. American Eagle Outfitters has 5,617,535 likes and about 40,000 people are talking on Facebook about them.  The information page has company background information and has a link to their main website page.  American Eagle Outfitters finds pictures of celebrities or people post pictures of celebrities wearing American Eagle clothing, and people will comment on the photos and usually the feedback is positive for American Eagle. There is an image of Selena Gomez wearing her AE tie-dye cut-off shorts out with her boyfriend, Justin Bieber. About 3,400 people like this photo and 622 comments on the photo.  This exposure is great for American Eagle they are getting advertising by celebrities and the public feels the connection between themselves and the celebrities.

2) Which consumer motivations are they meeting (create, control, compete, and connect)?

American Eagle Outfitters is creating a link between the company and its customers by allowing them to post on Facebook what they think about the deals and clothing line that American Eagle has to offer. The company creates the clothing lines and the customers get to put their share their views of the line on Facebook.  American Eagle Outfitters does not control what the public is saying on their wall but they can try their best to make sure, when a customer does by something that is no correct and instead of returning the item, they write a negative comment.  American Eagle does have the control to remedy the customer by offering a refund or discount on their next purchase, this control that the marketers have allows for damage control.  American Eagle Outfitters does compete with other trendy clothing stores like Abercrombie and Fitch, Hollister, and Aeropostale to name a few, American Eagle want alone with other trendy clothing retailers want happy customers in order to do this the companies need to listen to the customers and figure out their wants.  American Eagle Outfitters does this by using social media as a tool to connect with people to see what their wants are and then they do their best to meet those needs of those customers.

3)   Which metrics can the brand use to measure success?

American Eagle Outfitters can use metrics like number of likes on their Facebook page, the number of comments and user generated content like pictures and sharing. They can also use discount codes to see if more people shop because they put up a discount code on Facebook.  American Eagle and see how many people link with their main website and the time spent on their site.  American Eagle also has a text message system, where they sent out texts with discount codes and you can shop in store or online with your discount code, this metric is great to see how many people use the text message codes.

4)   What can you suggest for improvements? Discuss how your improvements will help

Have a photo contest where people can post themselves in American Eagle clothing and find the best the photo and that person wins a gift card or something.  American Eagle will judge the contest and the people must be covered properly, the photos must be submitted through American Eagle to count. These way customers can help the company and the company helps its customers.

Porn, violent images appear on Facebook as part of spam attack

Facebook was hacked and porn images were being spread throughout the site. The security system that Facebook uses is Sophos this sercurity system is good about blocking unwanted content on Facebook. Today Sophos said that the content was spreading for 24 hours or so before they caught onto the problem.  They were trying to figure out how the images were spreading and they came up with few ideas of how the content was spreading. One method for the spread of the porn content is “Clickjacking, when clicking on a friend’s image shares it in your own feed.

Hackers also may have compromised the accounts of users with weak passwords or tricked people into installing malicious code.” This is a problem for Facebook since the people being hacked were not the ones putting up the porn content.  A few members of the CNN news group were checking their Facebook pages and noticed the porn content on their new feeds but what more surprising the number of comments of the porn content, but many users was flagging the porn pictures and Facebook was able to delete the images.

Facebook did not know the images were up until a full 48 hours passed by until they were aware something was wrong with their site. Many users were really upset by the porn content and are leaving Facebook and going on Twitter to post their comments about what happened to Facebook.

On November 5, a group of people wanted to take down Facebook and called that day “kill Facebook day” That day came and went with no activity.  Last week a group put up a YouTube video that they created a virus to take down Facebook called a “Fawkes virus,” this sophisticated tool would attack Facebook. A few people on Twitter were saying that anonymous people ran their accounts but there was no mention of Facebook or attacking Facebook.

CNN reports, “Using a simple Facebook account, the worm can be carried into other accounts with little or no interaction,” an automated voice says in the video posted on the account “AnonSecurity157.” “We did not expect the intensity with which this would spread.” This sounds like an attack of changing pictures around is not a big deal but if Facebook is unprotected how many other sites are unprotected from attackers who want to take them down.

Is privacy dead?

Privacy is not dead because the advertisers do not know the person’s name only what they look up.  The ads are customized to that person and can guess an age but this makes the ads more relevant to the users. This way the ads the customers or viewers are looking at are relevant and not some ads that have nothing to do with them.  When I look online for to buy or reference something I personally want the ads to be relevant to what I am looking up or buying. This will help with finding a better deal or more information about a topic and can help overall.  People like ads to be relevant so they feel like someone cares about their interests; it helps create a connection between the marketers and the customers. This connection between markets and customers is great to offer deals or specials to the target market of that business and the customers feel they are getting a direct benefit.

Do you think consumers need protection?

Consumers are not giving their names away unless they buy something online and then credit card information, this information needs to be protected otherwise a customer could lose their identity and file a law suit against that company. Regarding advertisements customers should not really care if the ads are targeting them because it is based on what their interests are when it crosses the line is with medical information this information needs to stay private and ads should not be allowed to target this information.

Should the government develop laws beyond the current self-regulation environment?

The government is a reactive unit, so first a problem needs to occur then a law might pass to stop future problems in that area. Knowing this information about the government, the government should take a proactive stance on medical information being kept safe for users on the internet but the government cannot stop someone that is willing to provide that information to someone on the internet.  The ads and tracking systems cannot target medical information that can cause distress to someone if that information falls into the wrong hands, keeping this information safe is in the governments best interest since their plan is to go to a digital medical system to store people’s information. Having this information all over the internet does not help the medical system in place because that information is almost public knowledge.

If so, how will this affect marketers?

Markets need to put safe guards in place to protect people’s medical information. When a person agrees and willing to provide a marketer with their medical information to have ads target them about medical issues that person has, then it is okay.  People’s medical information needs to stay between the doctor and patient; otherwise, businesses can use someone’s medical information without the person being aware to with hold a job.  If businesses get hold of people’s medical information it can be sold to others and the confidentiality between doctor and patient is lost.

1)  Visits, unique visitors, page views, time on site, bounce rate, etc.

The number of visits to my site since the creation date is 73 visits. The number of unique visitors to my site is 30 since the creation date. The number of page views since the creation of the website is 230. The average time spend on my site is 6 minutes and 7 seconds. The bounce rate for my site since the creation date is 63.01%. More information about my site is the different web browsers that were used to Chrome had the most visits at 42 followed by Firefox at 25 visits then internet explorer with 5 and finally safari by 1 visit.

2) Visitor location

The locations of the people and bots visiting my site are mostly in the United States with 72 visits and 1 visit from Germany. The one visit from Germany is from the city of Dortmund; this visitor did not spend any time on my site and only visited one page. The United States visits are 70 from Illinois and two from Florida, the two from Florida are both from Broward County. Breaking down Illinois there were 63 visits from DeKalb, 3 from Sycamore, 3 from Naperville, and 1 from Deerfield.

3) Top pages (under content)

The top pages for my site are my main page with 136 views; this page has all my blog posts and most of my content. The next page with the most views in my contact page with 29 views. The difference between the two numbers is 107 views, this is a lot considering how young the website is, and it is a school related project.

4) Where is most of the traffic coming from? (Search, direct, etc.)

The direct traffic is 65.75%, referring sites is 28.77%, and search engines are 5.48%. The direct/none traffic source had the most visits at 48 and highest page/visit at 3.60 along with the highest time spent on site at 8 minutes and 33 seconds.

5) Top keywords from search engines

My site only had two keywords and they are Casey Eischen, and Guido Osterwald. Casey had three visits and average time on site at 11 seconds. Guido had one visit and zero time on site.

6) Does any of the information from your analytics surprise you?

The visits from Florida were surprising, through Facebook I found a girl with the exact name as me, and spelled the same, I friend requester her and she accepted.  She is from Broward County so that might have been her looking at my site we do not talk or contact each other so if it is her that is really surprising.

Custom Fancy Fortune Cookies

Fancyfortunecookies.com

Create your own fancy fortune
Great fun for all events! Shop now!

Target demographic:

Anyone that wants to buy a fancy custom made fortune cookie. This target market could be people or companies from all over the world that want to have a fancy custom fortune cookie. There is no specific target age, or restricted to male or female anyone who has the financial means to buy a custom made fortune cookie can buy one or more.

Call to action: Shop Now!

Landing page: http://www.fancyfortunecookies.com/Custom_Fortune_Cookies_s/50.htm

Three relevant key words (phrases)

Fortune cookie, cookies gigantic fortune, and fancy fortune

The fortune cookie: rational thinking behind picking this keyword is that the competition is medium and it has a high global monthly search and local monthly searches, and it does not cost very much per click at an approximate $1.18.

Personalized fortune cookies: rational thinking behind picking this keyword is that the competition is medium but the global monthly search and the local monthly searches are on the lower side but the keywords personalized will home in on the target market. The cost is a bit higher but the people searching will be closer to the target market. The approximate cost per click is $1.24.

Summary (per day) for the keywords fortune cookie, Max CPC $ $1.00

Average Estimated CPC

$0.64 – $0.78

Total Estimated Clicks

95.36 – 116.55

Total Estimated Cost

$67.51 – $82.51

Summary (per day) for the keywords fortune cookie, Max CPC $2.00

Average Estimated CPC

$0.76 – $0.93

Total Estimated Clicks

115.3 – 140.93

Total Estimated Cost

$97.70 – $119.41

Summary (per day) for the keywords fortune cookie, Max CPC $10.00

Average Estimated CPC

$0.95 – $1.17

Total Estimated Clicks

121.34 – 148.31

Total Estimated Cost

$128.66 – $157.25

SEO is the process of helping a webpage in an organic search. The higher your sites ranking by using keywords, and description, and title of the webpage help your ranking. Linking your webpage or website to other webpages or websites increases your ranking more if those webpages are high quality and higher ranked than yours are.  Another way to make your site higher in the rankings is to update your site a lot with meaning full content relating to your key words.  Google, Bing, and Yahoo, use spiders to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that link from other search engine indexed pages do not need submission because they find automatically. Spiders can look at a number of different factors when looking at site and its site. To avoid spiders to find webpages that you want to hide it is best to use a robots.txt this will make the spider not read what is on that page.  Thus, the spider will not report to the search engine company about the page.  There are two different ways to go about making your ranking higher and those to ways are White Hats and Black Hats. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility. Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that disapprove of by the search engines. If a website is found, using Black hats the search engine will lower their ranking or take their website off their list all together. SEO may not be effective strategy for all websites, and other interactive marketing strategies can be more effective, depending on the goals of that organization.

People, market, rest, company, customer. Yes because most of my blogs relate to Photoshop, Restaurant.com, ItSupplies, and analysis a website. The words people and rest were a bit out of place but overall the other three words fit what my posts were containing.

1) How easily can you fi­nd relevant jobs (please count the number of clicks it takes you to arrive at a page containing a relevant job description)?

I started at the home page and it took five clicks to arrive at a job for title for Associate Platform Support Analyst. When I was on the home page, I clicked on corporate then careers, then under the heading of corporate opportunities I clicked on corporate job search. After clicking on corporate job search, I had to use the pull down menu to find IT positions in Illinois. After I clicked search a list of jobs for a person with an IT degree opened and you can select from a number of different positions. After clicking on a position, it gives you the description and what qualifications you need for that position.

2) How easy is it to ­find the information about careers and benefits?

It is easy to find information about careers but takes more clicks to find information about benefits. You have to click into corporate careers and then there is an additional link for benefits.

3) Is the website compelling (e.g., does it make you want to work here)?

No, the website does not seem like it belongs to McDonalds. It looks like a website created by someone not in the restaurant business and McDonalds corporation just took it over and puts its logo in the corner.

4) Critique the page in terms of design and usability

-Navigation

The navigation is easy to follow. Put in the persona of the assignment it was easy for me to find the information that I was looking for, and the paths made sense.  The only part that was hard to find the benefits part of the assignment, McDonalds Corporation did not make it easy to find the benefits of their employees.  It took extra clicks for me to find the benefits for their jobs.

- Spacing/layout

Spacing and layout of the McDonald’s website is very clean and organized for people to find.   They follow the basic structure of their website well and segment everything in a clean manor.  There is no extra white space between objects and the text font and size is appropriate.

- Colors

Colors are lacking and use of two tones between white space and text to make the text pop.  Every page that I went to had a white background and looked very simple.  The color of the background or use of background image would help to attract people and make more people stay on the site longer. Looking at the text for long periods trying to find the information required for this assignment took its toll on my eyes, I had to stop for short periods to let my eyes relax.

- engaging content (use of images, videos, etc)

Very basic use of images a few free standing photos but nothing that yelled out work here or stay working here. People like to relate from personal experiences to match experiences that they might experience on the job. This way people feel more attached to the company that want to work for or currently work.

- Overall, ease of use

The website itself is easy to follow and understand, the layout is organized, and the buttons/links take you to the correct landing pages. Color is lacking but other than that, the website does look professional and provides the correct information that a person needs to find what they are researching.

5) What changes do you suggest that McDonald’s should make to the site to improve the experience?

McDonalds needs to add color or a background image to their web pages so people do not have to strain their eyes looking at black text on a white background.  To add a personal touch to the site McDonalds should add short one to two minute videos that had better help understand the company.

Kraft Foods

1) How many clicks did it take you to get from the homepage to a relevant job description?

It took eleven clicks to go from the company home page to selecting a career with an IT background in the United States, in Illinois and a city. This is more direct than McDonalds sure McDonalds had less clicks but I was able to pick my hometown and see if any jobs in the IT industry were available.  This full customization makes me feel that this company wants me to work of them because I can select anywhere I want to work.

2) How does this company’s site compare to McDonald’s Corporation in terms of usability

(How easy it is to complete the task) and persuasion (how much it makes you want to work there)?

Kraft and McDonalds in terms of usability the two companies are about even. Kraft has a better way to find a person a job but it has more clicks involved in that process. McDonalds has less clicks but does not give you the option of what city to work in.  The Kraft uses color and moving images more than McDonalds use and gives the viewer a sense of connection with their company. When picking which company to work for I pick Kraft over McDonalds solely basing my choice from the websites. The Kraft website for jobs appealed to me more because I was able to pick more options of where I wanted to work. Having this option makes me feel that Kraft is looking out for me and wants me to be happy where I find a job.

The text is simple with a clear message for action.  The picture itself is a dog sitting on the grass waiting for you to play with him/her.  The dog is looking for a family that will take care of him/her.  The NIU logo is calling for students or faculty members to go to the shelter and adopt a dog.  The text is similar to the lol cat post that has the text in two different places, this allows for a clear message without overloading with words.

The purpose of A/B testing is to determine if people respond better to one specific change in the advertisement.  The A/B test that I chose was the NIU logo, in advertisement A, the logo is on the dog, and in B, the NIU logo is on the grass. Everything else is constant between the two advertisements. The test between the two advertisements is to determine if more people visit the landing page with the NIU logo on the dog or off the dog.  If one advertisement has a number greater than the other one the A/B test was, successful if they did not make a difference then the A/B test was not targeting the correct part of the advertisement.

I chose the landing page of Orphans of the Storm search for dogs. The landing page takes the viewer to a search of all different features that you select to make your ideal dog.  This way you feel that you are adopting a dog meets all of your criteria.  This is a great landing page for people who want to adopt a dog, and does not have to go through the entire site trying to figure out how to adopt a dog.

The use of metrics allows the marketers to see what is working in an advertisement and what is not. I would use a hit counter along with click-throughs. Theses metrics help to determine how many people use my advertisement and adopt a dog. The click-through metric would allow seeing which people are clicking on the advertisement and I can send them a discount if they do not purchase a dog.