assignment 14: Ford VS Toyota

Our team acted as social media consultants for Ford, and we selected Toyota as the competitor brand. We choose several social media tools to analyze what consumers were saying about Ford and Toyota. The tools that we selected were Tweet Feel, Twitter Stream, Social Mention, and Twendz.

Tweet Feel is a social media tool that determines the mood of a person’s tweets towards a brand. It categorizes a person as either positive or negative towards your keyword. Our results for Ford showed a slightly negative response directed at the brand. These results were slightly skewed because Ford is a last name, and there were results for Harrison Ford and T.J. Ford. The results for Toyota were more accurate than Ford’s results and were also more positive than Ford’s. Due to time constraints, we briefly looked at Ford and Toyota. To receive a more accurate depiction of the general mood of consumers, we would need to track responses for weeks or months.

Twitter Stream is used to observe what individuals are saying about something. We used Twitter Stream to determine what quickly comes to mind  when people think of Ford and Toyota. Some of the obvious words that appeared for Ford were Henry, car, and Focus. One word that seemed out of place was Kenya, but this is because the Ford foundation is donating money to Kenya and other African countries for the purpose of higher education. There did not appear to be anything negative said about Ford. There was also the very positive word of best.

Toyota’s Twitter Stream was also positive. The words fun, sport, and tech were all positive mentions about Toyota. There were no negative things said, and the only  thing close to this was the mention of a competitor BMW. Toyota, like Ford, had some obvious connections like car, Corolla, and Tokyo. Even though Ford wasn’t negative, Toyota still appeared to be more positive.

Social Mention is another social media tool. It determines how people feel about a brand. It shows the likelihood of a keyword being discussed (strength), whether a keyword is being repeatedly talked about (passion), reach, and sentiment.

Ford had a strength score of 34%. This was higher than Toyota’s score of 27%. More people were talking about Ford. Ford’s passion score of 28% was far lower than Toyota’s score of 43%. This means that the people who are talking about Toyota are more likely to do so regularly. Ford had a very positive 12:1 sentiment score. People were saying 12 positive comments to every 1 negative comment. Toyota scored even better with a 14:1. Ford did have a slightly larger reach than Toyota. This means a slightly higher range of influence.

Twendz is another twitter data mining tool. Twendz allows you to see what people are saying about a keyword. It also shows subtopics that are related to the keyword. Ford’s results were somewhat inconclusive. There were once again comments about things that weren’t about Ford Motor Company. There was a 27% positive response and a 20% negative response. Toyota was far more favorable. Toyota had a 67% positive response and a 33% negative response.

Our overall findings were that Ford was not doing as well as their competitor Toyota. Ford needs to try to improve their image with younger people. Ford should reach out more to a younger audience and show that Ford is not your daddy’s car company.

On the other hand, Toyota was showing very positive results on every site that we used. Even when Ford had more strength according to social mention, Toyota had a higher positive sentiment ratio and a much higher passion score. Toyota is perceived how Ford wants to be perceived.

Assignment 13. Nike

Nike is a company that I have always liked. They are creative and have made very innovative products throughout their history. This is why I choose Nike to see if their Facebook page was as creative as the rest of their brand. This was not too surprising their page wasn’t. it was just as bad as most companies.

Nike’s Facebook page is basically a large advertisement for their products and that’s fine. Showing new products and ones that are on sale is a good start for your Facebook page. Nike is furthering their ads campaign on Facebook with commercials that they have put on Youtube. Basketball season has recently started so Nike is showing lots of basketball products and advertisements. In the top left corner is a picture of Lebron James Nike’s top basketball endorser.

Nike is allowing its consumers on some level to create, control, and connect with their brand. I didn’t see one post on their page but there were lots of responses from consumers on what Nike had posted. It didn’t appear that Nike was trying to control the conversation by telling consumers what to say. Nike also connected with consumers by responding to some of their questions. There was a lack of competition.

When measuring success Nike has over 5 million likes and 30,000 people talking about this. Those are some simple measurements. Nike could track how long people are visiting their site, how many are visiting, what they are clicking on.

In measuring success there always needs to be something to measure against.5 million likes means nothing unless you can compare it to something. I looked at Adidas Facebook page and they had almost had as many likes as Nike. While you won’t know page visits or length spent on page you can see more support for Nike over their main competitor.

To Improve Nikes Facebook page they need to get consumers more involved with their page. It’s good to have millions of people like you but you need those people creating word of mouth buzz. Nike has a cool Nike id website that allows consumers to create their own shoes. The problem with the shoes is that they are very expensive because they make one custom product at a time. Nike could created a Facebook competition where consumers create their own show on the Nike id page than. Facebook users could vote on which shoe is best. After the best shoe is elected Nike could put this shoe into production. They could also give a free pair to the winner and discounts on the shoe for everyone who participated in the competition. This entire completion would get consumers involved with the brand. When people are involved them become more passionate about it and would talk more about it. This could create lots of WOM buzz for Nike.

Assignment 12. Mind yo Business

“One of the fastest businesses on the internet is the business of spying on internet users”. I don’t think that there is any online privacy now or ever. It would seem that every page that is visited online is benign tracked by someone. According to the article the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. It couldn’t be clearer than this.

In the past most of online tracking was done using cookies and this is still used today, but there is improving spy technology. Cookies were initially created to keep a history of the items that internet users placed into shopping carts. This was very valuable because people would leave the website where they were purchasing something and come back and everything in their cart was gone. This created the need for internet page tracking.

Today we live in a world where privacy is completely dead. I don’t see a major problem with this. People willingly share their information all over the internet without a care. Most people will purposely put personal information about themselves on sites like face book. People share their every thought on these sites. So it wouldn’t appear that people even want privacy.

What a lot of people don’t know is that every almost every move they make on the internet is being tracked, and information is being sold about them. Profiles of individuals are being made and sold to interested parties. This is what most people would call a privacy invasion. They don’t want to be tracked on the internet and have personal information about them sold. I would argue that these are the same people on face book telling everyone that they just went to Subway and are on their way to Best Buy.

Consumer protection could be informative to internet users. Consumers are unaware that they are installing adware on their computers a lot of the time. This is because terms of use agreements are too long and people don’t read them. If term of use policies were reduced in length people might read them and decide if they want to use them or not. The government could create restrictions on the length of term of use policies to help inform consumers of what they are signing up for.

If people realized that they were being racked and decided that they weren’t going to use services like face book or Google this would affect marketers greatly. Marketers use this information to target consumers with products that they know the consumer will be interested. I think people would still agree to use these services though.

Is privacy dead? Yes, but we are somewhat responsible for its death. People don’t want information about themselves being tracked by marketers, yet they put stuff about themselves all over the internet. I don’t mind being targeted by online businesses that are trying to sell me things that I might be interested in. This is actually a useful feature on Amazon.com.

Assignment 11; Analyze this Google

Analyzing my word press page through Google analytics has shown that I have had 18 unique visitors. There have been a total of 46 visits to my page. With 144 page views there was an average of 3.13 average page views per visit. The time spent on site was 3.24 min with a bounce rate of 47.83%. This is a very high bounce rate.

The visitors to my page were all from Illinois. Most visitors came from DeKalb. There were also visits from Oswego, Naperville, Somonauk which is my home town, Montgomery, and Yorkville.

The page that was visited the most was my home page. The next most visited page was my about me page. Obviously my home page got the most visits. Every page besides the home page and the about me page had been seen 10 or less times. Most of these pages had been viewed for only seconds.

Most of the traffic to my site is direct traffic (78.26%). The remaining traffic comes from referring sites. There was zero traffic from search engines which is not surprising.

I was surprised that there were so many unique visits to my page, also that the visits came from so many different cities. I would have assumed that there would have been around two visitors from only DeKalb. Nothing else was surprising to me.

Assignment 10; Cookie Cookie Cookie

Personalized fortune cookies

http://www.fancyfortunecookies.com/

Fancy Fortune Cookies® has great gift ideas for every occasion. Spoil your family and friends with a gift that will rot their teeth. Come to our site and be amazed by what a fortune cookie can be.

This ad is targeted for anyone who is looking for a unique gift for people who have a sweet tooth. The call to action is come to our site. This is simple and non threatening. The landing page is http://www.fancyfortunecookies.com/. The home page is the right choice for someone responding to the call to action.

The three relevant key words

1. Custom fortune cookies
2. Fortune cookie gifts
3. Personalized fortune cookies

The keyword that I choose is personalized fortune cookies. There is a high competition for this keyword. There are 9900 global and 8100 local searches. The two keywords from keyword idea that I would use as a suggestion are cookies by design, and gift cookie. Both of these keywords have higher search rates that are why I would suggest them. They are not as specific as my keyword but do relate to what the product is offering.

• The estimated avg. cpc is $1.35
• the ad position is 2.3
• the daily clicks is 4.2
• the cost per day is $5.71

Obviously increasing cpc will increase the position of the site.

Assignment 9. In the Know about SEO

SEO or search engine optimization is the process of improving the positioning of a website on search engines. The better optimized a website the higher the ranking of the website on search engines.  The importance of SEO is obvious. If a website is optimized it is easy for people searching for the site to find it in search engines. If a page can’t be found it is basically pointless. It has been discussed in class that content is the most important aspect in SEO. Optimizing a website will not only rank your site higher it will make it more functional and relevant for users of the site.

After running my page through the keyword density tool my top words were

1. Restaurant
2. Danny
3. 2011
4. Search
5. Blog

These results didn’t surprise me. Restaurant being the number one word is probably in everyone’s top 5 in the class. The next most used word is my name. not to surprising who doesn’t like to talk about themselves.

Assignment 8: McWeb

It is very easy to navigate on the Mc Donald’s web page. It only took three clicks to reach a page with relevant job descriptions. As easy as it was to find the job descriptions, it was just as easy to find employee benefits. The McDonald’s web page is very easy to navigate, but it is very plain. I would not say that the web page makes me want to work there, but it is very functional. Then again, I would not determine where I work based on a web site.

The overall navigation on the site is simple. There are the clear paths for visitors to follow on the site that enable them to get where they need to go. The categories are listed in the usual places: the top, on the left, and at the bottom. There is a key word search that makes it even easier to find what you want. The site also uses bread crumbs to make navigation even easier. The web page was missing some alt texts for images.

The spacing and layout are good. The layout is similar to a lot of pages, and it resembles the example in the Prezi. I would change the color scheme. There is too much white. The site uses good passive and active white space but having the background white as well makes it boring. I would put more color into the background to liven up the page. With the appropriate use of active white space the page is very organized, not jumbled. There is not a ton of passive white space so the page seems full. It does not appear to be missing something.

The content of the page is probably as engaging as other web pages for careers. There are many pictures of smiling McDonald’s employees. There is also a video that I did not want to watch.  I guess that it was not very compelling, but it was not bad.

I would say that the overall ease of use was very easy to use. I was never lost, and I found what I was looking for in just a few clicks.

The Walgreens’ page is similar to McDonald’s page. Both have a very plain, simple design with a basic color scheme. From the home page I reached a career description in five clicks. It was not difficult to find. The navigation made sense, and I never had to guess which way to go. With an additional click you can apply online or look at employee benefits. There is also a job search tool.

As I continued to compare the Walgreens’ web site to McDonald’s web site, I noticed that Walgreens’ page appears to be more basic than McDonald’s. It just looks a little cheaper. Everything worked fine and was user friendly. There were fewer pictures on the Walgreens’ site, but it is a corporate web site for Walgreens so how many stock photos of people pretending to work do you need on a web page?  I would have no problem working for a company based on the quality of this website. If Walgreens’ offered me the type of position I wanted,  I would take it even if their site was not that great.

Both sites work fine, neither looked great. Personally, I do not think that they have to have great aesthetic appeal. Good navigation and layout are good enough for me.

Assignment 7 adopt a dog

The objective for these ads is to get people to adopt dogs. I choose dogs that I thought would attract people. Pet adoption is an emotional process.  The copy I wrote uses emotional appeals to draw attention to dog adoption.

The purpose of a/b testing is to determine the best variables to choose when constructing an advertisement. Two advertisements are created and tested against each other to determine which is better. To determine which of the two ads I created is better I would run them simultaneously against each other on google. Whichever one gets more clicks is obviously the better of the two.

The landing page that I choose was http://www.co.kendall.il.us/animal_control/petfinder.htm. this page is a list of small dogs available for adoption. This was chosen because not everyone is interested in the two dogs in the advertisements. This gives people the option to choose whichever dog they want.

The metric I would use is the click rate. I would also check the landing page for bounce rate, time spent on site.

Cat assignment 6

IT Supplies Assignment 5

Recently, Ryan Eugene from IT Supplies was the guest speaker for our class. Ryan spoke of the early days of the company including how it began in a garage selling only ink and toner. As the company grew, the use of the internet by the public also grew. IT Supplies decided to move from just catalog sales to online sales and catalog sales.

Online sales have posed to be somewhat of a problem for IT Supplies. At first the website was not user friendly. There were no pictures. There were only order numbers. The website continues to have an outdated look. Currently, it appears to have been designed 15 years ago. Ryan discussed how they are once again updating their website. This time they are using a dark- themed webpage. Even though this is an improvement, I would recommend that a company selling printers should feature colors on their web page that are bright and vivid, not dull and black.

Ryan spoke highly of Google and how it has helped him on his quest to improve the website and expand internet marketing. Then there was a lot of discussion on search engine operation. Ryan used Google to improve his understanding of how to receive a higher rank on Google’s search engine. To receive a higher rank, the focus has to be on the content of the site. When he changed some of the product descriptions the website ranked higher on Google.

Staying ahead of competitors was another topic Ryan covered. One way they tried to do this was by creating a blog on their website because their largest competitor created a blog on their page. Personally, I would recommend creating a better designed website than starting a blog. I checked multiple pages on their blog, and no one had commented on any of the blog posts. Who wants to talk about printers or ink?

My personal opinion of Ryan’s presentation was that he was not completely prepared. I did not learn much from this presentation. After Chris’s presentation, anyone who comes in has some big shoes to fill. My biggest take away from this was that I may not be fully prepared for whatever my future job is. I realize that I will have to continue my education after graduation.