FilipPuchalski's Sweet Site

The major learning aspect of the Social Media Insights assignment for me was just the power of the social media tools that we used.  Some felt to be a little bit more useful than others, for example I believe that Google Insights is overall a much better monitoring tool than TweetFeel.  Although TweetFeel analyzes the overall perception of the company as opposed to a number of relative searches, there are two major downsides to it.  TweetFeel investigates only Twitter as opposed to other social media to figure out the overall like/dislike status of the company.  Another major disadvantage of TweetFeel is that it sometimes analyzes tweets incorrectly. In our presentation we highlighted an instance when an individual tweeted “I don’t really like Nike”. It should clearly be considered as a negative. However, TweetFeel believes that it is a positive comment. Mistakes such as those are unacceptable and have to be corrected.  On the other hand I believe that Google Insights is one of the most powerful social media analyzing tools. Not only it can analyze a relevant search volume for a given term, it can also display search trends over a period of time going back as far as 2004. Another great attribute of Google Insights is its ability to determine the geographic location of the searches. Google Insights gives you top regions that are searching for the specified term. This is a great tool for marketers. Being able to figure out what countries, states, or cities are most interested in your business, product, service or whatever it might be, allows marketers to target these specific areas and perhaps increase advertisements, sponsor an event, or even open up a store.

Using multiple social media monitoring tool to analyze which brand Nike or Adidas is doing better, we came up to a conclusion that Nike is fairer better. With TweetFeel we discovered that only 54% of people like Adidas opposed to 64% that like Nike. Using How Sociable enabled us to see which brand was mentioned more often on various social media sites. Once again Nike is the winner. Nike was mentioned 1.89 times for every 1 mention of Adidas. Finally using Google Insights I was able to determine the search volume for each brand within the last 90 days. Nike turned out to be searched for more often, as a matter of fact almost twice as much. Nike averaged 67 and Adidas 32. What was interesting was the fact that Slovakia was a top country in search volume for both of these terms. I decided to take a closer look into Slovakia. The top cities were different; for Nike the top city was Michalovce, and for Adidas the top city was Spisska Nova Ves.

All of these social media monitoring tools give marketers an idea of how their company is doing virally. It enables them to take action if a company is struggling, and also to continue what they are doing when a company is doing well in the eyes of the customers.

When I was asked to evaluate a social media strategy of any company, I didn’t hesitate for long as to which company I was going to evaluate. I chose to evaluate the social media marketing strategy of Puma. I visited their facebook page and I’ve noticed some interesting things that Puma is currently doing. To the left of the website, right under the profile picture there are numerous groups available for the customers to check out. These groups include Puma Vision, Puma Rocket Race, Puma Social Club, RSS/Blog, Polls, YouTube, and Puma Group. These are just some of the unique groups I’ve found on their facebook page, not to mention the usual info, photos, events, videos, and notes.

There are few consumer motivations that puma is currently meeting, they are connect, control and compete. One of the first groups that caught my eye was the Puma Rocket Race. With this group puma is meeting the competition part of the consumer motivation. Puma Rocket Race gives people a chance to win a pair of tickets to Buddh International Circuit. The objective of the game is to race your rockets, and the top 5 scores of the day win those tickets. Puma Rocket Race enables customers to interact with the page by playing a simple game and therefore it is very engaging.  Puma’s facebook also fulfils another of the customer motivational states, which is the ability to connect with Puma. Puma’s social media page has Polls group. There is an option for the customers to answer and also vote on some simple questions such as “What is the coolest PUMA sneaker?”. This Polls option give people a chance to interact with the website, and therefore once again creating engagement.  

When evaluating a social media campaign there are a couple of metrics that can be used to get a feel for how well it is doing.  In Puma’s facebook’s case these metrics are how many people “like” it, and also how many people are talking about this.  There are currently 5,866,533 likes on facebook. Compared to Nike’s 5,440,680 it seems to be doing quite well. However it is worth mentioning that Nike is beating Puma in the “talking about this” section, which means that Nike’s word of mouth is a higher then Puma’s.

Although I am very impressed with Puma’s overall facebook page, there was one particular negative that I have encountered when browsing through the pages. One of the groups titled Puma Social Club had access limited only to the people in Brazil, and not to mention the fact that it was in Portuguese. I feel since it is a social media page it should be available to everyone. Targeting only Brazil excludes everybody in the world who might be interested in what is on the page.  Allowing people from different geographic areas to access the page could potentially translate to a positive word-of-mouth. Also since English is pretty much universal language these days, I would make Puma Social Club in English.

I used to be one of those individuals who was mildly concerned about the online privacy. I assumed that as long as I don’t do anything extremely stupid like give out very sensitive information to an oncoming e-mail, I will be safe from the potential dangers associated with the online usage. However, after reading the article titled “The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets”, my opinion has changed. The article stated that the vast majority of the internet users were not aware of how intrusive and pervasive customer tracking has gotten. Obviously I was one of those individuals. One of the shocking information from the article was that fact that 50 top website have installed on average of 64 pieces of tracking technology usually without customer’s knowledge. This technology can track almost anything that we do. Anywhere we go on the web can be tracked, not only the websites that have originally installed the tracking technology. That is a little ridiculous. What is also more terrifying is the fact that it is only going to get worse. Currently there are closely to 100 tracking companies. They benefit from selling the customer information to all sorts of advertisers for a fraction of a penny. This is great for marketers and advertisers as they can specifically target customers. Based on customer’s information they can give them ads based relative to them, reducing the waste coverage of advertising to people blindly. In the technology filled world we live in, internet is only becoming more and more popular among people everywhere in the world. Due to that fact the number of tracking companies is only going to increase. They are going to increase only if nobody puts a stop to it. As of now, government is permitting this way of tracking individuals. In my opinion there should be a more strict law prohibiting this kind of tracking of the online customers. One of the reasons is due to the ethical point of view. Some people that the sites are tracking might be children, or people with disabilities or diseases. Advertising specific targeted ads to children is unethical, as they are a lot more impressionable. Also, I’m sure that people with disabilities or sicknesses do not want banner ads popping up reminding them of the everyday struggles they are trying to live with. However, if a law of that nature is developed, it will have an effect on the marketers. It is very easy to target customers with all of that data given. Once it’s gone, it will be more difficult to do online advertising. Based on what I have read I believe that customers need protection from these tracking companies. One way of protecting themselves could be through better educating themselves about the online usage. As long as they know they are being tracked and they’re ok with it, it shouldn’t be a problem. However, as I stated before problem lies in the fact that most people do not know they are being tracked. Sites that utilize this tracking technology should disclose and ask if the websites visitors are comfortable with being tracked and having tailored advertisements to them. I came to the conclusion that as of right now there is no online privacy.

Unfortunately my site had only 21 visits, but that’s ok, I m planning on making up for that soon. I had seven unique visitors and 43 page views. Average time spent on my site by these visitors was 5:02 min. Also my bounce rate was quite high with close to 57%. Most of the visitors are located in Illinois, more specifically nine visits came from DeKalb, five visits from Sycamore, five from Barrington and one from Naperville. The top page of my site is /fpuchalski/ which is my homepage. 90% of the traffic comes from direct traffic and 10% come from referring sites. Unfortunately I did not have any traffic coming from the search engines, therefore I do not have any keyword data.  I am a little surprised about the number of visits on my page. However it is understandable since I haven’t taken much action to expose and make my site more visible.

Buy a Giant Fortune Cookie

Traditional and personal fortune cookies. Order Online Today!

http://www.fancyfortunecookies.com/

I chose the title “Buy a Giant Fortune Cookie” because it is one of the options available on the fencyfortunecookies.com.  As to the ad text, I decided to use “Traditional and personal fortune cookies” because those are the further offerings on the web page and they are highly dense according to google rankings. My call to action is quite typical, but effective “Order Online Today!”. My target demographic is quite broad. I would imagine the target customer to be mostly women, 20+, who like sweets  or any other candy. My landing page is the www.fancyfortunecookies.com which is the home page of the fancy cookies.  I chose the word “fortune” to run through the Google Adwards Keyword tool. It turns out that the competition for that word is low. Global monthly searches are roughly 7,480,000 and local come to 2,240,000. One of the suggested ideas by Adwards was “Chinese fortune”. I think it’s a good suggestion because it has a low competition and is globally searched for close to 40,500 times. Another suggested idea by Adwards was “fortune cookie”. Although it has a medium competition, it was globally searched 246,000 times. Those were the only related suggestions to www.fancyfortunecookies.com. With the max cpc of $2, the average CPC of the word “fortune” is $1.18 – $1.44, number of clicks is 1.4 and estimated daily cost is $1.83.   

SEO is basically a process of making a web site more visible in the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. SEO considers what people are searching for, the key terms and which search engine they prefer. More often than not, the earlier and more frequently the site appears in the search, the more people are going to click on it. Therefore it is of most importance to tailor you site’s content, key words or even an html to what people are looking for. This will ensure that your site will be seen more frequently. After running my site through the key word density tool, I found out the most common words used on my page. They are customer, post, able, thing and market. These results are not a suprise to me since I frequently use them.

After landing on the “corporate careers” page, I was quickly able to navigate my way around the McDonald’s website. I quickly found relevant jobs to the Industrial Technology. All I did was click on the “job search” tab which took me to the Mcdonald’s Corporate Careers. From there I selected industrial technologies for the “Category” and Illinois for the State since that’s where I would like to work. Then I was taken to the present job opportunities in Illinois. This whole process only took 4 clicks to navigate my way to the information I was looking for.  Consequently I decided to take a look at the benefits offered by McDonald’s which wasn’t very difficult either. With only one click on “employee benefits” I was able to find all the information I ever needed about the health protection, pay, rewards and many other categories. After navigating throughout the website, I came to the conclusion that if somebody was basing his or her decision rather to work for McDonald’s or not solely on their web site, I believe most of the people would pass on this opportunity. Although the easy of navigating through the website is a benefit, overall the website just seems boring to me. The first thing that stands out to me is the use of color, or a very limited use of color I might add. They use a white background with some boring fonts. In my opinion there is way too much white space; active space is way overused. They also don’t have too much of engaging content. They offer a very limited amount of pictures and videos. The only positive I can think of is the ease of use. As previously stated, I was able to find relative information to my search in a matter of seconds. To make things a little bit more interesting I would suggest for McDonald’s to experiment with the use of the background color and perhaps more fun pictures or videos.

  Similarly to McDonald’s web page, I took a look at job opportunities for Industrial Technologies major at Walgreens. Up to the actual job finding everything seemed quite simple. I was able to easily find everything I needed about the Walgreens including benefits.  As to the actual job portion of the assignment, it took me seven clicks to get to the job descriptions in Illinois. So based on how many clicks I needed to make I came to the conclusion that Walgreens overall navigation is a little bit more confusing than that of McDonald’s. Overall I personally wouldn’t want to work for either of these companies. Web sites just seem very boring with its use of color and the overall layout. There was nothing that engaged me into the site.

I chose image of three dogs that clearly look unhappy. There is a fence separating them suggesting that they are in a shelter. In the copy, I decided to add some special effects such as shadowing, bordering as well as the use of black to add to the depressing feel of the image. The purpose is to motivate people to volunteer and help the specific shelter that I have selected called Helping Paws. The purpose of the A/B testing is to figure out which advertisement is more attractive to the customers. To find out which one is more appealing to the people, one needs to simply measure the amount of clicks on the advertisement. The one with more clicks, is obviously the preferred choice. I picked the landing page of the Helping Paws in Woodstock. The reason why i decided to go with this particular one was because one of my friends actually adopted a cat from there. To test the effectiveness of the ad would be to compare the “clicks” to “pass-throughs”. The ratio of the two would give you a good idea of how many people click on the advertisement and how many people decide to ignore it.

Recently, Ryan Eugne decided to take time out of his day to come on down to good old DeKalb and share some of his experience regarding his occupation. He works for the iT (Ink &Toner), which is a smaller print related business. They offer printers, and everything surrounding it, also things such as scanners, projectors and other accessories could be found on iT website. iT was formed in the 1998 by Grey Lahart. Originally, it was a cataloging business offering its products via a catalog or a phone, since internet technology hasn’t evolved far enough to provide any competitive advantage over the other two.  One of the reasons why iT was successful was because they were able to hold a minimum inventory. However, with technology on the rise, they quickly found themselves in the need of a website. With a rapid expansion of the internet, iT was able to adjust their business model to better fit the customer’s needs of ordering online. They still have a catalog, but these days more of their business is done online. Web has some advantages over the catalogs in the price factor, meaning it is a lot less costly. It can also gather data on customer purchases, habits and other data. This data can be analyzed, and conclusions can be later made about how to approach each customer segments. Essentially, internet provides a lot more interactive experience for the customer. To improve their business, iT started a blog in 2010. Users from all geographical regions could provide any sort of input anything iT related. Anything from dissatisfactions, to recommendations for improvements could be blogged about. Improving the business based on the guidance of the customers should be a little easier.