Janelle Finke

We compared the social media performance of Hollister and American Eagle.  We used several monitoring and analytics tools, including Google Analytics, Twendz, and Social Mention.  Our initial results were difficult to gauge because of the different sites and keywords we used.  If we used “ae”, “american eagle”, or “american eagle outfitters” we got different results.  “American Eagle” would occasionally return results for bald eagle or American Eagle Airlines, and the number of results dramatically decreased with “American Eagle Outfitters”.

Another difficulty in monitoring was the mislabeling of positive, negative, and neutral comments.  The monitoring tools are still not foolproof.  Many posts were about people making fun of someone wearing Hollister, and yet those types of posts were categorized as neutral.

Overall we found that American Eagle has a much better social media presence than Hollister.  When we compared each of the facebook pages, we noticed some significant differences.  Hollister had a variety of posts, from sale announcements to conversational to item-specific.  However, Hollister did not engage with its facebook followers once they posted.  On the other hand, American Eagle has clearly responded to customer complaints and responded to positive comments.  American Eagle has a much more well-rounded presence – they have posts and pictures about things they’ve done with the community. American Eagle also hosts facebook contests, such as free shipping to a winning football team’s college students.  Hollister’s page is filled with pictures of new store openings and pictures of their muscular models.  While this is consistent with Hollister’s brand image, it seems that people are more receptive to American Eagle’s facebook style.

From looking at these companies’ facebook and twitter activity/pages, I learned more about the positive and negative aspects of social media.  From my internship I learned a lot about some basic rules for social media, such as the importance of responding to posts, having a variety of posts, and limiting the number and type of posts.  However my internship was not in the fashion/clothing industry, and I learned even more from doing this assignment.  It almost seems fitting to me that Hollister’s social media presence is worse than American Eagle for similar reasons that are associated with the brand.  Hollister seems unapproachable and “better than” everyone else, but American Eagle has a more trendy, down-to-earth appeal.  Although brand consistency is a good thing, Hollister needs to be careful that it doesn’t turn customers into competitor shoppers by its attitude and lack of social response.

Online privacy is something that hits very close to home with me.  I think lack of online privacy has gotten out of control because the government operates too slowly for the internet.  Government privacy laws have kept things such as doctors’ records and tax information much more secure than online information, but since the government has to go through so many steps to pass a law it can’t keep up. I didn’t know that some companies have a self-regulation practice, such as Google, but I think that is a great start to improving privacy.  However, I think there needs to be more standard regulation.  Although I am not a fan of invasive or overbearing government action, too many websites cannot be trusted to have a good privacy philosophy and follow-through.  Marketers would be affected because they will be limited on types of topics they can target.  As people gain more control over how their information is shared, marketers may have more holes in their customer profile databases, and so they may not be able to send as many narrowly-targeted messages to people.

I personally am willing to give up some information about myself in order to make my web experience better.  Information such as my location and search history can be helpful for websites to know, but I would prefer that I am prompted to approve such information being shared.  I definitely agree with the WSJ article that certain topics that people search for shouldn’t be shared with websites.  You never know if someone is searching for personal use, or researching for work or school.  The main issue with online privacy is information getting into the wrong hands, and that is where consumers need protection.

1)  My page has had 30 visits and 60 pageviews.  The average time on my site is 7.02 minutes and the bounce rate is 60%.

    My site has had 10 visitors and 23.3% of the visitors are new.

2)  My visitors are located in the U.S.

3)  My top page is my landing page with 35 pageviews followed by the Contact Me and About pages with

    6 pageviews each.

4)  Most of the traffic is coming from direct traffic (56.67%), followed by referring sites (23.33%)

    and search engines (20%).

5)  The top keyword from search engines is "jfinke6@gmail.com" at 83%.   

6)  I was a little surprised to see that only 23% of my visitors are new visitors.

    It seems like most of the comments on my posts are from spam, so I thought more visits would come

    from random visitors instead of the same or similar bots coming back.

My target demographic is all of the U.S.  It’s not clear from the company website where they are based or if they ship internationally.  I thought about narrowing the target to select metropolitan areas because these people are more likely to have a local Chinese restaurant nearby and have an interest in fortune cookies than someone from a rural area.  However I think people are more likely to find the custom fortune cookie website when they are looking to send a gift than specifically for fortune cookies.  The landing page for my ad is the same landing page for the website.  I think it is the most eye-catching of the pages.  I thought about using the ‘fall gifts’ page to show people what they could buy for the season, but the page isn’t as appealing and I think it’s important for customers to be able to easily navigate to what type of cookie they are looking to send.

Three relevant keywords I chose using google rankings are: fortune, cookie, and gift.  I will analyze the competition and costs for ‘cookie’.

The competition for ‘cookie’ is low.  The monthly global search volume is 16.6 million and the local search volume is 9.14 million.

‘Cookie gifts’ is a good keyword.  This is a more specific keyword idea than ‘cookies’ so people searching for cookie gifts are more likely to actually purchase from fancy fortune.  Although the competition is high and there are only 22,000 local monthly searches, the keyword is one of the more relative ones.  Another good keyword suggestion is ‘buy cookies’.  The competition is medium and has more local monthly searches at 27,000.  These keywords would appeal to someone who is looking to purchase cookies rather than for help making cookies.

For the ‘fortune cookie’ ad, I raised the max CPC to $3.  This results in an ad position of 1.07 and an average CPC of $0.93.  Raising the max CPC improves the ad position and raises the average CPC.

In this assignment I will discuss SEO and why it’s important.  I will also discuss the top keywords that were retrieved using the keyword density tool for my blog.

SEO is the process that discovers a web site and makes it appear in a search.  SEO can either be organic or paid.  Organic means that search engines show a page in the search results simply by relative keywords and text and number of visitors.  Paid search involves paying a search engine to give a site’s listing a higher ranking in the search results.  SEO involves optimizing a web page to include keywords, links, and image descriptions that people are likely to use when searching for information or products that the site offers. Web pages that are well-organized, have lots of relevant and consistent key words, and relevant headings will show up more in search results.

The top words from the keyword density tool were:

plug

twitter

business

Janelle Finke

I was surprised by the top keywords.  There’s not a log of content on my site compared to others, and apparently my assignment about plug-ins carries the most weight.  On the bright side at least my name comes up the most in the two-word category since I want to use this site with future employers.

McDonald’s vs. Walgreens

This is an assignment comparing the usability and visual appeal of each website’s job section.

1)      Navigating through the McDonald’s website to find corporate IT jobs was fairly simple.  It took me 8 clicks, including using the drop-down menus to get to a page with a job description.

2)      Finding information about careers and benefits was a little more confusing to find.  I clicked on the Careers tab at the top and returned to the beginning of the job search sequence, then found a tab on the left labeled Employee Benefits.

3)      I would expect much more from the McDonald’s web site.  The home page is very engaging – there’s a sequence of 3-4 visuals that pop up while the page is loading.  The graphics are eye-catching and the rapidly-changing banner reminds me of the fast service I get at McDonald’s.  So it’s very disappointing that the Careers section is so boring.  It gives me the feeling that all the attention is focused on customers and if I work there I’ll soon be just another employee that hates his job.

4)      The navigation through the page is ok.  One frustrating thing that I keep doing is clicking on the “Corporate Opportunities” text thinking that it is a link.  The text underneath the photo isn’t as big and appealing.

One section in particular that could be improved is the job search results page.  The chart that shows the job openings is too small, hard to read, and not appealing.  Also the different fonts and colors make the page hard to follow, such as the bolded text telling me how many results my search retrieved and that the results list navigation is the tiny chart at the bottom.  The chart should be bigger and closer to the top of the page so that I don’t have to scroll through navigational text.  Also I think that the pictures McDonald’s uses on its careers section should be bolder and bigger.  I didn’t even notice the video on the right side, so the “why you should work here” video should be more centered or have some text on the page directing people to the video.

In terms of spacing and layout, there is a lot of white space.   The eye-catching pictures are placed too far to the bottom of the page or too far to the side.  Another thing that makes the page hard to follow is, for example, the text sizes and styles on the Hamburger University page.  “Hamburger University” is the largest text but immediately below is bolded text – I could feel my eyes switching between these two lines because they both seemed important.  Additionally, is a picture of the wall in front of Hamburger University really the best they can do?  I’d like to see pictures of people inside the university, maybe of the kitchen or a classroom session.

The careers section needs more color.   The banner on the left should have some color to it because those should be the links to different career information.  The lack of color would explain why I automatically looked to the top banner to figure out where the Benefits Section because I was drawn to the pop of the big red background and white text.

5)      McDonald’s needs to make the career site more appealing to users by having a better layout on each page and making navigation links stand out more.  The College Credit Connection is the best-looking page I found in the careers section.  The banner title catches my eye and the plain black text is in easy to read block format, instead of trailing around pictures.  The video is in plain sight and has text explaining what the video is about.  The links and pictures at the bottom cater to a college student’s question: what can I get out of this?  Overall I think McDonald’s just needs to improve the layout and feel of the website.  It should also include more eye-catching visuals of people working, show pictures and bios of the executives, and have testimonials about working at McDonald’s.  It could also include a slideshow or video teaser pitching to prospective employee’s something like “want to know the secrets behind our perfect-every-time French fries? Apply within”.

Walgreens

1)      It took me at least 10 clicks to get to an IT job description.

2)      At first I thought Walgreens was going to be a lot better than McDonald’s when I saw the big red job category buttons.  Then when I clicked on IT it seemed like I was starting a general job search – I had to scroll down to see the results and it wasn’t clear that the jobs below were only for IT/Engineering/E-commerce.  The search results that come up remind me of a job search engine like indeed. If I click on IT then when I’m taken to the job search section I should only have to put in a zip code or opt to narrow the results to just IT jobs.

Overall the site is much more inviting that McDonald’s.  The benefits section is easy to navigate and the text sells the company to me.  The text tries to sell the company and job to me in a way to get me excited about the possibility of working there.  Multiple headings separating the type of benefits offered at Walgreens make it easy to find what I’m looking for, and links to back up the stories about volunteering and employee bios are great.

One plug-in I thought would be useful for an online business is called e-shop.  It was created by Rich Pedley.  It allows an online business to have a shopping cart, which is useful for those sites that want to sell products online.  The plug-in also also allows users to track sales data so they can track their performance.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/eshop/

Another plug-in I thought would be useful is called Really Simply Facebook Twitter Share Buttons, created by WhileTrue  It allows visitors to share an article from a website on their social media sites. This is good to have because then people can help drive traffic to your site by sharing an interesting story or video on facebook or twitter.

http://www.whiletrue.it/

This is my first time making a detailed web site.  I have had brief experience making a web page with html, but wordpress makes it a lot easier to make a web page.  I know that learning how to make a web site is crucial to my career and am excited to build one step by step.  I chose the theme for my web page because it is a simple layout that is easy to navigate.  I would like to have a picture that runs across the top but maybe I will learn how to do that later.

Some of the companies I’m following on twitter are:

Groupon Chicago

http://twitter.com/#!/GrouponChicago

I’m following Groupon because I like getting deals on things to do, and even if I don’t buy something it still gives me great ideas for things to do around the area.

Women’s Health Magazine

http://twitter.com/#!/WomensHealthMag

Women’s Health has good tips for when I’m looking to switch up my workout.

Harvard Business Review

http://twitter.com/#!/HarvardBiz

I had a teacher tell me once that I should keep up with Harvard Business because executives get their news from it too.

Meijer

http://twitter.com/#!/meijer

I follow Meijer because I interned for them over the summer and am eager to see their social media following growing.

NIU COB

http://twitter.com/#!/NIUBusiness

I follow the College of Business so that I can stay updated about what’s going on during the week .

Ryan Eugene from IT Supplies came to talk to our class about his company and the roles of internet and direct marketing in the way they do business.  IT (Ink & Toner) Supplies is a relatively young business that began with a catalog.  Once the internet had reached a more households, IT Supplies began selling products through its website.  They use a company from Georgia to manage their content.  Ryan stressed the advantages his company has over direct marketing.  The internet is generally less expensive than using lists on a per conversion basis.  Additionally, analytics allow for easy assessment of conversion rates.  Figuring out the conversion rates for direct mail is more time-consuming.

One plug-in I thought would be useful for an online business is called e-shop.  It was created by Rich Pedley.  It allows an online business to have a shopping cart, which is useful for those sites that want to sell products online.  The plug-in also also allows users to track sales data so they can track their performance.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/eshop/

Another plug-in I thought would be useful is called Really Simply Facebook Twitter Share Buttons, created by WhileTrue  It allows visitors to share an article from a website on their social media sites. This is good to have because then people can help drive traffic to your site by sharing an interesting story or video on facebook or twitter.

http://www.whiletrue.it/