Kyle Busiel

Dr. Pepper has a bunch of different kinds of separate pages under its main Facebook page. Most of these are usually just contests that people can enter to either win something or be featured on Dr. Pepper’s page.

The first thing Dr. Pepper does is have people post quotes. Each week Dr. Pepper picks a quote and posts it up on that page. If the quote is good enough, Dr. Pepper will use it later in one of their ad campaigns. Dr. Pepper will also send a grab bag, with random gifts inside, to that person’s address.

The page also has a Cooking with Dr. Pepper contest, where people can share their recipes that include Dr. Pepper. If a person wins, their recipe will be featured on that page. People can then post under each recipe what they think about it. Strangely enough, there is nothing bad being said about any of these weird types of recipes.

The third contest is probably my favorite because the company is giving out tuition to students. Dr. Pepper is giving out 2,500 dollars, for a total of 1 million, to students who post their story, and why they deserve tuition. If that video gets more likes than the others, that student will receive the prize.

There are some other cool applications on Dr. Pepper’s Facebook page like a photo booth and funny ads that the company has come out with.

Overall I think the Dr. Pepper Facebook page does a great job of meeting all 4 consumer motivation metrics. It creates a place where consumers can control pretty much anything they want to post, as well as compete and connect among others that enjoy Dr. Pepper as well.

As for measuring the success of the Dr. Pepper Facebook page, I believe it could use anything from number of visitors, posts, applicants in contests to what kind of comments people are generating about Dr. Pepper. I have only seen good things on this Facebook page. Facebook pages can be a little biased in the sense that only people who like the product will like the Facebook page, but I haven’t seen any bad comments once so ever. 11 million likes with 100,000 people talking about Dr. Pepper in their posts speaks for itself.

In the end I find it hard to figure out ways to improve the Dr. Pepper Facebook page. If I were to complain about anything, it would be that there is too much going on in the sidebar. Unless someone expands the sidebar, they won’t see half of the things that Dr. Pepper might want to show them. I think that it could cut out some of the recent ads about Dr. Pepper Ten, and just display the contests and applications that many people would want to use. I think that this would allow consumers to really find what they want faster, instead of having to expand the page and maybe guess what it is behind the link.

Online privacy has become a huge issue for people when it comes to companies using information to market products. I don’t even think this privacy even exists anymore. Databases have been being built for years, drawing in all of the data we give it. Many people would agree that it is wrong for companies to have this much information on each consumer and then use it to their advantage. The problem is that quite a bit of the information businesses obtain is divulged by that customer. People are so busy updating their status, writing personal blog posts, and tweeting things that businesses can use. Then on the other hand companies are tracking where consumers go after they leave the website. That’s a little creepy when you think about it, but it does help companies better target ads and products that would better fit that customer’s needs.

To me the ads are more of a nuisance than anything else. So all of these different types of cookies were installed into my computer and the company knows everything about me. I realize that they have all the information in the world on me, but that doesn’t mean I will ever buy. I disabled Facebook’s ads because it just became so cumbersome and annoying to even look at. As a person I just don’t go shopping unless I am in the mindset where I want a particular item. I also buy very obscure things that probably doesn’t help businesses or marketers one bit; I seriously doubt I will buy anything like a zebra colored piggy bank again. The only problem I have is that businesses are selling our information for a profit. I would like some freedom or say in the matter on whether it gets sold, or at least a part of the earnings.

As for consumers needing protection, I don’t really think there is much to protect. Even if laws were passed to stop websites from installing cookies inside your computer, people would still give out so much information for free. This is just the nature of the internet. It is impossible for people to have the kind of social life they want and keep everything about themselves hidden from corporations. There just wouldn’t be a point to try to protect consumers by developing regulations.

As a marketer I know how much data benefits us. It is already hard enough to develop strategies to try to get customers to become better customers. If there was a law regulating how information was gathered, then marketers would have their hands tied. People would have to go out and search for products on their own. Most of the items they want probably won’t even be found because there are so many out there. In the end I think regulating online privacy will be a detriment to everyone.

It is amazing how much information Google Analytics has for our site. My site has a total of 73 visits, 19 of which being unique, and 196 page views, with an average of 2.68 per person. Two of my better stats are the average time spent on my site, 7:06 minutes, and a bounce rate of 52.05%. 72 out of my 73 visits came from the United States. The other one came from China, but was only a bot trying to link to my site. The top page five pages on my site are the home, about, resume, contact, and the uncategorized category. This isn’t too surprising since the top four pages have all of the content available on my site. The majority of traffic is coming from direct sources, just typing the website URL in, with a count of 56. Sadly no one has gotten to my website via search engine, but that isn’t too astonishing since this was only created two months ago. None of the information on Google Analytics was very surprising. There are so many other websites out there, with relevant information, that mine should fly under the radar.

Custom Fortune Cookies

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

Buy your own custom fortune cookie today! Choose from a variety of flavors and create your own fortune.

I will be targeting people ages 20-40 with quite a bit of disposable income. Buying a custom fortune cookie creating their own fortune cookie message should drive customers to the site. The landing page I chose was the custom fortune cookies page because it fits the purpose.

The three keywords that I chose for the Google AdWords campaign were Custom Fortune Cookies, Personalized Fortune Cookie, and Fortune Cookie.

Custom Fortune Cookies seemed to fit best so I chose that for the main keyword search. The only problem with choosing this as the keyword is that there is a high competition rank associated with it. The global and local monthly scores are quite high compared to other similar searches, at 12,100 and 9,900 respectively.

Two similar words that could also be effective are Custom Fortune Cookie and Customized Fortune Cookies. Cutting off the s at the end of Custom Fortune Cookie and making it singular also has a very high search volume at 9,900. Customized Fortune Cookies is also similar to the intended keyword search of Custom Fortune Cookies, so in having that could still link potential customers towards the custom fortune cookie landing page.

After choosing $1.50 as a maximum cost per click, the estimated average cost per click is $0.95, the estimated daily clicks are 71.47, and the estimated daily cost is $67.99. Changing the maximum amount one is willing to pay for each click directly affects the average one will pay per click and the position of the ad.

Having a good search engine optimization, or SEO, score is important because it will display your content towards the top of a search engines list. A person needs to use a variety to ways to increase their own sites SEO rank. Having unique and relevant content will be the most important thing a person must do to increase their sites SEO rank. Also having relevant titles, descriptions, URLs, and headings is extremely important when search engines run their bots through to determine what a sites SEO is.

When I ran my blog through Googlerankings.com it posted many words that I use a lot. My top ten words are rest, restaurant, Kyle, comment, company, time, blog, McDonald’s, supplies, and 2011. This doesn’t surprise me at all because my larger blog posts were about either guest speakers from companies, and most of my page titles have my name in it.

The McDonald’s website is rather easy to navigate around, as it only took me three clicks to find out what marketing jobs were available for me to apply for. The careers page does a rather swell job at providing one with enough information about a job. There will be no surprises if one happens to take up any of these jobs anytime soon. The careers page also displays what benefits there are for an employee. There are so many benefits from health care, to profit sharing, to pay and rewards that it is easy to see why so many go to work at McDonald’s corporate office. Even though McDonald’s gives you reasons and benefits to work there, it doesn’t really differentiate itself from the competition. I would have liked to see a little more of “we do this and this is why you should come work for us”, along with the benefits. Also I believe McDonald’s should spice up the color scheme a little because it is quite boring. I’m sure there is a meaning for the use of white as the background color, but it is used pretty blandly. Even though I have qualms with the colors, the rest of the McDonald’s website is fantastic. I love how interactive the timeline page is, as well as how the information is presented. This website is very easy to use, navigate around, and is designed exceptionally well for what it is intended for. One thing I would change would be adding more pictures to break up the monotony of all the information. McDonald’s does an excellent job of providing information to the reader, but it needs to be broken up to make it look more appealing on a career website. I would also make some of the pages more interactive, like the food page on their regular website.

The Walgreen’s website was a little bit more difficult to navigate through than the McDonald’s website. This site took me about five clicks to find relevant job information, but once you finally got there, it displayed the information very neatly. There is also a lot less information on a single page of Walgreen’s website than there was on McDonald’s. This can be seen as a good or bad thing. I don’t think Walgreen’s displays enough information on its pages, but I think McDonald’s displays too much. A happy medium needs to be found to provoke readers to want to look at the information, but not overload them. I think the Walgreen’s career site is more enticing when it comes to making you want to look for jobs in certain areas, but falls short once one reaches the actual job description page. The McDonald’s jobs were separated by bullet points and headings, where as the Walgreen’s jobs are just kind of thrown at the reader in a clump of text. Again, what’s with the white!? I realize this is a professional page, but people are going to be staring at this thing for quite some time while applying for your jobs. If you want to choose a plain color for your website, at least make it easy on the eyes like an ugly beige color.

Overall I liked the McDonald’s website more. I am okay with information overload as long as it is broken up with some sort of white space, bullet points, etc. Walgreen’s career page really falls short with its clunky mechanics and unappealing job page.

Here is an image I learned to make in Photoshop

Our guest speaker, Ryan Eugene, did a pretty good job explaining the background of his company IT Supplies. Ryan was quick to announce that it was actually Ink & Toner Supplies before any student would just call IT it. It was also nice to see an NIU graduate come out and explain what kinds of jobs us students can expect coming straight out of the interactive marketing program.

Like most companies, IT Supplies started from the ground up, or in this case out of a small garage. Before the Internet really picked up, Ink & Toner Supplies primarily drove it’s sales through the use of a catalog. IT Supplies is still using the merchant business model because it is selling products directly to the consumer. Later the website was created once e-commerce became more prevalent in the everyday household. This would take over the way IT Supplies did business forever. As the current web master of IT Supplies, Ryan Eugene talked about how important it is to change your description of a product to increase the site’s SEO rank. He also talked about how a blog was created to answer any questions customers might have and to further increase the site’s SEO rank. My favorite slide that Ryan brought up was the web vs. direct slide. This slide showed that the web offers new customers on a global scale, is less costly than lists, easily measurable, and contains more information and provides interaction. I enjoyed this because I am much more interested in web marketing than direct.

Overall it was awesome to hear an NIU graduate talk about their successes, and provide me with information that will be prevalent to me within the next couple months.

The first plugin that I found very useful for online business was  Google XML Sitemaps by arnee. This allows search engines to find your blog, and notifies the search engine whenever a new post is made. This will allow more traffic through someone’s blog and will better enhance the websites sales.

Another plugin I found to be helpful was Network Publisher by LinksAlpha. This plugin allows a blog post to uploaded to social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. This lets a lot more people see what a company can be blogging about, whether it be special deals or just company news, and could draw more people to that site.

Chris Krohn from Restaurant.com did a fantastic job presenting to the class. His presentation was fresh and clean, but was also very different from how many others present. It seems that most people representing their company just try to sell themselves and their history, which loses students along the way. Chris was able to keep everyone entertained with his spunky charisma, while truly defining Restaurant.com. Mr. Krohn was also able to teach the class important subjects that we would be getting into later in the class. It was nice to actually have a presenter that didn’t shoot out jargon like we had already known the words.

Usually when a guest speaker comes in from a company I take a little bit of notes. I found myself taking quite a few more notes with Chris presenting (about 4 more pages than usual). It was fascinating that Restaurant.com was able to make it on their third try, especially since most companies don’t get a second. It started off with a subscription based business model where restaurants would pay an annual fee to get customer traffic into their building. Well that didn’t work too well back in the day where not many people owned a computer, or knew how to navigate through the internet. It seemed that Restaurant.com was just another company waiting to flop with the dot com bust. After that Restaurant.com was resurrected for it’s second try, but this time bringing a new business model and plan to the table; it would sell certificates on eBay. The only problem being that eBay was too small at the time, and Restaurant.com couldn’t post these certificates in bulk. Strike two for this company, but it wasn’t out of the game yet. The company was revitalized for a second time and got it’s business model right. This time the company would sell certificates directly from the website. People can go to Restaurant.com, purchase a certificate for one of their favorite restaurants, and then use it to reduce the price on the meal.  It isn’t as glorious as it sounds though for Restaurant.com. Keeping both the customer and restaurants happy isn’t an easy task.

Consumers need to think they are getting a deal on their meal and businesses need to make money for this plan to be effective. There is a fine line that Restaurant.com walks to achieve this. Chris talked about keeping the communication channel a two-way street. If there wasn’t this dual network, then the company would have failed on its third try as well. I was also thrilled to find out that Restaurant.com gives out so many free certificates for the holidays. I mean it is nice that I will be able to get a $10 certificate, but it’s refreshing to know that a company actually cares about the people it is surrounded by. Restaurant.com will flourish with this type of mentality. Not only because it will keep the customers happy, but because it will keep customers coming back for more and more. It will be interesting how Groupon and Living Social do against Restaurant.com, and how these sort of companies will shape the future.