The Mike Lehman Experience

After using the social media tools of HowSociable?, Twitter Stream Graphs, and TweetFeel, there were several things I learned both about the power of social media in marketing and how important it is for companies to concern themselves with their brand image.

HowSociable? allows the user to type in any word or search term. The website then gives the word a visibility score based on how often the search term is appearing in a number of different social media websites including Facebook, Twitter, and even Google+. The score can be used by companies to determine what areas they might to target more heavily as well as where their strongest social media presence is. It is also possible to determine how the competition is doing as well. On this project, our team discovered that the term PepsiCo received a visibility score of 1,926 while the term Coca-Cola received a score of 2,097. It initially appeared that Coke and Pepsi may not be as far off from each other in the field of brand awareness as we initially thought. We decided however to run two more tools to get some better analysis.

Twitter Stream Graphs is a useful tool that takes the term you type and find the most common words that appear with that term in the most recent 1,000 Tweets about that term. It also lists some of the most recent Tweets at the bottom so you can determine why exactly people are using the terms they do along with the term you searched for. For Coke we discovered that the term “diet” was being used a lot within the tweets about Coke. This was due to the new holiday cans that have been released by Coke that are white and are somewhat being confused with the Diet Coke cans. For Pepsi one of the top terms was God, however, I could not remember exactly why that term had been so popular. Overall, Coke seemed to have more positive and just overall better exposure through this tool.

TweetFeel, the last tool we used, essentially rates the Tweets of whatever search term you choose as either positive or negative. This shows the company an overall percentage of what good or bad things are being said. They also list the most recent Tweets at the bottom and continually update said Tweets so the viewer can see why they have been ranked positive or negative. There is a flaw to this however, because sometimes TweetFeel cannot accurately detect whether a Tweet is good or bad. Sometimes a good Tweet will put as a negative and vice-versa. We found that by putting in the term Coke, there were roughly 170 positive Tweets at that time and 115 negative ones. This gave a percentage of 60% which was thought to be pretty good. For Pepsi, there were 158 positive and 111 negative Tweets for a percentage of 59%.

While the numbers are eerily similar for both TweetFeel and Social Mention, we decided that overall, Coke still seems to have the better brand image based off of international reach, Facebook fans, and the more positive and informational view from Twitter Stream Graphs.

One the Mountain Dew facebook page, they have several different pages they use to promote their product. They have links to different web pages associated with their products. They show pictures of their products and people who love drinking Mountain Dew. They have games on the page that are fun for the biggest fans and promote their products. They post deals and coupons at different times for their customers to use.

They definitely meet the connect motivation as they are connecting people who share a love for their products through social media.They also use the create motivation pretty well as they created games that fans love to play. They use the control motivation through their ability to control what exactly their customers see on the facebook page. They compete well with their ability to attract people to their facebook page.

The best metric that can be used to measure success would be Tweetfeel. Tweetfeel makes it easy for us to find what positive messages, as well as negative messages, are out there which can be used to come up with new ideas for marketing.

Some improvements that could made to facebook page as well as the twitter page are listing the most positive messages available towards the top of every page. This improvement would put out a very positive message and help to attract new customers to the brand.

Online privacy is one of the most pressing issues developing itself on the internet. It is also one of the most controversial. On one side you have marketers and business and the ever increasing need to find as out as possible about customers to stay competitive. On the other side is the consumer who may not want certain aspects about their life to be public information or at the very least they want to be able to control who exactly gets to view said information.

In a sense, total privacy on the internet is dead. With all the trackers and third party cookies out there, consumers need to realize that they are essentially giving consent for companies to view what they do on the internet and anything they may put on the internet.

I believe that some of the tracking companies do is beneficial as a whole. It helps marketers to target customers better and not waste their time marketing products to them that they don’t care about. It can also help consumers to find products they may really want to buy, but may never have found without this specialty marketing.

I also believe, however, that there should be a line drawn as to how much tracking is too much. Some information should be sacred and consumers shouldn’t be subjected to 100 page privacy policies that don’t make sense to most of them. There should be an easy way to communicate exactly how secure websites are before entering them and a heads up to what information may be taken down and possibly sold to marketing companies.

I think the government may need to develop certain laws about privacy, making sure that policies are written for the consumer and not the marketer. The average consumer typically won’t have the same education and knowledge of a marketing director or whoever else may be in charge of drafting a privacy policy. Government laws could stipulate that there need to be dummied down versions of these policies so as to protect the average consumer better.

These laws that could be developed may hinder marketing companies but, the hindrance would be miniscule as all it would require is a little more time spent when drafting privacy policies. The biggest concern for marketers really should be how ethical the tracking they do is and how it affects the consumers they track. They have to sit back and ask themselves, “If we weren’t marketers, would we want someone we don’t know to have access to any and all information I may put on the internet? And if I don’t mind, wouldn’t I at least like to know where these sites are that are going to do that? What sites are going to track what?”

As a whole, privacy on the internet is a growing concern that the government will need to monitor as time goes on. The first thing that should be worried about is consumer safety. If that can be achieved, then tracking information can be a very beneficial thing, not just for marketers but also for consumers.

After reviewing my Google Analytics account associated with my blog, I discovered the following:

Since I began my blog I have had 51 visits. Forty-five or 88.24% of those visits have come from direct traffic, 5 or 9.8% have come from referring sites, and 1 or 1.96% have come from search engines.

There have been 163 page views during that time and the average amount of time spent on the site is five minutes and fifty-nine seconds. The bounce rate is listed as 49.02% and 37.25% of all visits are new visits.

Fifty of the fifty-one visits have been from the United States with the one other visit occurring from Ukraine. Of those 50 visits from the United States all of them have come from Illinois with 45 from DeKalb, 1 from Naperville, and 4 from Barrington.

The top content is the home page /mlehman/ with 97 page views accounting for 59.51% of visits. The next highest is /mlehman/about/ with 17 page views and 10.43% of those visits.

The one search that occurred from a search engine was from Google. The other traffic sources have be primarily direct and then the referring sites of laurenlabrecque.com and facebook.com. The keyword was simply the URL for the site typed into Google.

Overall, none of the information really surprises me. All the data seems to be about right. Having a visit from the Ukraine was a little weird, but after looking closer, the visit lasted 0 seconds meaning the visit likely wasn’t from a human. The numbers make sense as I don’t promote my site so the likelihood of people knowing about it and going to it isn’t very high.

Giant Holiday Fortune Cookies

fancyfortunecookies.com

Buy the World’s Biggest Fortune Cookies

Custom Design and Messages

I chose to focus in on the Holiday fortune cookies on the website due to the presence of Christmas beginning to surface all over the country. People are always looking for new gift ideas and I think trying to target that market would go over very well. I also wanted people to know that these are some of the biggest fortune cookies in the world, another selling point. The call to action is actually the words “Buy the World’s Biggest Fortune Cookies.” I feel that this is significant enough to garner actual purchases. The landing page I chose is the page where the Christmas cookies are shown due to my choice to target holiday shoppers as my target market.

I chose cookies as my Google AdWords word. The competition for the word is low. There are over 13,600,000 global monthly searches for the word as well as over 7,400,000 local monthly searches. There are a ton of searches done overall which is nice and offers a lot of opportunities for business. I found that by picking a max CPC of $1.00 I end up yielding and estimated ad position of 1.44, estimated daily clicks of 674.11 and an estimated daily cost of $674.11. The ad position is well worth the expense as I would be one of the top picks for people to click on which would be crucial to gaining new customers. I think for my keywords I would choose the phrase giant fortune cookies due to the fact that there is a good amount of competition for the word making this likely to produce many searches.  The other suggested keyword I would consider using would be fortune cookies. It is greatly related to the product I am marketing.

SEO or search engine optimization is simply the techniques used to cause a Web page to be highly ranked on one or more search engines. The techniques used help to promote Web pages better and in more depth, causing more click-through rates and traffic to Web pages. Some of the SEO techniques include:

• Augmenting HTML cod
• Web page copy editing
• Site navigation
• Linking campaigns
• Much more

SEO is important  because it gives a competitive advantage to those businesses who really excel in its uses. The companies that are most visible tend to be the most successful and most of the time have great SEO working for them. SEO can help increase sales as well as brand awareness.

The top three words from the keyword density tool are custom, customer, and marketing. The top two word phrase is mike lehman. The results really don’t suprise me too much. I use the word custom and customer a lot in my posts and the word marketing is expected to be used a lot as this is a marketing class. The two word phrase is not surprising considering my ego on this website.

On the McDonald’s website, finding a job is quite easy. It only takes two clicks to find a job in IT. Finding information about careers and benefits is even easier, however as it only takes one click before you land on a page discussing all the benefits available at McDonald’s. The website is pretty simple, but in a good way. It looks clean and incorporates all the colors and shapes and everything else that the average person would associate with McDonald’s. I can’t say it makes me want to work there, but I do believe that it gives a strong first impression if I did indeed decide to apply to work there.

The navigation of the website is quick and easy. The tabs make sense and are easy to find. The simple design of the website doesn’t distract you with too much going on. Instead it helps you to focus on the messages on every page. There also doesn’t seem to be a ton of pages that have a lot of scrolling down involved. There isn’t a ton of extra white space and where there is it is used appropriately. The layout is simple and flows well making it easy to navigate through the website. The colors are everything you would expect with the McDonald’s corporation and they are warm and inviting. There aren’t a ton of pictures and videos, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Too many of those would become distracting and make me less likely to fully pay attention to the content. Overall, this website is extremely easy to use and find what you’re looking for. The only changes I can think of would be to probably add a few pictures as there aren’t a ton there. It would be kind of nice to get an idea of what people look like while doing their jobs, not just headshots as are shown. Also, some pictures of the corporate headquarters would be cool as I bet few people know what that looks like.

Finding a job on the Kraft website is a little more complicated and difficult. They don’t have IT as a choice for finding positions so you better know what else you are looking for that would be similar. It also took 5 clicks to find the jobs once you started. In terms of usability, this website isn’t too bad. But if you compare it to the McDonald’s website, it is much more complicated and confusing. There are too many clicks required to get to where you want to go and the use of colors can be a little distracting. The pages don’t seem to hold a consistent design like McDonald’s which is a little disappointing. The McDonald’s website makes it much easier to complete the tasks at hand and figure out what I want to know. It does not persuade or even entice me to want to work for Kraft Foods. All in all, the McDonald’s website is better overall in its flow, usability, and attractiveness.

Above are the two ads I created for PAWS Chicago. Both adds show the heading used on the PAWS website, include a call to action I feel is directly linked to the pictures in each add. The paws in the background are more for fluff and a slightly better look. The picture is supposed to trigger emotion within the people looking and then the call to action is set to engage the people to act on those emotions and adopt a dog.

The kind of testing done above is called A/B testing. It is used to determine which ad is more effective in delivering the message. One ad would be sent out to one group of people and the other to another group. This kind of testing allows promotion while also developing an idea for which ad is more successful and can ultimately be used permanently in the future. I would use each of these ads at two different websites that have about the same traffic and are similar in nature. Then I would track which ad has a better click-through rate.

The link I chose for a landing page for these ads is http://www.pawschicago.org/adoptions/dogs-available-for-adoption/. This is the page where customers can look at different dogs that are up for adoption and learn about the dogs and the steps in which it takes to adopt them.

The metrics I would plan on using to determine which add is more effective would be click-through rate.

We recently had a guest speaker come in from IT Supplies. It was Ryan Eugene and he is the Webmaster for IT Supplies. IT Supplies sells ink and toner supplies.

Ryan began his discussion with talking about the early days of IT Supplies. They began their marketing with a catalog that was mailed out to customers and they would place their orders by the phone. They later moved on to using a website to fulfill orders via an online catalog with SKU’s to order.

Ryan talked about how as a webmaster you have to constantly read and keep up with trends. Because of growth in industry, web presence is required to compete. He talked about how the more content you have, the more unique searches will come up which helps drive more traffic to their website.

He also talked about how and when the web wins. The web allows for new customer acquisition on global scale. It is generally less costly than using lists. Analytics allow for easy assessment of conversion rates. He discussed how their website now is an extensive online catalog and order processing center in which users can place secure transactions and receive items as early as six hours after placing an order via EDI.

Ryan’s discussion was very similar to our discussions on internet history as he kind of covered the history of IT Supplies through its adoption of the internet and their website. Both our in class discussion and what Ryan talked about is true, the internet is growing more and more each day and it takes a lot of research and hard work to keep up and stay competitive in today’s markets.