Who remembers a post I made last semester about a new law being passed that would require companies such as Facebook to make IPO because of how big a private company they are? It seemed as though Facebook was very steadfast on not going public anytime soon since they wanted to pay off their loyal private investors first. Well, the day is finally coming that Facebook will go public and that day is tomorrow. Facebook will be submitting paperwork to regulators tomorrow morning, for a $5 billion initial public offering. The IPO will be expected to be one of the largest U.S market debuts in history. This will excite many investors who have always dreamed of owning a piece of the largest social media networks in history. Will you be trying to get a hold of a piece of Facebook or do you feel that the price is too step for your liking?
- Category Archives Marketing – General
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Facebook’s Finally Going Public
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Monday Night Music Video
AHHH… it has been such a long day. Leaving the house at 8:30 in the morning and arriving home twelve hours later is without a doubt strenuous; I’m sure everyone else has days just as grueling as this. Once I arrive home I cook up some food sit down and kick my feet up for a good thirty minutes and just relax, browse the internet, and watch some TV. Take a few minutes and check out this middle school hit! Try not to get too nostalgic..
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The Importance of Sleep
At times I feel like I am so overburdened with loads of work that the best way(and only way) for me to be able to complete the work is to stay up for long hours past normal sleeping hours. Though I may be able to complete the work I always feel worse afterwords because I missed hours out of my normal sleeping pattern. I recently read an important study about how important sleep is to your productivity.
As a matter of fact, when we are sleep deprived we actually make more mistakes, which is similar to manufacturing when more units of production also means more flaws and waste. The article reminds the reader that what contributes to postive results isn’t the amount of hours the team puts in but the quality and quantity of work they produce. How can this information be put into use for your daily life?
How about you go sleep on it and come back to me.
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How do you keep people coming back to you website? Take a lesson from “WOW” and make your customers QUEST
Just like World of War Craft but swap the magic and swords for…cleaning supplies? This is real life now and just like any kid, adults like to have fun too. Use company products to involve customers on a whole new level. Why not create incentives to explore company websites with quests and missions, interacting with products and giving us all a break from the lusterless lifestyles of middle America. That’s what some companies are starting to explore.Online quests have proven to be tremendously popular. The trick is: how do you harness that level of engagement for something that’s not a game?
Some websites do this by applying quests to different types of activities. Chore Wars turns household chores into an adventure. Players can earn 20 experience points and 10 gold pieces just by emptying the dishwasher. The Extraordinaries, an iPhone app, has quests for mapping neighborhood playgrounds or locating defibrillators for the First Aid Corps.
Recently, companies have tried increasing customer engagement by adding game mechanics to their website like badges, points and leaderboards. Quests take it a step further by allowing businesses to guide visitors through a custom series of high-value actions — also rewarding users for their engagement.
Rewarding customers for time and attention
Quests are about rewarding people for spending time on your website, and more importantly — paying attention. Time and attention are getting increasingly hard to capture, so why not reward for it? Assuming you have quality content on your site, what else can you do to keep people around? What if there was an extra stickiness layer to engage visitors? That’s where quests come into play. It’s not just about the rewards; it’s about the journey that your visitors embark on.
Visitors that engage with quests are up to three times more likely to revisit a website. Why? For one thing, they enjoy the gratification of winning, and they would like to repeat it. These visitors might have also gained points or virtual currency that they can use towards a reward. The airline industry uses this method in the form of frequent flyer miles. In a competitive industry, it’s a staple for gaining customer loyalty.
If your quests are entertaining and well executed, visitors are more likely to return. It can be about the experience and not as much about gaining points. Be warned, however, that it’s imperative to refresh your quest content. If someone has completed 50% of your quests, but the others aren’t of interest, they may decide to go elsewhere.
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Funny or Failure? Adding Humor to your Marketing Campaign
We all love a funny ad, that’s why we watch the Super Bowl right? Humor in advertising is an art form, we have all seen a funny commercial bomb terribly and we have seen advertisements which stick in your mind with colorful characters, sarcastic humor and even animated geckos which preach to you the good word about car insurance. But that’s the point I’m trying to make, you take a company that is completely humorless and turn it into a memorable advertisement.
Memory plays a big role in the effectiveness of a video marketing campaign and funny videos have a way of sticking with you. Humor triggers an emotional reaction to your brand’s message. This is what makes it so memorable for the viewer. It is this same emotion that inspires them to share your humorous advertisement with their friends and family.
True humor is often hard to hit squarely on the head and all too often attempts at being funny do more harm than good. There is a difference between invoking a smile and producing a laugh out loud response. So what makes funny, funny? One key ingredient is the element of surprise. The tough part is making that surprise relevant to your brand.
Take a look at this video here, what do you think about when you hear “learn a language”. Personally, I think of boring. In an industry where Rosetta Stone has become synonymous with learning a foreign language, Berlitz is using humor to catch up to the competition. While the videos produced by Berlitz are knee-slappers, each delivers the message of just how important it is to know a foreign language-even if that language is English. Not to mention how that language can help you out of some pretty serious situations.
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Unavoidable Timeline
Welcome back, I missed you guys! How was your winter break? Mine was great thank you, but man did time fly it felt like one minute I was just starting break and then the next thing I knew I was right back in my college classes. I guess that’s an enivetable thing about time, huh?
You know what other thing is unavoidable considering time? That’s right, you can no longer avoid having a Facebook Timeline. For those who do not know what a Facebook Timeline is, a Facebook Timeline is a new kind of profile that let’s you highlight photos,posts, and life events that help you tell your story. Based off this MSNBC.Com article, this may stir up some trouble as many people do not like the thought of the new profile.”40-42% of current users want to remove timeline.”
So what do you think? Do you like being forced to use the Facebook Timeline or do you feel like its going against your freedom of choice?
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Welcome Back!
After a month off from school we now must slowly become re-accustomed to the daily grind of going to class, coming home and doing more school work, passing out, and doing it all over in a few hours. On a more positive note, just remember that as we move further and further away from our relaxing Winter Break, we also move closer and closer to Summer time living. So with that being said, welcome back to Temple University for the Spring semester of the year 2012. Remember to study hard but also to take time to enjoy the city with your friends!
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Playing Dirty in the Business World
So you want to be smart in the business world? They say a company is only as smart as their competition so what happens when people get creative with getting the edge? Well this is the result of some clever corporate trickery:
1. When Security Pacific Bank merged with Bank of America many Security Pacific branches were closed. First Interstate Bank rented trucks and parked them in the lots of the branches that were closing. Then First Interstate employees in those trucks then helped people open new accounts as there were leaving the banks.
2. In 1986 British Airways ran a promotion to give away 5,200 seats for travel on June 10th. Virgin Atlantic Airways ran ads that said, “ It has always been Virgin’s policy to encourage you to fly to London for as little as possible. So on June 10 we encourage you to fly British Airways.” The British Airways promotion generated a lot of news coverage, but most of (more…)
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Black Friday Getting Violent?…Check out Cyber Monday
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Black Friday has become the busiest shopping day of the year since the 1960′s. We all know and love this holiday, it’s the day after we just finished stuffing our faces with turkey. As the food coma starts to wear off we all climb out of our warm beds at around 3am to start fighting through traffic to get the best deals on our favorite holiday gift items. This year they tried a new tactic, opening at midnight and staying open all night and into the day. All I have to say is, poor mall employees. So now instead of sleeping some of that turkey off we can just jump into the car and spend spend spend. That is what life is about anyways, right?
This past weekend, “Black Friday” sales were $11.4 billion, up 7 percent, or nearly $1 billion from the same day last year, according to a report by ShopperTrak, which gathers data from 25,000 outlets across the country. It was the largest amount ever spent on that day.
U.S. retailers racked up a record $52.4 billion in sales over the Thanksgiving weekend, a 16.4 percent jump from a year ago, the National Retail Federation said Sunday. It also forecast a 2.8 percent increase in sales for the November-to-December holiday season, down from the 5.2 percent increase in the same period last year.
But “Black Friday” has been a blessing and a curse: In recent years, it’s become so popular that it’s known for its big crowds, long lines, and even disorder and violence among some shoppers.
“Black Friday has become a victim of its own success,” says Adamson, the branding expert. “It has been successful to the point where it has created the opportunity that if you don’t want to deal with the madness, come out on Tuesday or some other day.”
“Cyber Monday” was coined in 2005 when a retail trade group noticed a spike in online sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving when people returned to their work computers and shopped. While more people now have Internet access at home, retailers still offer discounts and (more…)
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The Nocebo Effect; Contagious Dissatisfaction
Companies love word of mouth advertising. It is by far the best and most efficient way to spread the good news about products and services. But what happens when someone is dissatisfied? Now we may all say, one bad customer experience isn’t the end of world. But what if it was? It’s well known that people talk more about the experiences they’ve had with companies that are negative than positive. Negative experiences as a customer tend to leave a bad taste in the back of our mouths that we are itching to let loose and gab to the world about. No matter how many satisfactory previous encounters we may have had with a restaurant or retail store, one incident will forever alter our opinion on that establishment.
Not only is this well known among business students but it was actually studied. The Nocebo Effect, very similar to the placebo effect which is what happens when people are given sugar pills instead of real test medication and start to think and feel like they are experiencing a negative side effect when in fact they are just imagining it. The implication for brands and marketers is similar: if people have reason to expect problems with your product or service, perhaps due to the complaints of other customers in social media, they may experience or report those same problems – even when they don’t exist! The implication for brands and marketers (more…)
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