Week 14 Assignment III Online Marketing Strategy

My proposed business, SoCal Relocation Services, will need to be built from ground up, starting with establishing a content rich and aesthetically appealing website with essential ecommerce functions such as customer registration, payment gateway and online chat for customer services etc.

With this website as the mother ship, I will start acquiring business connections and accumulating customer base by actively promoting my business and driving traffic to my mother ship on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Instead of keeping a separate blog, I will frequently publish  news worthy events and services updates on my website and replicate the same to the above mentioned social media platforms.  My social media marketing effort will be a close reflection of my website content and will be done on Facebook business page via status updates, event calendar and photo upload to broadcast my relocation services. Twitter will feature tweets that serve as headline of the Facebook content updates simultaneously to keep my Twitter followers abreast with my website and Facebook activities. Pinterest will host the collections of visual marketing materials for rental and/or real estate properties.

The foremost advantage of synchronizing the contents of the website with that on the social media platform is time-saving. At the inception of the business, my marketing budget will be close to nil which will mandate that as the owner, I will also be the accounting clerk, the operation manager and  the marketing personnel as well. I will be time pressed when churning out fresh and attractive marketing materials. It would be nearly impossible for me to maintain separate contents across my business website and the social media platforms.

Another advantage of having one update for all is being consistent across the platforms and conveying coherent and concerted messages in all of my online marketing venues. I'd like my online marketing to be straightforward and easy for the customers to follow and to drive the point home through repetitions via different platforms.

Hopefully after several rounds of initial relationship and customer connections building, I will acquire a respectable numbers of customer email addresses through the customer registrations on my website. Armed with the email addresses data, I will be able to start using email campaign through software vendor such as Constant Contact. However, to reduce the possible customers' hostility against unwanted emails, I will limit the mass emails to occasions only significant enough to warrant such unsolicited email campaign, ones such as annual customer appreciation banquet, major real estate seminars and special coupon deals, etc.

My next month contents updates,  to be published on my website and quoted across the three social media platforms I chose, would be as follows:
Week one, "Advice on Getting to the U.S. and Getting ready for the School". It will include tips on purchasing airline tickets, passport and visa applications and custom clearing.

Week two, "How to Maximize Summer Break". It will offer information on summer internship opportunities, summer school and summer travel and leisure.

Week three, "SoCal Housing and Rental Market Update". It will cite report about the latest news on  housing and rental properties in SoCal region.

Week four, "Why Choose Us". It will be a detailed explanation about the services we offer.

Week 14 Assignment II Comments

I have commented on the following blog posts:

1. http://briantbenham.blogspot.com/2013/05/csit-week-14-online-social-strategy.html?showComment=1368151260658#c5945367638745947768

2.http://myrtlecreeknursery.blogspot.com/2013/05/effective-social-media-platforms-for.html?showComment=1368152183320#c2902953499442667916

3. http://anne-ec-dotes.blogspot.com/2013/05/evaluating-social-media.html?showComment=1368159823586

4. http://melaniessocialmediajourney.blogspot.com/2013/05/social-media-reviewed-what-will-work.html?showComment=1368160397198#c7064025622431544264

Week 14 Assignment I

By looking back at what I have blogged and wrote on the various social media platforms so far for this class, I come to realize that I have gained a quite sizable understanding of today's social media marketing environment and along the way have formulated a clear strategy for marketing my proposed business and generated a significant volume of contents developed around such strategy.

Interestingly, my initial aversion against the behemoth Facebook out of concern for intrusion of privacy has changed, during the course of this class, into a neutral attitude of adopting it as a pragmatic solution for marketing my business and services, especially when the business page can be established and maintained seperately from a personal page. The benefits of having a presence on Facebook and actively promoting business on the Facebook page outweigh the concerns and risks in using Facebook. I think due to its dominance in social media and the well developed features and functions it provides, Facebook would be my top choice for ongoing daily online marketing effort which will include updates of graphics, status and events to drive traffic to my business website.

The nimble Twitter would be an ideal candidate as a secondary social marketing tool to supplement the advertising effort on Facebook. The type of marketing I envision on Twitter would be frequent and concise tweets to constantly remind my followers to visit my Facebook page and business website. It is more of a headline news about my business with details to be found on Facebook and business website.

I have a particular fondness for Pinterest, finding it very attractive and pleasing to the eyes of the web surfers with the graphic collection of subject matters. I would imagine using Pinterest Pin board to  showcase the rental and real estate properties for potential customers of mine. A another Pin board featuring the Chinese cuisine and its recipe would serve as an attraction for potential customers.

The online social media, as I learned throughout this course, enable small business owners and entrepreneurs to advertise their products and services in an unprecedented way that level the ground for competition between the big and small business. Through diligent and creative work and effort it is absolutely possible for an enterprising novice to carve a niche in the online business.

Week 13 Assignment - Facebook Analytics

Since my Facebook account with its business page "Socal Relocation Services" was newly created as part of the homework requirements for this class, even after the 'Like' from my fellow classmates as mandated by this week's assignment, it has only 5 Likes which fell way short of the 25 Likes that is required to have access to Facebook Insights.

The changes I noticed under Admin is the New Likes and New Notifications which contained encouraging comments about my business page and posts. I believe if I keep up with the content update on my business page I will eventually achieve the coveted 25 Likes to be able to see the much desired and highly sought after Insights.

Week 13 Assignment Google Analytics

For my hypothetical business, SoCal Relocation Services, I will be very curious about how the live traffic looks like if I ever set up the website and start marketing for it. Google Analytics seems to be a perfect solution to satisfy my curiosity in finding out where the traffic comes from, how the contents of my website engage with the viewers and the pattern or habit of my website viewers, all of which can be found via the reporting of Google Analytics.

Not only can I get a thorough understanding of the live traffic on my website,  I can also monitor the dynamics of the website traffic via Analytics Intelligence, a tool that will alert me about abnormal changes of  the traffic pattern to keep me informed of any significant website deficiency or external events that could cause the abnormality. Further more, I can implement a trial and error methodology by twisting the various key contents, designs, campaigns and business logic to achieve the optimal results reported by the Analytics intelligence.

Another important feature my website can benefit from is the multi-channel conversion tool that provides insight of  what the buying customers did sequentially on my website before the final step of purchases. I would imagine my website utilizing various forms of online marketing, i.e. email, banner ads, news or content update to attract potential buyers of my services and turn them into customers. I would be interested in finding out what path those buying customers take before arriving at the purchase decision, what forms of online marketing work alone or together to drive the customer toward the shopping cart checkout. The multi-channel conversion tool would be the one the solve this puzzle.

And certainly, the Social Activities tool would be one that I will frequently use to gauge the effectiveness of my social media marketing efforts which will be the centerpiece of my online promotion as the result of my focus on advertising for free and the reliance on words of mouth type of marketing strategy. All three of the available tools for Social, the Conversion, Source and Sharing would be the ideal candidates in evaluating my social media marketing efforts.

Week 12 Assignment Part II - Coupon

I designed a coupon to attact new customers. It offers one free ride from LAX airport to a destination within 20 miles radius. I am thinking that by bringing on board the people who just arrive my business will be able to convert them into long term full services customers.

Week 12 Assignment Using Other Social Media Tools

My first consideration in using additional social media tools would be Google+. Although it is not ranked as high as the leading social media such as Facebook or Twitter, Google+ seems to have an advantage in growing potential of its users as a result of Google's dominance in its search engine/advertising business. Its Circle function is very much aligned with my type of personal services business that usually grows out of referral among circles of friends, acquaintances, colleagues, past and potential clients who is interested in my type of business. The Hangout function could be utilized neatly as a conferencing tool with my clients and colleagues.

I am kind of hesitant to spread out  my online marketing effort among too many social media platforms, fearing that I would lack the manpower to manage all of them. Just for the sake of discussion, if I have to choose three additional ones, they would be Groupon, Yelp and Google Map with the degree of importance in the same order.

Even though coupon marketing seems to generate only short term interest which tapers off sharply after the campaign, it is still an effective way of attracting new business with precision target and alacrity. Once my Groupon offer brings the customers into the door, it will up to my ability to retain the customers, which I am quite confident about based on my excellent services.

I have a very unfavorable perception of Yelp out of several bad experiences with the vendors that had rave review on the Yelp but turned out to be crooks. The credibility of the reviews on Yelp is in serious doubt on my mind. I suspect a business can hire people to write good reviews about itself and also bad reviews about its competitors. However, it seems that when people coming to a new town or new place, they do go to Yelp for reference at least for finding things such as restaurants, etc. Yelp has developed a name recognition that I simply should not write off summarily. Therefore, if I decide to enlist the fifth or sixth social media platform to advertising my business, Yelp would be it.

The last one I might consider is Google Map. As a start up company, I do not envision my business renting a high end office space initially due to the budget constraint. My car and laptop would probably serve as my office and the office furniture at the beginning. However, having a physical location always help adding credibility and respect to a business, especially the type of business like mine that depends on building trust with customers. Therefore, eventually I will have an office and Google Map will be a nice tool to direct the customers to my business.

Week 11 Assignment Part III Advertising on Social Media for Free

Social media such as Facebook is a good place to attract audience with paid advertisement, but even a better place to establish a clientele with fresh and engaging contents without spending a dime. By staying current on contents and providing valuable information for viewers and followers on one's business page, a more solid and willing client base can be achieved than through the traditional paid marketing campaign.

To promote my fictitious relocation services business website www.SoCalRelocate.com without resorting to the paid advertisement offers by Facebook, I designed three Facebook posts that contain Call to Action.

The first one is offering a tip about pollen allergy that usually confronts new immigrants from China.
It explains the problem at the timing of the spring season and prompt the viewers to visit the business website for further details.

 

 

The second post is an event posting for a Chinese Art Competition Award Ceremony that directs viewers to obtain tickets to the event from the business website.

 

 

The third post is offering free stuff for referring a friend to my services. It again contains the business website for viewers to check out the offer details.

 

 

All three posts are designed to drive traffic to my business website but with different angles. 





Week 11 Assignment Part II - blog posts that I commented on

These are the three posts I commented on.

http://briantbenham.blogspot.com/2013/04/csit-155-week-11-part-1-online.html?showComment=1366303560472#c4514827585089894523

http://anne-ec-dotes.blogspot.com/

http://myrtlecreeknursery.blogspot.com/2013/04/advertising-on-facebook.html#comment-form

Week 11 Assignment Part I Ads

After reading the lecture and evaluating the options of advertising among the social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitters, I came to the conclusion to run my future ads on Facebook which seems to be more established and sophisticated and offer more flexibilities than its peers.

Since my business page on Facebook is a brand new one with a meager 3 Likes, it is a natural decision to begin with advertising my business page rather than promoting a post on it. After initial advertising campaign and hopefully a successful one that produces a respectable number of Likes, I would emphasis more on promoting a post on my business page than advertising the page itself. The rationale behind it is that I feel the right-column page advertising resembles the transitional push mode advertisements that just plaster themselves across the spectrum with high level messages. A promoted post with relevant content and attractive image tailored to the targeted audience's interest would generate more focused response and yield a higher return rate.

For my business page advertising, I came up with the following ad:

The image closely resembles that of my business page logo to serve as the link between the ad and the page. The text, with the limited numbers of characters imposed by Facebook, briefly explain what the business is about while delivering an ad-like punch line. As I said, this is a high level message to just push the page name out there.

For my post promoting ad, the design is simply the top part of the post that is being promoted, for which I inserted a photo of  coastline along Torrey Pines States Preserve that is befitting the content of the blog text. The content of the blog text is a comment about SoCal area as an ideal place for foreign students and scholars because of the prominence of its Chinese culture. I believe insightful posts would be very effective in amassing audience.

 



The audience of the ads are as follows:

targeted: 311,820 people

• who live in the United States
• who live within 50 miles of Irvine, CA
• between the ages of 18 and 40 inclusive
• who like #University of California, Los Angeles, #University of California, San Diego, #University of California, Irvine, #University of Southern California or #University of California, Riverside or #speak Chinese

Since my business specializes in relocation services in Southern California for foreign students and scholars, the above mentioned criteria should be self-explanatory. I was trying to further isolate the Chinese Facebook users from the above audience, but was very disappointed when I found out there isn't a parameter as "Chinese" under the "Ethnic" from the "Broad Categories". The only available selection underneath is "Hispanic". As a second choice, I used #speak Chinese for "Precise Interests". However, final collection of all the attributes sets and the set under #speak Chinese is a union not an intersection which is what I preferred.

I would have limited budget for the ad campaign on Facebook. Initially, I will cap the daily budget to $5.00 and the length of the ad to be a week to just test the water to see how effective the ad would be and to further tweak it into more cost effective.

Week 10 list of blog posts that I comment on

For this week's email marketing blog posts, I commented on the folowing three:

http://mattsmindcsit.blogspot.com/2013/04/w10-email-marketing.html?showComment=1365639137278#c653462119565654379


http://seekerofawesome.blogspot.com/2013/04/newsletter-ideas-list.html?showComment=1365638239451#c875287279964061028


http://briantbenham.blogspot.com/2013/04/csit-155-week-11-part-1.html?showComment=1365637379857#c3855570371642728819

Week 10 Assignment I Email Marketing

For my relocation services business, I would like to utilize the email newsletter on a periodical basis with varying intervals including welcome email, monthly information updates, quarterly market analysis articles and occasional special event announcements.

When a potential client signs up for email newsletter either from my business website or manually via events and contacts, a welcome email will be automatically sent to the client that introduces our services and highlights the benefits of using our services.

Information updates on topics such as local community events, neighborhoods statistics, school information, local news and ethnic and cultural events would be sent to email users on the contact lists on a monthly basis to keep them in the loop and remind them of our presence.

Quarterly articles about real estate and mortgage trends would be valuable tools for engaging with email users on my contact lists. By providing such value added information to my potential clients, my business would be able to distinguish itself among the competitors.

Lastly, my business will host and/or participate in an annual cultural event around the time of Chinese New Year to celebrate the Chinese cultural and heritage as well as establish itself as a business leader in the SoCal Chinese community. The email newsletter would be used in conjunction with website, Facebook and other social media in getting the words out and attracting new visitors.

Week 9 Assignment Part II Blog Categories

My proposed business is a relocation services that is tailored to the niche market for helping foreign students and visiting scholars from China to settle down in southern California. The components of the relocation services such as finding a place to stay, financial advising, translation services and local guides will be naturally translated into the categories of corresponding topics on my business blog.

For the category of finding a place to stay, my business blog will post detailed information about the housing and rental markets in various geographic areas in southern California, as well as update on current mortgage market information. Financial advising category would be used to inform the various type of financial institution, types of accounts, the ways of investing and the international banking options. Translation services category will showcase our expertise in document procurement in both English and Chinese. Local guides will update the viewers about what are happening and the fun activities around the town.

I believe organizing my blog posts into the above categories will assist me in staying in charge of my blog activities and staying current and fresh with my blog content and as a result attracting potential customers.

Week 9 Assignment I Being Personal on My Blogs

Being a shy person, I have always had an aversion towards being revealing about myself and my personality in the public domain. It has been my individual preference not to share my background, belief, affiliation and proclivity publicly, especially on the web which has the capacity to permanently hold on to such information and to virally disseminate the same.

However, I realize that the nature and the purpose of blogging calls for the author's expression of certain opinions and perspectives about the blog's topics with varying degree depending upon the type of blogging, i.e. casual vs. business.

For this blog that I maintain for the class I am taking, assuming that  not a whole lot of web users will pay a visit here and I should be able to remain fairly unnoticed, I feel comfortable to share my personality with my fellow classmates to build rapport with.

For a business blog, presenting too much about myself seems to be distracting and unprofessional to the viewers who usually are seeking business related information and expert advice from reading a blog. Even for personal services type of business that I proposed to be engaged in, I find it unnecessary and too intrusive by injecting myself into the potential clients' perusal of my business. My feeling is that  always let the strength and merit of the business impress the audience Rather than I myself stand on the show floor.

Week 8 Twitter Advanced Search

Since my hypothetical business is a relocation services specializing in helping the Chinese foreign students and/or visiting scholars to settle down in the SoCal area, my main interest on Twitter would be to follow the real estate news and activities in the SoCal region. Instead of using advanced search, I conducted a regular search on the key word "SoCal real estate" which yielded abundance of relevant search results, among which I chose CA Real Estate@DRE_RealEstate and SD House Hunting@sdhousehunting to follow because I found they both have a sizable numbers of followers and also have been prolific in tweeting, an indication that they are news worthy sources for me to retweet in future.

I also like to follow the twitter accounts where my targeted audience tend to congregate, accounts
such as Chinese news source. From my experience, I know that Chinese speaking people usually visit the online news media that is in Chinese language. The advanced search on twitter neatly provides the functionality of searching for tweets written in a given language, which I set to be "Chinese (中文)" and search for the Chinese words meaning "news". The results fields are populated with numerous tweets and multiple people. I am not interested in the tweets that simply contained the words of "news" in Chinese. Therefore, I chose the results for people that have the word "news" in Chinese as part of their Twitter account names. The two I chose to follow are the FMN 自曲新闻‏@freemoren and RFAChinese‏@RFAChinese.

Lastly, I'd like to follow some Twitter accounts that provide information for tourists, having on my mind the thought of retweet those accounts as supplement to my own tweets content. Finding such tourist information accounts was as straightforward as a regular search on the key work "socal tourism". Among the search results, it was quite a breeze in deciding to choose @visitCA and @visitsandiego as the accounts to follow for this particular purpose.

Overall speaking, I found searching on Twitter to locate the relevant accounts to follow was quite easy and often produced the intended results.

Week 7 Get Visual Assignment Part II

The two business that I surveyed for the use of visual social media are www.orbitmoving.com and www.caprelo.com, both of which are engaged in international relocating services that is similar to the services my business offers.

Both of these two businesses have Youtube buttons on their websites that link the visitors to their marketing videos on Youtube.

However, orbitmoving.com has only one video with 6:37 length posted sometime in 2009 that is mainly an unnarrated sequence of their moving services in motions with music playing in the background. The quality of the video is of low resolution and fuzzy images which make it look like a home made video. This is what I suspected about the outcome of a small business' effort and exposure on Youtube, a cheaply made and infrequently followed up introductory video. The is due to the lack of resources in video producing and content generating by small business, as discussed in my previous post about my own business' utilization of Youtube. Orbitmoving.com has no other link to visual social media other than to Youtube.

www.caprelo.com , on the other hand, has a channel on Youtube that comprises of 20 professional grade marketing videos covering various topics related to the relocation services it provides. The videos are of high quality and well directed with professionally looking personalities playing out the story lines. Still, I doubt the effectiveness of using Youtube as marketing venue. One evidence of the lack of effectiveness is the meager number of  only 2 subscribers to www.caprelo.com's channel despite the obvious efforts it invested in it. www.caprelo.com additionally has Instagram button on its website which indicates it also utilizes Instagram as a graphic tool to augment its appeals.

To reaffirm my belief in the scarcity of using Youtube as visual marketing tool by relocation services, I did a search on Youtube on keywords "relocation services". The search resulted in 17400 videos, a number that is very small compared to the tremendous amount of videos clips posted on Youtube. By resorting the search results by relevance, the top videos are not even remotely related to relocation services, indicating that not all of the 17400 videos are about relocations services.

Week 7 Get Visual Assignment Part I

This is exactly the reason I undertake this course, to learn the new business models and the internet technology that connect people and business in a way that is dynamic, innovative and communicative as compared to the old way I knew. Social media such as Facebook and Youtube is vanguard of the revolutionary change in conducting business, while the new comers such as Pinterest and Instagram bring with them fresh ideas and features of social interactions for web users and business.

By carefully evaluating the four most widely used visual platforms, Youtube, Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest, as being new to the later two, I found that Pinterest would probably work the best for my relocation service business, SoCal Relocation Services (SRS).

Among the four, Youtube is the most popular platform with the highest numbers of active users. It will be an ideal venue to showcase my services with personal appearance and introductory videos. However, I doubt I would have time and resources to create enough news worthy contents to support a channel on Youtube. It seems to be time consuming and not even worthwhile to create video for every bit of service I would provide to my client. I think it is a better idea to use the embedding feature of Youtube to incorporate personal appearance and introductory videos on my business website and my Facebook business page.

Instagram and Tumblr seem to resemble each other in terms of core contents and functionalities. Both of Instagram and Tumblr are blogging sites with users' capability to post large and high resolution photos, rendering the use of them at the same time by business redundant. It is my feeling that Facebook business page would serve the same purpose as using either Instagram or Tumblr. Furthermore, maintaining multiple social media sites at the same time will be tedious and cumbersome, unless I can find a way to automatically update the content across all the platforms with one input, which I have yet to figure out.

So after eliminating Instagram and Tumblr for the aforementioned reason and relegating the use of Youtube to the secondary role as part of my business website, I focus my exploration on Pinterest, a social media platform that enables its users to aggregate their favorites sites, pages, videos and photos at one central place for later reference. It is a splendid idea, considering how inefficient, unorganized and cumbersome the traditional way of doing it is, which is adding the web sites/pages as favorites in web browsers. By pushing for the presence of my website and making it stick to Pinterest users board, I believe my target audience would have a easy time in seeking out my service in time of need.

Week 6 Part II Elaboration on Facebook Scheduled Posts

I scheduled three posts for my Facebook business page, Socal Relocation Services (SRS), which specializes in helping foreign students/visiting scholars from China to settle down in Southern California.

The first post was an introduction about a series of tips I was going to write on living and studying in Southern California area. My potential business clients are foreign students from China who have newly arrived here and would need help in finding a place to live and in establishing themselves here. By offering information and advice relevant to the problems they face, I believe my Facebook page would attract the right audience.

The second post I scheduled was a picture of the scenic coastline of Torrey Pines State Preserve. This picture would simply serve as an attraction to the eyes of the targeted audience and as a filler between the content heavy posts before and after it.

The third post I scheduled was the first tip out of the series. It is advice regarding finding things to eat. It offers practical advice for Chinese foreign students  for whom eating well would be essential task and a paramount challenge due to the difference in way of living and culinary cultures between the U.S. and China.

I scheduled the three posts on three consecutive days and at different hours of the day to just explore when would be a good time to post in regard to getting the most viewer's response.

Week 6 Part II Screen Shots for Facebook Scheduled Posts

Week 6 Part I - pages I choose to Like as Socal Relocation Services

My business page on Facebook is Socal Relocation Services. Using Facebook as Socal Relocation Services, I choose the following eight businesses Facebook pages to Like for the purpose of making connections and promoting Socal Relocation Services:

1. Redfin, a real estate broker that specializes in markets such as SoCal region. One of the first thing that newly arrived Chinese students and visiting scholars would have to deal with is finding a place to stay. By incorporating Redfin as part of the network, my business page would be able to offer valuable leads and insights into the house/apartment hunting for my clients.

2. Bank of America, a leading financial institution that has extensive network of branches spanning the U.S. and worldwide. A part of my services is helping the Chinese students and visiting scholars in obtaining bank account, arranging fund transfer from their homeland to here.  Bank of America is a premier financial institution that offers world class international banking services, which will fit in my services requirement neatly.

3. IRS, Internal Revenue Services. Paying taxes and filing tax return will be a confusing and daunting task for people coming from China, and if left unattended or mishandled, would cause dire consequences for them too. IRS Facebook page contains up-to-date information which could be shared by my business page as advice to my potential clients.

4.California Association of Realtors contains detailed market analysis and valuable industry expert opinion and insights for California housing market. A lot of  business can be gained by introducing the California housing market to my potential clients.

5. My business page also likes Southern California Weather Authority and Visit California for leisure information as complimentary news sources for my potential clients who will assimilate into the SoCal life styles.

6. World Journal is a leading Chinese language newspaper whose content can be shared by my page. University of Southern California has a high percentage of Chinese students and visiting scholars who are affluent as the same time. This is where my potential clients are and my page likes it for the exactly the same reason.

Facebook Insights Terms

Reach is the number of unique people who have seen any content associated with a Page (including any Ads or Sponsored Stories pointing to that Page) in the past seven days.

Engaged Users is the number of unique people who have clicked anywhere on the post of a Page.

Talking About This is the number of unique people who have created a story about a Page in the last seven days.

Virality is the number of unique people who have created a story from a Page Post as a percentage
of the number of unique people who have seen it.

A business Page owner can study these parameters offered by Insights to analyze the effectiveness of the posts and tweak the future posts according to the feedback as to what the audience resonate with the post. First, the Page owner can look at the Reach to see how widely one post has touched the potential audience. By examining the Engaged Users, the Page owner can determine if the post has generates enough interest to the viewer to the degree that the viewer will further explore the post topic. Talking About This provides the feedback as to what viewers tend to respond or comment on. By looking at the Virality, business Page owner can compare the effectiveness of a post accurately across the posts.

After analyzing the parameters under the Insights, the business Page owner can tell what type of posts, i.e. videos, photos, event schedule etc., is effective. He/she can also tell the demographics of the audience by looking into the gender, age, country and language data and see if the post reach the targeted audience. Insights enables the Page owner to get a detailed and complete pictures of the audience and to further enhance the post according to the feedback provided by it.

Target Market Analysis for Socal Relocation Concierge

I am considering starting a business in helping the Chinese foreign students and visiting scholars to settle down in the southern California area. During the past several, the numbers of Chiense foreign students and visting scholars who come the to southern California to attend schools or participate in reasearch program has grown tremendously. My proposed business, Socal Relocation Concierge (SLR) will offer services in assisting them in moving to and settling down in their new environments here.

Target Market: Chinese foreign students and visiting scholars who newly arrive in the southern California area, who have not find a permanent place to stay and have not establish themselves here.

Demography of Target Market: Most of them will be of the age of college students or post graduate students. Some will be in their 40s or 50s if they come as visiting scholars. They could be male or female, although the female will be mostly likely to enlist our services. Marital status would be either married or single. They will be people of very good education background, mostly would have already be accepted into the colleges or graduate schools in southern California area. Their income level would be very varied with majority living within students' means while some would have family resources to rely on.

Psycho-graphics of Target Market: new to this country, these people would be anxious, unsure of their surrounding, tentative in making living arrangement, unfamiliar with American ways of conducting daily business, such as obtaining driver license, setting up bank account. They would be eager to settle down quickly to be able to focus on school works.

Behavioristics of Target Market: Their initial circle of activities would be limited to school setting and places that ethnic Chinese frequent, such as Chinese grocery stores and restaurants. They would tend to cluster around fellow Chinese students and Chinese residents living in Socal, relying on the rapport
offered there. They would be very responsive to the marketing message of local relocation experts  offering relocation solutions.

Week 3 Assignment Part Two

After examining my web browsing habit, I come to realize that my daily encounter with Internet is quite confined to websites for utility purpose such as Google.com and Bing.com, a fact that I am actually proud of as an indication of not wasting too much time on purposeless web surfing. Therefore, my selection for websites to comment on are www.bankofamerica.com and www.fidelity.com, the two websites that I have to deal with often to manage the family finance.

Being probably the most representative of the ecommerce presence by the financial institutions in the U.S. , these two websites share as many characteristics as differences.  What makes them both effective is the brand building as a conscientious effort in displaying their theme colors, logo and marketing messages in an coordinated way on their sites. Besides the necessity to come back to visit their website, both websites offer a wealth of information and knowledge in financial planning and asset management, well organized in the form of navigation bars and sections that are prominently and logically presented on their sites.

However, I found that in respect of aesthetics Bank of America website is a better site where the content area is centered across the screen and the layouts of sections are even and proportional. It resembles the look and feel of a traditional brick and mortar bank building exuding soundness and trustworthiness. Fidelity's website is oddly aligned all the way to the left of the screen and scattered with bits of information here and there which makes it hard to distinguish the relationship among the various contents. The font sizes on Fidelity's website are quite small and do not correspond to their sections' logical relevance and hierarchy

With the inclusion of friendly human images on its website, Fidelity does a better job at creating a welcoming experience for its website users. It has the around the corner small town credit union's look and feel that endears itself to the potential customers, as compared to Bank of America whose website seems be very impersonal and imposing.

What I find amusing is the straightforwardness of both websites in splashing the 'open an account with us' all across their main web pages. It is what they do for business and they did a fine job in putting the solicitation as the forefront of their websites.

Websites Evaluation on Aesthetics, Design & Branding

The website http://www.gforceracecars.com/ is a brochure type of website that serves the basic function of presenting the company's and its products information with straightforward layout and graphical contrast.

However, there are several ways to improve the overall attractiveness and professionalism about this website.

First, the Home/Welcome page, which is the main page of the website, should be shortened to a manageable length. As of now, it takes me a continuous click about 10 seconds on the scroll down bar to reach the bottom of the page, at which point I already lost track of what I saw and what the emphasis of the page is. The various sections on this page could be easily organized as additional pages with captions for the sections as link.

Secondly, The center of web pages should be expanded horizontally. As of now, the website seems to be too narrow, with the content area constrained in the center black area, outside of which is the empty red columns that occupy almost half of the screen.

 The third way to make the website looking professional is to correct the misspellings, such as "draq race" on the welcome page and to present the contents in a consistent ways. For example, when "Accessories" on the left navigation column is clicked, the content area is completely black and the merchandises information is at the bottom of the page which could be overlooked if the visitors do not scroll down to the end of the page.

 The website http://tectorch.com is also a brochure based website that brings the relevant information about the company and its products on to the web. However, it needs major revamp. The website's main page is very crowded with almost all the information crammed together. The company info and the products info should be separated into their own pages. The products info should be organized with proper hierarchy. The web graphic could use some help with contrasting color to segment the content into meaningful clusters of information. Also, there are too many types of fonts, font styles and font sizes on each page. The font should be streamlined into no more than three types on any single page to make it easy for the visitors to follow.

As major brands of automobile manufacturers, http://www.ford.com and http://www.toyota.com have different approaches for their online branding and marketing, with the former presenting its multi lines of models at the forefront of its website and the later delegating its website main content area to the marketing messages. While both websites are aesthetically pleasing with rich video and graphic contents, Ford's website seems to be easier with the visitor's web browsers than Toyota;s website that takes several extra seconds to load up. Ford website also does a better job at keeping its theme color consistent while Toyota's website is scattered with incompatible colors such as purple, greenish black and silver.

Business Websites with Social Media

There are the five business websites I surveyed that utilize social media as part of  and also an extension of their website contents:

www.fidelity.com with Facebook, Twitter and Youtube links.
www.walmart.com with Facebook link
www.forever21.com with Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, pinterest Links
www.kearnypearsonford.com with Facebook and Twitter links.
www.vons.com with Facebook and Twitter links.

Is Social Media the Place to Lodge a Complaint?

It has happened often that after hours of being put on hold or switched back and forth between rosily-called customer services representatives and their next level higher ups, I ended up with no solution to my complaint but with a skyrocketed blood pressure level and brutally bruised self esteem.

Then I felt such an urge to let known my frustration and misery as the result of being overpowered by the Big Bad Business. Before the dawn of social media, I would have to resort to shouting in a crowded place to disseminate my messages which would surely die down within a few yards of me.

Now with the social medium providing a central and easily accessible forum, people whose voices are as trivial as mine now have an opportunity to have their voices heard, their experience shared, and their anger and frustration based on common cause released as collective and coordinated barrage at the Big Bad Business.

Even a Big Bad Business is surely concerned about their public image being tarnished by cohort of people lodging complaint about them. However, is online gripping going to fix the problem at hand for us?

Probably not.  Quite as often as in brick and mortar market place, an individual customer’s complaint on the online public forum is drowned out by so many other voices shouting at the same time for attention for a myriad of agendas.  It usually takes a person with a lot of patience, tenacity and belligerence and with the luxury of ample time to push his/her cause through on the online world to be able to build up enough followers, commiserators, and fellow plaintiffs in pursuing a specific problem with a Big Bad Business.  Also, someone who stands up to a business by writing negative comments on social media website such as Yelp could end up facing legal problem in the name of defamation lawsuit brought against him by the business.

Business Oriented Social Media Platforms

It is quite hard to me to evaluate the business worthiness of a social media platform, simply because I have not been an active participant in social media. I only have a Twitter account which I rarely log in.

However, from what I read and heard about the social media websites, it seems that websites such as Facebook and Twitter are geared towards the personal and social use while websites such as Linkedin and Google+ are better equipped with handling business aspects on the web.

To further justify  the above observations, I believe I would need to open accounts with these websites to gain insight into how they operate. But I am an intensely averse to signing up accounts by giving away my real name. Can I use a pseudonym to set up the acount?

My Choice of Template

I am relatively new at blogging, with the exception of a few assignments done on Wordpress for a class I took.

When I first created the account at www.blogger.com, I was a bit overwhelmed with the blogging terminology/jargons. After taking a while to get oriented in the sphere of  the blogging, I found it quite easy to get started with blogging, with the tools such as template, font/color/background customization. It is an exciting

I came to realize that it is such an exciting thing to be able to blog because only as recent as the advent of the blogging that an ordinary person like me who has no public voice among the mass of the people could have a chance to get his/her story told, opinion heard and experience shared in front of a world audience.

Therefore, as a person who is usually shy at public speech, I choose a bit bold color of maroon for my blog's theme color to stand out among the rest of blogs vying for web viewer's attention. I also choose a font a bit whimsical. However, I decided to use the simple template because I am afraid I won't have much content to post at the beginning.