It might be my last blog post for e-marketing course but not my last post. Honestly, since COMM464 e-Marketing is an elective marketing course to me, I did not pay much attention on this course until I realized how amazing the course content is and how greatly Ivan teaches. I obtained a deep sight of today’s online market and its future trend, most importantly, I feel so great to apply what I learned from the course in my real life.
I am also taking another marketing elective course COMM468 Marketing Application this term. During the whole semester, my team need to make a comprehensive marketing plan for a client Collen. Collen is currently running a dietitian consulting company called At The Table Nutrition. However, since she is self-employed and lacks of sufficient funds, she hardly expand her business in Vancouver. According to the survey results, most people would like to find dietitian service through searching online. Therefore, my team came up to recommend that Collen should pay more attention on her online business. However, since no one except me takes e-Marketing, my team members feel quite helpless. Meanwhile, I learned how to run online business through Google Adword Campaign and how to increase the online visibility of one website, I used what I learned in COMM464 in this project. I updated the website visibility report and suggested several tactics based on the results of visibility report, and I also recommend that Collen should run her own Google Adword Campaign for her business. My recommendations surprised my team members, and those are just a small part of what I learned from my e-Marketing course.
As a last year undergraduate, I am planning to run my own event planning and business design business with my friend Laura. We met each other in UBC and fortunately we are both interested in event planning and designing. Therefore, during our preparation phrase, I am in charge of operate online business part. Through using social media and search “wedding in Vancouver” on SINA WEIBO (Chinese Twitter), I have already find two clients for wedding planning. Laura and me decided to use more online resource to start our business.
I will definitely recommend this course to my friends and keep reading Ivan’s great blog “Where is the puck?”. Thank All.
Here is a “love story” happened in Taiwan.
Luca found a Nokia cellphone in his guitar case. As a street singer, Luca was surprised since usually there are only coins and paper cash. He checked this cellphone and wanted to find out who leave it to him. From the photo album in cellphone, Luca found that it is belong to a young Taiwanese girl. Moreover, Luca found bunches of photos of him and videos of his performances. So, that girl did not leave the cellphone unwittingly, she had already send Luca “secret messages”.
Since then, Luca decided to find this Nokia girl. He tried almost all online tools. He posted that girl’s photos on Taiwanese social media, and also created a blog for people who might know that girl to contact him. He kept update his blogs regarding the whole processes how he was looking for her. In really short time, this news had been spread by Taiwanese Internet users. Many people joined in helping Luca to post his story with that Nokia girl online.
With more and more Internet users been attracted by this “Help Luca” event, on Nov 3rd 2008, Luca updated a new blog.
Translation:
Do you have any love stories which can touch people’s heart? Please post your love story in your blog and let us know how will you propose to your Mr./ Ms Dream. Just like what YAYA did (the name of Nokia girl). We will reward the best two love stories Nokia Supernova cellphones!
People finally realized that this “love story” of Luca and YAYA is created by Nokia. Through using online tools, Nokia successfully completed an e-marketing advertisement!
Given the fact that it has the largest population on the face of the earth, it should come as no surprise that China also has the largest number of internet users. There are presently over 400 million internet users in China, which account for one fifth of the 1.75 billion internet users the world over. Of these users, 176 million are users of social networking sites, and over 280 million are search engine users. Most notably, though, the value of online business transactions in China reached $36.5 billion in 2009. How huge this market is!
Despite the 400 million people who currently use the internet in China, this one billion people who are not yet online, and while it is naive to think that every single person in China will inevitably be an internet user, if internet penetration in China were to reach levels similar to those of the US, this would be an addition of over 600 million users to the web. Of these new users, many would be drawn to online businesses, further expanding an already vibrant and robust market. Most notably, these users will expand the field of potential customers which can be reached through careful advertising.
As the fastest growing economy in the world, China’s real GDP is expected to grow another 60% by the year 2014, bringing even more disposable income to the rapidly increasing number of internet users in China. Does it make any sense to not reach out to this group through internet marketing? By learning to effectively employ Chinese search engines, being culturally sensitive in how you target a foreign audience, and learning to navigate the language barrier, a relatively modest investment of time and effort may pay dividends later. For example, by simply translating the homepage on your website into Mandarin to encourage people to conduct business with you in English, your page will be able to appear in Chinese search engines.
Therefore, with China’s rapidly expanding economy and internet user base, it only makes sense to venture forth into Chinese e-marketing.
What’s IN Magazine is our current client for COMM464 E-Marketing’s term project. It is a local-based (Vancouver-based) lifestyle and entertainment magazine which is young and full of surprises. I have never heard of this magazine before until my team members decided to do online marketing plan for it. “umm, this magazine has a cool name” it is my first impression of it. I am not sure whether “IN” means “fashionable” in North America, but it has the meaning of “fashionable”, “cool” in Asia.
I remember my first time to navigate its website is in the mid of January this year. As I mention above, it is a young magazine and its website looks simple at that time with just a few pictures, no video, and most advertisement spots are vacant. Obviously, it has to establish its reputation in Vancouver and let more people, especially Chinese know it. According to the website visibility report of its website, we found that it has fairly low traffic and we know that it might be a big challenge for us to do online marketing plan for such a new magazine.
My team and I organized a meeting with the manager of What’s IN Magazine in the early March. It was a rainy day and the company is located far from Burnaby city center. I can not forget this trip since it took me almost 30 mins walking to the company in rainy day after I got off from the bus. Honestly, as undergraduates, we never expected that our project client would have such a high expectation of our work. Steve, the manager of the magazine, patiently listened to our proposal of marketing plan and introduced its current business situation. He was open to our questions and treated us with respect. Suddenly I felt that I am doing the real marketing work for this company. It was so “IN” !
After that meeting, we kept in touch with Steve and modify our plan for almost a month. Today when I browse its website, I am so proud that it has created a fantastic website for readers. I watched all videos of celebrities’ interviews and read most articles on it. I see its fast growth and thus I really want to share my feeling with my friends.
Now you can get the free magazine in most Chinese restaurants and the other public places. Hope you guys enjoy reading it.
I cannot stop thinking about my career every night before I fall asleep recently since it is the countdown for my graduation. I am quite sure that most 4th year undergraduates seem NOT ready for the challenges of establishing their own career. Majoring in both Finance and Marketing, I did internship in financial industries last two years. However, I feel that I am not so interested in being a banker or broker. I know many junior undergraduate may dream about working in investment banks, trust me, it is not as funny as you think and it is difficult to succeed unless you can sacrifice your time and life for it. Since I know working in investment bank is not what I want, I start to look for the other opportunities.
In this last semester of my university study, I chose to take an e-marketing course. With more knowledge of e-marketing accumulated, I kinda find the most suitable and starting point of my career.The other marketing course that I am taking right now is Marketing Application. I conducted a consumer survey regarding the dietitian service. One question in this survey asks about the way people seek for a dietitian. What out of our expectation is that most respondents reflected that they would seek for a good dietitian through either referrals or searching online (top 2 choices). See, the online marketing has changed the way people think and do. In past, consumers usually establish the trust and loyality of one product through their family and friends, this is what we know the original Would of Mouth Marketing. However, the development and evolution of Internet brought the great opportunities for most businesses. Since more and more people being attracted by Internet and started their trip online, the original Mouth of Word Marketing has moved to the Internet.
Everyday, every minute and every second, there are hundreds and thousands news being published online. People communicate each other conveniently and efficiently. Blogs, forum, chatting rooms, these online communication tools establish the strong connection between people. Now you can imagine that how fast people can share their experiences of one product online and how important their comments to your business.
In the Youtube video above, Stephanie Leffler, the senior VP of Network Solutions and Ryan Blair, the CEO of Pathconnect.com discussed about the power of online marketing and shared their experiences of how they succeed through conducting the marketing campaign by using the Internet. Hope you guys enjoy it.
DANGDANG.COM is a leading business-to-consumer e-commerce company in China, it announced the launch of its e-book platform in China at the end of last year. Many people say that DANGDANG.COM copyed AMAZON.COM. I don’t think so. In today’s e-business era, any successful online business strategy can be spread to every corner of the world.
Dangdang provides approximately 50,000 book titles in the initial launch of the e-book platform at e.dangdang.com. After online payment, customers can download the digital content using Dangdang’s free applications on iPhone(TM), iPad(TM) and Android(TM) devices or read online on their PCs.
“We are excited to break new ground with the launch of the e-book platform for our customers as we believe that the addition of digital content to our comprehensive online offerings will greatly enhance our customers’ online shopping experience and satisfaction,” said Guoqing Li, CEO of Dangdang. “We are positive about the e-book market in China. While we expect the revenue contribution from e-book sales to be modest initially, we believe that e-books will strengthen our leading position in the online book retailing market and play an increasingly important role in our media segment going forward.”
(the Founders of DANGDANG.COM)
On its website dangdang.com, the Company offers more than 680,000 books and other media products as well as selected general merchandise products including beauty and personal care products, home and lifestyle products, baby, children and maternity products, apparel, digital and electronics products. It also operates the dangdang.com marketplace program, which allows third-party merchants to sell their products alongside products sourced by the Company. Dangdang’s nationwide fulfillment and delivery capabilities, high-quality customer service support and scalable technology infrastructure enable it to provide a compelling online shopping experience to customers.
The IPO of DANGDANG.COM on NASDAQ reveals that the successful business model can be copied and modified. Internet provides a large platform for everyone doing business. Through obtaining the deep understanding of how Internet works, we would grasp the opportunity of succeed.
My Canadian friend who is learning Chinese and fascinated with Chinese culture once asked me: How to get involved in China? Any shortcuts to learn its culture and make Chinese friends? I told him that he should try register an account on Sina Weibo.
Many people may not know what Sina Weibo is. If I told you that it is akin Twitter in China, now you get it.
Sina Weibo, established in 2009, belongs to China’s largest Internet portal Sina Corp. The social site has more than 140 million registered users and is expected to hit 200 million by year-end. Weibo is the literal translation for microblog and is often referred to as a Twitter-clone for China.
Sina Weibo took less than two years to gain half the 300 million users five-year-old Twitter has today. Weibo is only available in Chinese now, whereas Twitter has rolled out in America, Europe, Japan, and Korea.
While Twitter announced its own photo sharing service last year, Sina Weibo already has a feature-rich interface that allows users to embed and repost photos, videos, participate in polls and thread comments to encourage group conversations – features that brands could use to create buzz and engage fans.
Sina’s national GM Li Xiang said one of the company’s plans is to help businesses create commercial opportunities on Weibo. More than 30,000 businesses are on Sina Weibo from McDonald’s and Starbucks to beauty and sports categories such as Maybelline, Clinique, Adidas, Nike, and even luxury brands like Burberry and Cartier.In May 2011, Unilever used Sina Weibo as its key activation platform to kick off a three-month campaign for Dove, inviting millions of Chinese women to share their personal beauty stories. Weibo’s commercial features include display, location-based services, community, video, and apps.
Moreover, many registered Weibo users also open their online retail shop on it. Weibo created a big net for Chinese people all around the world. Most retail business on Weibo are “Purchasing Overseas for You” which means Chinese people who live overseas use Weibo to contact the buyers in mainland who want to buy foreign products, especially luxury brands, such as Chanel and LV. Through communicating on Weibo, people who live overseas go and purchase luxury products for people live in mainland and send the product back to China. This short selling chain grows fast recently and become one of the hottest topics among Chinese people overseas.
In today’s e-Commerce era, our marketing prospects on the Internet are different from the norm. As Byron Abels-Smit of Aspen Media said, “The Internet is not just a new medium, but a new kind of medium. It’s like when television was new, at first advertisers treated it like print or radio. Early TV commercials were just type and a voiceover. That only changed as people learned how to effectively use television for marketing. Newspaper rules didn’t apply for TV. In the same way, print media and TV rules don’t apply to the Internet.” That is why we should gather a deep understanding of Internet this new kind of media as soon as possible.
Usually when a business uses both traditional advertisements and salesmen, these two complement each other in the process of selling: the mass media advertisements can help the company reach a large pool of customers, while the salesmen offer customer information and process sales transactions. Therefore, most businesses need a blend of mass media and salesmen to have a complete marketing capability. However, this is not the whole story of Internet-based marketing. In other words, the power of Internet is larger than the combination of mass media and salesmen. It can reach a large pool of customers, provide information and process the sales transaction by itself. For these reasons, I think that the Internet is more a market than a communications medium. It is a market and a medium both.
Internet marketing is about communication and interaction, the foundations of emotional intimacy, If we understood the Internet, we could use it to build a stronger emotional bond between customers and us. In traditional marketing media, prospects don’t take our communications as personally as they do on the Internet. This intense involvement can lead to intense responses. This can be good, but the emotionality is also what leads to flames and anger as well. Internet customers can be more volatile than the normal customers since the transactions are tightly relied on the trust. That is why it is especially important for all marketing people to learn about “Online Netiquette”.
For more information of Online Netiquette, there is one article on UBC ssc for us to read.
http://ctlt.ubc.ca/distance-learning/learner-support/communicating-online-netiquette/
EXTRAPETITE.COM is a blog created by an Asian girl Jean since 2009. Jean is fascinated with clothing design and teaching young girls how to wear in various occasions. It is a successful example of how people promote themselves on Internet. I think Jean would never imagine that her blog will become so popular in 3 years. So far, she has created Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Bloglovin’, and RSS and attracted 4700 fans on her blog and 5299 fans give “like” on her Facebook page.
Jean regularly posts blogs to teach young girls how to wear. She is a big fan of online shopping, thus most of her clothes are shopped from several online shopping websites. In her blogs, she also posts the link of all those online shopping websites to guide her fans how to select the most appropriate and not expensive clothes. Her rich experience of online shopping helps her own career in EXTRAPETITE.COM. Most of her fans follows her styles to wear and purchase similar clothes on those online shopping websites. Jean’s blog attracted ELLE’s attention. As one of the most fashionable brands, ELLE invited Jean to work with its fashion team.
Jean also posts many dress design and makeup tutorial videos on YouTube which enhance the communication with fans. From texts and photos to videos, Internet helps Jean promote herself efficiently and effectively. This is how magic the online business is. It offers opportunities of succeed to everyone, no matter you have star face or not. If you paid attention on it and followed its development, the Internet would also be your best assistant in your business.
In the first class of COMM 464, we discussed about the evolution of Internet and how the Internet influence on our daily life. It does not only provide fast searching and large database but also changed the way of our living style.
People who were born during 1980s are called “Internet Generation”. Indeed, we started to make friend with Internet when we were young. I still remember the first time I search on Internet, my uncle who had oversea education introduced me this fancy net. He told me that when he studies in US, he used Internet a lot for searching information and entertainment. However, at that time, Internet was not as popular in China as it was in Western countries. Now when I looked back, I am so surprised of the super fast development of Internet in China. With more and more China-based website went public in Nasdaq, such as Alibaba.com, Sina.com, this old and traditional Eastern country welcomes the Internet and opens to the world.
So far, shopping online has become one of the most important and popular ways to most Chinese young people. Taobao.com, one of the most successful B2C online shopping website in China, had generated over $40 billion RMB in 2010. Founded by Alibaba Group in May 10th 2003, Taobao developes B2C and C2C retail through providing a platform for businesses and individuals to open online retail stores. Since Taobao.com launched in China, its consumer base expanded from mainland China to Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. It stands out as the giant of retail platform in Asia now.
Taobao.com is one of the successful online business examples in China. During recent decade, online business has “invaded” to every corner of the world. Online business has benefited from both advanced technology and logistics development. Its future development is positively expected.
From this short video, we can see that how fast the Internet developed. The series of data shows this change vividly. Hope you guys enjoy it!
