Yesterday is 11^th November, Singles’ Day in China. Alibaba reported more than $9 billion in sales on that day, illustrating the buying power of the Chinese consumer and the importance of the event in the retail calendar. Alibaba turned Singles’ Day, a Nov. 11 Chinese response to Valentine’s Day, into an online shopping festival in 2009. I think the most successful thing that Alibaba did is that they recognized the commercial potential of that date. Alibaba had sales of 35 billion RMB during last year’s festival, and it increases rapidly to 571 RMB this year. The reason of that Alibaba become successful is too complex, but I am going to talk about why Nov.11 is become a national shopping carnival and Alibaba earn such huge profit.

TianMao is the platform, similar to Taobao, for retailers and customers to buy or sell online. The advantage of TianMao is that nearly all products have guarantee of being quality goods, so the reputation is better. Therefore, suspicion of products that are discounted has begun to dissipate for customers. Making them feel really save money contracts more people choose to buy what they want on that day. Unless millions of small retailers, there are many famous business join TianMao to expand their markets. That is another reason to attract people shopping on TianMao.

11^th Nov is a quite interesting day in China; it’s called Single’s Day to against the Valentines’ Day. So the feeling of the public is delicate, and people like to teasing others or even themselves who are single. In short, this is a national amusement day. Choosing this day and copyrighting the “Double 11” are both very clever idea to stimulate customer power and protect profit.

But I think the media promotion also helps Alibaba to achieve this success. On the one hand, it does help to save money; on the other hand, the advertisement, we call it “preheating period”, is very successful. People are attracted to buy things they want to buy but haven’t buy because products are cheaper on 11^th Nov in first year. Now it more likes a “habit” for the public. As people may more and more attention on it, Alibaba becomes more and more profitable on TianMao.

However, there are lots of complains appears as well. People thought businesses on TianMao are not honest enough. Sometimes those retailers only discount several yuan or raise the price first then discount it later. Although it happens every year, but people still want to buy for saving money. Another problem is that it causes high pressure on expressage. Even biggest express businesses like SF Express, Yuan tong Express can hardly afford the work. Some express in large cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Changsha may be paralyzed.

I always know the huge purchasing power of Chinese people, but this year Alibaba makes me realized how rich of Chinese people are, lol.

“This week, U.S. President Barack Obama waded into the discussion, laying down a forceful argument for protection of so called “net neutrality,” a principle that says all Internet traffic should be treated the same and service providers should not be able to give preferential treatment to some content.”

When I saw this news on BBC, I am even not sure what does net neutrality really mean. Here is the definition —- This is the idea that all legal traffic on the Web should be treated equally and that ISPs should not slow down or speed up certain content. Supporters believe that “net neutrality” could bring all content equally like ISPs with no superior services to those content providers who have ability to pay more.

But why people do not fight for it in North America, like Canada? I did some research and found that in Canada, ISPs have long been treated as common carriers. Sometimes the carriers earn undue advantages, like the Telecommunications Act bars carriers from unjustly discriminating against any person or giving anyone even including them. This would make it difficult for a carrier to enter into deals to give content companies “fast lanes.”

PS: Because I have no idea about Canada’s business environment, but I do am interesting on it. I want to do more research on it and remember myself to ask further ideas to classmates maybe.

Have you ever seen something like famous bloggers can post advertisement to their followers and earn the money from that business? I don’t know very well about foreign social network, but it is a common phenomenon in China, especially in Weibo (like Facebook). I have a problem about it recently. Because I am a writer for a magazine, so I have many followers. A makeup business want me help to advertise them online and I could earn 2000 yuan about it. I said no but it makes me be interested in this kind of advertising type.

I found that many famous bloggers do this for earning money. But what I also found is that even many followers read it or even repost it, few people finally buy it. Although it cannot actually increase sales but businesses always do that. When bloggers choose to advertise business, he or she will face problems like reducing followers or make your followers feel disgust. Therefore, some clever bloggers choose to write some funny stories with pictures to make people read it. However, people become more sensitive about advertisements and more acute, so they can find any blind advertisements. To maintain their followers, most bloggers post many funny short stories and hype their goods by the lottery.

Some bloggers have their own shops online, and use this platform to advertise their goods. I think it is kind of unethical way to selling products. Generally, these kind of bloggers are good-looking and they are the models of their products like clothes in common, followers will buy it because they love that blogger but the quality of goods are bad sometimes.

This is a story happens in my life and I thought it can link to business. I would never do that but I thought how they really run the business and who are the advertising team is quite interesting to think about.

Yesterday is 11^th November, Singles’ Day in China. Alibaba reported more than $9 billion in sales on that day, illustrating the buying power of the Chinese consumer and the importance of the event in the retail calendar. Alibaba turned Singles’ Day, a Nov. 11 Chinese response to Valentine’s Day, into an online shopping festival in 2009. I think the most successful thing that Alibaba did is that they recognized the commercial potential of that date. Alibaba had sales of 35 billion RMB during last year’s festival, and it increases rapidly to 571 RMB this year. The reason of that Alibaba become successful is too complex, but I am going to talk about why Nov.11 is become a national shopping carnival and Alibaba earn such huge profit.

TianMao is the platform, similar to Taobao, for retailers and customers to buy or sell online. The advantage of TianMao is that nearly all products have guarantee of being quality goods, so the reputation is better. Therefore, suspicion of products that are discounted has begun to dissipate for customers. Making them feel really save money contracts more people choose to buy what they want on that day. Unless millions of small retailers, there are many famous business join TianMao to expand their markets. That is another reason to attract people shopping on TianMao.

11^th Nov is a quite interesting day in China; it’s called Single’s Day to against the Valentines’ Day. So the feeling of the public is delicate, and people like to teasing others or even themselves who are single. In short, this is a national amusement day. Choosing this day and copyrighting the “Double 11” are both very clever idea to stimulate customer power and protect profit.

But I think the media promotion also helps Alibaba to achieve this success. On the one hand, it does help to save money; on the other hand, the advertisement, we call it “preheating period”, is very successful. People are attracted to buy things they want to buy but haven’t buy because products are cheaper on 11^th Nov in first year. Now it more likes a “habit” for the public. As people may more and more attention on it, Alibaba becomes more and more profitable on TianMao.

However, there are lots of complains appears as well. People thought businesses on TianMao are not honest enough. Sometimes those retailers only discount several yuan or raise the price first then discount it later. Although it happens every year, but people still want to buy for saving money. Another problem is that it causes high pressure on expressage. Even biggest express businesses like SF Express, Yuan tong Express can hardly afford the work. Some express in large cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Changsha may be paralyzed.

I always know the huge purchasing power of Chinese people, but this year Alibaba makes me realized how rich of Chinese people, lol.

SalesITV has been an Australian company that is the leader of online sales and face-to-face coaching since 2008. This year, it decided to switch to HubSpot to improve its customer service as a global provider of sales.

At first, SalesITV did do very successfully on expanding globally. It tended to use their website as the primary generation tool for their business to scale. but its existing platform limited their efficiency. As a result, in 2014, its new marketing leader Adam Wiggins qualified different platforms and finally decided switching to HubSpot. Because of HubSpot’s ease of use, within first six months, SalesITV has seen marked growth in terms of web traffic, leads and revenue generated. On their website, traffic grew tenfold, leads increased 30% and as a result of inbound leads, they’ve generated over $80K in revenue since March 2014.

Why everything changed a lot after SalesITV switching to HubSpot? In my opinion, the key is that it drives more customers for the business. Adam perfectly follows HubSpot practices and customer resources to develop different segments of buyers and represent the types of people SalesITV should mainly market or sell to. Therefore the target market with exact strategy is more specific. HubSpot also helps visitors to their official website. SalesITV can use various channels like HubSpot SEO, Blog and Campaigns app to easily create new market and drive new trends of sales. Adam says, “It takes minimal time to upload and format a blog article into HubSpot. This allows us to spend quality time on what matters to our prospects and clients  – the content itself.” I think it’s a quite good way to advertise itself and let more people know about it. SalesITV post one blog everyday to introduce their products and maintain peoples’ attention about it.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2014/11/11/why-facebook-forced-users-to-download-a-separate-messenger-app/

As a Chinese student, I began to use Facebook 2 month ago. Within our business plan group, we choose Messengers as the connect tool.

Then I wonder why FB makes Messenger as a separate App instead of put it in main mobile app like Weibo did in China. I did some research on it, and I found many users were outraged because they did not want to use a separate app for messaging. “The reason why we wanted to do this is because we really believe that this is a better experience and we think that messaging is becoming increasingly important. And messaging was this behavior that people were doing more and more. There are more than 10 billion messages sent every day on Facebook, said Zuckerberg.

Therefore, I think the Messenger turning off the main mobile does not make sense, which means this movement is not important; the most important thing is that Zuckerberg wanted to create pure instant-messaging software. It takes time for users to be used to using it as a separate app.

However, I am afraid there are some problems for Messengers as a user. First, it takes about few seconds for users to go to a new separate tab, as most people users connect with are their Facebook friends. I do not think it is convenient enough for users, so the quicker switching or better connection of Facebook is very necessary in short time. Second, users may more rely on other mature messaging apps like Whatsapp, Wechat in Asia, or iMessage on their phones.

This movement of FB seems like it is not efficient enough, but I understand forcing users to switch to the separate Messenger app will be better in the long run. Every time you receive a message from FB, you should go to Messengers and this reminds you that Messengers is a messaging app that you used a lot. People will be used to use it one day because all his or her Facebook friends are there. Messengers would be a successful app in the long run as it has already got strong user basis.

At last, whether you like it or not, now that Facebook Messenger passed 500 million monthly active users and the Facebook-owned Whatsapp messaging app said that it hit 600 million active users as of August 2014; it means that Facebook’s messaging apps have over 1 billion aggregate monthly users.

Several days ago, there are two alumni came to our class and told us about their business stories. I was quite moved at that time.

I did not ask any question but I really love the suggestion that Carla gave us. Writing skill is really important. It makes me worry as well. Because I am an international student, so my English cannot be as good as native speaker and I do not understand many culture here. Official language and format is harder than daily language, I should overcome it. What Carla also says is very useful; she said writing should be specific and direct language. I think whether in Chinese or English, this is the key to writing working things. Some one asked them how to overcome difficulties that they first join a company. They both said you should learn what your leader has done, their working styles, how they communicate with employees and colleagues. I strongly agree with that. Learning more may cause less mistakes. Different leader has different working styles.

They are adults who have already enter this society and realized its brutality. They do well and seems like enjoy their job and life. I think I will choose logistics or HR for major but I am not sure now. I hope I could find a job that I enjoy it even it is tough.