First day at my internship!

What a short day today was. I had a meeting, today with my manager about the objectives that we are going to accomplish and show that initially I am going to go through historical data on their analytics as we go on to the new and improved page which will be mobile friendly. My job is to see what is being looked at and what is bouncing so we can integrate it into reports. unfortunately my four hour work day was cut short to a one hour meeting and tour because my computer wasnt ready yet so they couldn't get me in the game luckily I will be ready for tomorrow and will report more on that. As even when the class is over I will keep up on my blog.

Connecting

Connecting is a big thing to accomplish in business. I find the one thing that analytics cant show is if the user got what they were looking for. So that is when in-person networking comes in to play you come in to contact with that person to see what they think.

With that this is where persona play can come in handy when developing your strategy on how you will make this appealing to that specific group that you are trying to appeal to. Still making the appropriate connection still is mandatory to see if what you were trying to initially accomplish is accomplished! So make objectives, do persona research, and connect this will all lead to successful place in the circle of what you do.

Business Advice: How to make a stronger call to action

Wheter you are trying to promote new apps or bring in more leads here is some steps to create a strong call to action.
1.Who is your Target Market? it is good to identify age, gender, shopping habits but this also goes in persona development as well.
2.What does our target market want? It is important to know the needs, wants, and desires of your target i sit to transform their life or is it that app that can make their life that much easier? The easy way of discovering what the market wants is doing keyword search.
3.What do you promise to solve? this is one of the biggest parts in crafting your call to action does your product make your life less chaotic, put order back into things, this all come in to play when making your statement.
4.What do you want your target market to do? after figuring all of the first three steps out, you can put together your call to action. The last step is to give your audience a clear direction what to do. in the end people are really looking at what they want to benefit themselves nothing else matters if you the person does not address that issue.

Internship, and recent happenings

I will start with recently I took my Google Analytics individual qualification exam, and passed! This to me I see as beneficial and maybe open a few more doors. I recently have been accepted as a intern for a company called Internet2. I will be doing their online marketing and web analytics and being certified makes me that more confident that I can do what I have been accomplishing for the past couple semesters. I will post a video on what more they are about and what their mission statements.
This new opportunity I hope will help me get myself established and my foot in the door.

Last of the networking events for the semester

This month I went to two networking events which were both sponsored by SPARK the agenda was simple as stated on the site: 1. Drink coffee 2. Network 3. Eat bagels 4. Network 5. Drink coffee Seems simple enough I managed to talk to a few people but still working on "breaking the ice." I am much better then I have been when I started at the beginning of the semester. The second event was marketing round table where they talked about selling smart and how to pitch your business to make a impact. The big thing about pitching a business is to make sure you know it about them and not you. These networking events have really opened my eyes and helped me "break the ice" and I believe I will continue going to these even after this class just with all the people and experience you can get out of the event.

The benefits of Google+

When Google+ first came out it was by invite only, to me I thought great another Facebook clone. Now in the business world their spikes a huge explosion in Google+. From an article I read Google+ is having people spend longer amounts of time on the site and that means increased traffic. Another perk for users is authorship. By having a Google Plus account allows you to claim authorship of your original content. This keeps your unique and original content valuable and accredited to you, even if content thieves scrape your work. This increases credibility and power, and also increase your search engine recognition. As a business person this can work in your favor. Increasing online presence is not only easy but beneficial in the end if they search you or your company that's what will come up on the first couple searches.

CGI killing movies?

As technology advances The use of CG in movies continue..but is it becoming too much? As long as their has been movie around their has been special effects, I have no problem with them its the fact that are they being utilized to their full potential and can the over use *Michael Bay* ruin the movie going experience? Yes and No, computers have allowed us the people to enjoy many new feats taking us to a new world in Avatar even bring the entire world of Toy Story to life. These are good examples of CG use in movies. No the criticism, as much as I do not like the series The Star Wars prequels are heavily CG based taking much of the credible story and overpowering it with CG and taking higher priorities style over substance and that was never the case with those movies. Another case would be think if the towering franchise of Transformers didn't utilize CG it would be a huge flop because once again style over substance. As the summer blockbusters are coming to a end a array of 3D movies come out hopefully with a CG dominated industry the writing will catch up.

killing two birds with one stone

As the month is coming to a end I need to make up 2 networking events and to my luck 2 events happen on the same day in Ann Arbor I will attend 2 SPARK events to fulfill my networking requirements and hopefully get something out of it. This can be a great experience all the networking events I have been to have been unique and different all in their own way. I recommend that anyone go to these events even if you're not a business major. I had the luxury of bringing my room ate who is a teacher to one of these events just so I had someone I knew there but it helped and led to meeting any different and interesting people. I will do a follow up blog post on how the events went and go into more detail about future events.

Bright future rough road

Recently we had an alumni student from the search marketing come in and talk to the class Alex Merz who now works at Google. He works as the analytical lead for Google LCS team. his big statement was being behind of the learning curve. It is true unfortunate as tech savvy as many people can be the technology that we have is changing everyday. It can be hard to keep up and stay in line with the "next big thing." The main part of his talk was about the industry and how it evolves over time. As I prepare for this internship I have applied for if I am not certain about something the best part about technology is it can be fast learning. The way of showing people how to do things is over as Youtube is slowly taking over the educational platform. I can look it up and learn it fast. In all honesty no business can stay ahead of the curve as most people learn their place in the business what they need to do and how they act upon that way of doing it. As the evolution of tech it is much to hard to stay ahead of the new innovative thing.

Organic vs. Paid which is the best route?

I have been re-reading a text Conversion Optimization by Khalid Saleh and Ayat Shukairy *ill link the book at the end of the blog for those who are interested in purchasing it, I find the most interesting is organic search vs. paid search. Which is the best route to go? For those who do not know what the difference between organic and paid I will break it down. In organic search's that is go to be web pages the closest to the users queries based on relevance. Paid searches are websites owners are paid to display their websites on certain "keywords" the question is what is the best way to go. My research has discovered that organic search is the better way to go as it will be the most relevant to what you are looking for. People tend to end up going with organic to as it is the first thing that pops on on the search engine. This does not rule out paid searches, it is on how you display and sell yourself, to show what you are looking for and that goes into persona's which is another topic. Here is the amazon link for the book if you are interested in finding out more about organic vs. paid

Marketing Consulting Benefits

In a previous blog I talked about marketing advice. This is part two of my advice series, more targeting towards small businesses and marketing consultants. In a big business they usually will have a marketing director or manager. Many small businesses will try to do their own marketing with their dismay no success. Here are some benefits of marketing consulting in small businesses: They can teach team hat they need to know before starting a plan, can determine the medium that will be effective such as social media, and so on. Can benefit of making aware single mistakes with their message and change the call to action, know who to target so you can guarantees to generate revenue this goes with making a persona and picking who to target. The biggest tip is exposure with all the above taken into consideration can lead to great things.

Possible Internship

I have applied for a internship with a group in Ann Arbor Internet2. This opportunity came in my Google Practicum class. They were very fast to respond back and happy for my application. I have a phone interview on July 30. The time gives me time to prep and overlook their site to find out more about them as I did when applying. I have worked in the grocery industry for over ten years. I feel its time to break away and expand my horizons and opportunity at applying what I have learned in the class room as well as learn as much as possible this can allow me to expand my resume but also my skills. I recommend everyone in the class take a hold of the intern opportunities as it helps to get yourself out there and grow.

Networking events I have exprienced in the last month

As the Month of July comes to a clear end I must blog about the networking events I attended last month. I attended the last and my first of the LA2M. It was a very interesting meeting a lot of people and hearing some interesting stories on how people relate the topic of video/media to their jobs. With this in mind I have applied media in my advertising class when filming a commercial, an editing the video. The power the media has is amazing, a lot of people rely on media nowadays you cant execute anything without using a form of media video is the strongest by getting your point across. The other event want officially a "networking" event, I went to the Huron Valley Chamber of commerce meeting and networked with a bunch of local business people by my hometown it was interesting to see the amount of people I already knew from working in retail basic business was discussed followed by coffee afterwords.

Networking

For the past ten years I have worked at a grocery store, not till this class have I realized I have been slowly building a network up. I have many friends and customers who have helped or will help in any situation if it means handing a resume off or even passing it on to other people it is a;ways good to take care of opportunities. What helps is being sociable and finding out as much as possible if a person says they are tired of their job ask what they do? This to e always opens as a gateway and can find out more about their jobs and the person themselves. Reality hits every single day is a networking opportunity, even if its for a couple of seconds the big thing is to get your name out and build up contacts this can be helpful in the big time when finding a job always good to have personal word of mouth and people can do each others favors.

Advice in Marketing

Social media can lead to a lot of benefits for businesses if applied right can be successful. When I see that businesses just have a face book I kinda start losing my mind thinking why stop there. Facebook can be helpful to get yourself noticed, their are a ton of other methods that you can take to make your business even more successful. I would first start with making a simple adwords campaign and make yourself searchable by adding basic keywords that relate to what you do and will be beneficial in the long run. Then take the methods and start a blog/website demonstrating what you do linking the adwords to that page and having a PPC(pay per click). The PPC is great because you can set it how high you want or low and bid on keywords. The hardest part is knowing who you are targeting. Targeting requires knowing who you want to visit your site and advertising on the keywords they will use to find you. After all said and done it is not easy to execute and can take a lot of trial and error. More methods to take start a twitter account this is the easiest thing you can link everything and post special coupons if you do that sort of thing and keep your followers up to date. More social media is available such as tumblr,reddit, and so on. Online marketing is important as stated in the above but also in person marketing is just a successful. Many businesses started out as a word of mouth just building a network and can lead to much success and even much failure just like the PPC it takes a lot of trial and error but can be great in the long run because it is all about "who you know."

Telling A story

I have been doing a lot of research lately on how to present but tell a better story. The biggest advice I found is move beyond the bullet points and story board your ideas. Start with your title what you are and what you represent and set up the audience for who you are. You move to act I who you are inform your audience then your setting, and role of who am I here. After all is said move to Point A the challenges you face followed by a call to action that moves to where you want to be Point B. This al sets up for Act II Develop the action and show what you need to see. Chart all of this out and lead to a resolution. Simply Chart out Act I your setup have your hook and a incident, this leads to Act II Development what are the stakes. All leads to the resolution of what the aftermath should be. Follow all of this and should lead to a good story or put on the right track.

Update On NPO

I am working with a great NPO called Team continuum, their mission statement is "The Mission of Team Continuum is twofold. We provide immediate and vital non-medical assistance to cancer patients and their families when the diagnosis results in disruption, hardship and uncertainty in their everyday lives. We also provide funding to health care facilities and foundations, to enhance the delivery of care, communication and educational services for cancer patients". Team continuum hosts a NYC marathon and each member raises money for the cause. The ultimate goal of the site is to have people sign up for the race itself. That was the first problem I noticed when coming to the site they have a donate button on the top but no sign up. I went through and clicked on Join the team, it takes you to a new page with a statement and a button that says "Join Now." This was rewarding thinking ok just one click, it takes you to another page with a very unnoticeable join team button. This explains why the goals are not being made to register for the race cause after the unnoticeable button it takes you to another page and a register button is there. This type of page causes a really high bounce rate and people will not sign up for the race. I ultimately sent a email to the head and gave some creative criticism, she agreed with everything I said and will talk to the people who run her site to see what can be changed. This is a great step forward and hopefully will bring much success to Team Continuum.

The Power of Twitter

With the incoming semester I have been building my online presence network as well as physical. When blogging, posting articles on google+, tweeting it is all about selling yourself. Blogging and Google plus I understand what about twitter? The significance of twitter is amazing. An article I read stated "Twitter for businesses, most discussions revolve around the relationship of businesses with consumers: marketing to, interacting with and attracting individuals." Now with twitter there is ads in itself and relating to what your looking at and tweeting about so it will get you to click on that product. The future of twitter, I believe that eventually all sales can be conducted on twitter which I believe is happening as we speak. Twitter has a large Business to Business audience. Most are on twitter searching, researching interacting and looking for opportunities to sell, direct traffic to the B2B website and drive tweets to the B2B brands. This comes in with one of my previous blog posts about inbound marketing which I believe you all should read.

Project Loon

Google has recently unleashed a high pressure balloon that is apparently going to bring internet to over 5 billion users who do not or never experienced the internet. This to me I find amazing as a single solar powered balloon experiment just to see if they can connect the unconnected. This proves that Google are the true innovators of the technology world, in my opinion they are doing what Apple failed to do and bring new and unscene inventions the Google glass, now project loon *I'm calling Google balloon. Google is on a winning streak. If this works this could change the way the internet works and if this is the way of internet could their finally be other reigning services either then comcast or would it open-endedly be free?

Possible opportunity for inbound marketing?

I have worked at a gourmet grocery store for almost over ten years. I have seen a lot of changes as they finally created a facebook, I glanced to see the work they have done. The facebook is mostly used to keep up on sales and special dates coming up. Until this class I have never thought about possibilities it could bring. Then I thought Why not twitter, Pinterest? with twitter they can keep updates, and possible monthly coupons for their twitter followers and it will be more mobile friendly. Throughout the store the have recipes posted why not Pinterest? If they use Pinterest this could increase searchability as well as a adwords account and analytics. This could bring great opportunity for the company itself and myself.

Personal Update

This month has been a crazy month busy with work and school. The non-profits I have been working with have been responsive one technical issue with team continuum. The campaigns are still pretty new and as I read and learn about more methods and each NPO has their own persona. The ann arbor hands on museum the persona of the person is more hip, interested in things and how they work they are more logical and like to read up on things before actually going. The next NPO Dream catchers for abused children the persona is more caring the person on this site would logically be looking for a hotline, real stories, how to deal and cope with people who have been abused, and or being abused. The last NPO is team Continuum a NYC marathon, this persona is more caring as well as they are dedicated to giving back to the community as all donations go to the NPO also cancer foundations. As for networking this month I plan to go to LA2M as well, as whatever pop up on to eventbright. This has been very helpful and interesting to meet the different people and connect with them as I learn more about each person and industry.

Inbound Marketing

Today I went to the Donuts and Inbound marketing Webinar/networking event. This event was one of the most fun and interesting events I have been to so far this semester. It was held at the Whole Brain Group in Ann Arbor. The main focus was Inbound Marketing which we have been demonstrating through our class with our non-profits. It amazed me at how much I knew and have already accomplished through previous experiences. The main focus of the seminar was inbound marketing and I will do a brief summary of some of the main points that we went over in the seminar. The main goal is know your target, and how you can pull the target in with methods such as, content creation, search marketing, and social media. You want to Create content that will make the consumer want your page then get found using search marketing techniques and optimized keywords, and sharing posts what Bonnie said like Finding Nemo "keep on swimming keep on swimming" but instead "keep on blogging keep on blogging." The next step is landing page optimization and establishing a relationship by having a clear call to action. After your call to action comes the "funnel" that we have mentioned many times in our search marketing class with the top of the funnel being just looking to the bottom ready to buy. Then when all said is done you can review your analysis and adjust when needed. After the seminar I had a great conversation with Bonnie Valentine, the speaker and director of sales and marketing consultant for the company made a good connection and hope to keep in contact with my progress of the year. Overall Grade A event. A brief chart of inbound marketing.

Integration Alliance Linkedin Rockstar!!

Here is a brief intro of what I experienced today:

I got to meet Mike O' Neil the self proclaimed LinkedIn rockstar. He and a bunch of other people enlightened me on the way of how to properly use linkedin and what steps I could take to further making my profile "not suck." The biggest discussion was taking your linkedin profile and translating it into different languages so that if people from different countries would like to do global buisiness thye could read and understand the linkedin profile. The meeting itself was interesting, the group was further impressed as I was the only student there finding the event on my phone app Eventbrite they were very happy that, the event was getting out in the open.
As the time went on they asked what towns they should visit next as they were leaving Michigan, Grand Rapids, and Ann Arbor were mentioned as the student body would be able to benifit this great networking oppertunity. Mike told me what to take in on the LinkedIn and encouraged I throw him an email and will help me out as much as he can. In conclusion overall I call this event a great experience being my first event EVER.

Everything is going mobile

I notice every day that, everything is getting an app, if not converting to mobile. The world of smartphones and where they have developed is astonishing. The smartphones have defiantly effected on how people operate on an everyday scale of life from observation people go from texting to actually doing business, on the phone just by a push of a couple of buttons. I believe eventually that the credit card will be gone and it will be all mobile just have to put your phone up to the screen and it will transfer funds to person you are purchasing this.
The galaxy has demonstrated by people facing screens at each other so they can transfer pictures. I will sit and wait for the astonishing big developments that the mobile technology can bring and if not late soon you will have to have a smartphone for people who reluctant as it is a common need in technology to do almost anything now a days.

Networking events here I come

So due to work scheduling it is very hard for me to get to some of these events. After having a chat with my manager she would adjust as needed but to my luck the 2 days that I am not there their are events!! I just registered for this Detroits Linkedin Rockstar networking hopefully this is good and not a wild goose chase. The second event is Donuts and inbound marketing hosted in Ann arbor and is highly search marketing oriented.
These events should be interesting and hopefully if not open some doors enlighten my views on how the world is run by people who actually have an idea on what the heck they are doing. Thus said I will blog about both events after they happen compare the two to see where it leads me up to the experience.

NPO contact

This week has been a busy but successful week. I emailed all of the NPO's that I am working with this semester to introduce myself and ask what they would be looking for and how I looked forward to working with them this coming semester. In the past I have worked with Dream catchers before their site is interesting but at the same time I believe they can accomplish a lot.
The other groups from experience I hear they are wonderful people I have lots of ideas and hope to be able to contribute what I have learned throughout my courses at emu to the real life scenarios.

Networking oppertunities

Some opportunities that I can take this semester to network as much as possible. The big thing to do is the LA2M luncheon Wednesday event that takes apart and highly recommended to go. Biggest thing about networking is breaking the ice and being comfortable with people. I believe the easiest way just break out and tell a joke.
Another event is the Ann Arbor Spark, this event can be able to bring myself and learn as much I can from people. What I learned from a speaker if you feel uncomfortable to go "just go" if you cant talk or tell your story talk about "restaurants or movies"

Networking strategy

This is my first blog post. I will be using this blog to keep track of oppertunities this semester to have networking. I will achieve this by going to live network events, and posting about what I see and who I meet via this blog, twitter, as well as Google +, to follow the people I meet. I am honestly not much of a "tweeter" but we will see how that changes with this semester.