Online Marketing Strategies For WPI Venture Forum

In the last blog, I mentioned one of the purposes of venture forum, is for people to networking and communicating their ideas. However, venture forum also contains more important mission – gather entrepreneurs, investors and sponsors at one place at one time. That means, all the parties can obtain what they are looking for. Most of the sponsors are business lawyers, and patent lawyers. Another important group of people who compose the forum that I want to point out here are the volunteers. They are acting as representatives, marketers, organizers, etc. Without volunteers, it will be hard to run such big events.

From the information I have collected on the internet, WPI Venture Forum was founded on 1990. As a WPI employee or student, we are free to go to the WPI Venture Forum. For alums, the admission fee is $15. However, other people need to pay $99 individual membership fee or $250 membership fee to attend the event. Those are the major ways how WPI Venture Forum earns its revenues.

Since it is not a non-profit organization, online marketing should be the best way to promote this program. The first suggestion I want to give here is to strength the search engine marketing (SEM). One of the methods we discussed in the class was about keyword search – use key works for links, so that search engine such as Google and Bing can be easily detected. Also, although we can be easily guided to WPI School of Business webpage through a link on WPI Venture Forum, it would be more convenient, efficient, and noticeable to do the other way around.

Secondly, word of mouth (WOM) affects a lot! In order to generate awareness for the audiences, social media marketing (SMM) is essential. Here I want to use MIT-CHIEF (MIT- China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum) as a reference. This organization holds some activity such as giving out MIT-CHIRF t-shirt for those targeted audiences who twittering about the WPI Venture Forum events. This is a really smart method to do the referral marketing online.

Another online marketing is to set up a community in WPI Venture Forum official website to let people express their thoughts and comments for such event. Some people may argue that online community may be not healthy for intellectual property (IP) or patent especially for entrepreneurs. However, I want to say that the community can set up some rules about the words, so that people there only can discuss about the ideas that is on the table. Moreover, entrepreneurs can absorb more useful advices through such community. The biggest advantage for this community is to networking – not like normal social networking websites, WPI Venture Forum Community gather professional business people together in the same region, with same interests and preference in a casual way.

The final advice I want to give here is to post some successful cases on the websites – not necessary the confidential documents, but some summary of examples. Just like white paper on technical companies’ websites, to show the expertise and profession. As I noticed before, WPI Venture Forum used to post online video on its official websites to show the events. It is an effective way to allure and trigger the interest for audiences who have the desire to attend such events, and it would be nice for them to keep doing this.

Reference:

WPI Venture Forum

http://www.wpiventureforum.org/index.html

Kevin Barrett, Matthew Fiore, Mark Thomas, Caitlin Wood. WPI Venture Forum: A Market Analysis

https://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-032007-102844/unrestricted/MQP_Venture_forum.pdf

How To Put Idea To Implementation

WPI Venture Forum is a really extraordinary activity for our School of Business students. The topic of this Venture Form is “An idea, what’s next?” The main speech is provided by Prof. Sturtevant from MIT, who is a co-founder at project 11. He had many practical experiences turning ideas into realities. I am very impressed by his elaboration of the steps an entrepreneur should take after generating an idea:

i.                     Have hope

ii.                   Turn hope into evidence

iii.                  Build a business model canvas

iv.                 Generate a value flow model, and make a list of assumptions

v.                   Make hypotheses of your plan

vi.                 Test and measure the hypotheses

vii.                Keep track of the hard questions

The most impressive part of his keynote is the hypotheses part – he spent quarter of his time on this section. Prof. Sturtevant took four companies as examples; they are PACT, Zagster, and Fashion Project. He illustrated how those companies made hypotheses for their business plan and assumptions as well as the way they tested the hypotheses. Those real cases are really helpful for further understanding of how to turn a business idea into real.

Following the lecture, there was a case illustration presented by InfoBionic. It is a newly founded medical device company. Moreover, the medical device manufactured by this company also related to IT field – they also develop information technology, but focus on healthcare. InfoBionic invent three main products for patients to monitor their arrhythmia through using could technology. This characteristic makes the company complicated and hard to identify the value proposition at first place. However, the bright side is that the gap that InfoBionic filled is innovative and unprecedented.

Those keynote and case illustration remind me of one of the courses I took last year, which was called ETR500. We used the text book “Entrepreneurship for Scientists and Engineers”. This course elaborated how to successfully start up a business for entrepreneurs, especially in technology field. From what I have heard and read, applying for a patent is one of the most important steps during doing a new business. Also, someone asked how to do the initial research for a new business, and one of the guest speakers mentioned that networking is very important – since it can bring you to a larger audience once you know some people. In my point of view, the events such as WPI Venture Forum are great ways for us to networking and know more business people.

Impact of Internet for Economic Value and Social Value

“Economic Value of the Advertising-Supported Internet Ecosystem” is a very detailed report that is too long for me to read, especially in the electronic format, so that it almost cost me a day to read through it. After reading this report, I was astonished by how great impact the internet has to the ecosystem of business. This is a report very deeply analyzed the economic even social changes that were brought by internet. Also, the study provides some insights for the future trend of internet. There are huge amounts of data in this report which is gathered from U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Those data is so comprehensive to include all industries and businesses related to the internet.

Internet is a very profound science, which is supported by many elements. In order to connect to the internet, hardware such as servers, routers, broadband and computer is essential. Apart from the hardware, software also plays an important role. Moreover, the purpose of internet should be seriously considered; otherwise, no one will use the internet. I am very impressed by the CREC (Center for Research in Electronic Commerce) Model of the Internet Ecosystem. The whole study is organized throughout the four layers in that model – internet infrastructure layer, internet applications layer, internet intermediary layer, and internet commerce layer. The authors collected hundreds of data to dig inside those four layers. From my understanding, infrastructure here refers to the hardware while the application is all about the software. Similarly, intermediary means consumer support, and commerce here is close to the consumer services.

During reading the study, there are two things that were out of my expectations. The first thing is that although each layer of internet ecosystem creates thousands of jobs and generates millions of revenues, it still benefits people more from the minor layers below those four layers. The companies grew fastest is not the ones like Facebook or Twitter, but the ones that support for those famous firms. This finding is beyond my imagination, because all I can think of is that the internet must drive the usage of the high-profile brands, however, I have not concerned those behind the leading companies.

Another thing about internet that surprised me from the data that provided by this report is that the number of employment for infrastructure is far more than the application in 2011, which is totally opposite to the situation in 2007. As the report suggested in chapter 4, the estimation of the employment is conservative, and a large part of them are part-time workers, or even under-employed. There are few large companies like Microsoft and Symantec Corporation. Compared with application, because there are more branches under infrastructure, companies involved in different fields in hardware (including internet access, cable providers, and mobile networks, etc.) appear to be a lot more than the software companies. Hence, the number of employment is increasing dramatically recent years.

Through the facts and data in this study, it is not hard to see that internet is a so powerful technology that creates thousands of jobs and huge amount of revenues. There are so many benefits for using internet – i) the cost is low, ii) it is easy to do the business with people around the world, iii) it enhances creativity and entrepreneurship, iv) it is a perfect way for social activity, v) it drives the usage of mobile and tablets. The most important part is, while internet increases the economic value of business, it also stimulates the social value for people. Meanwhile, social value again drives the economic value. I believe the future of internet ecosystem will not be only limited on computer, tablets, or mobile phones – I even heard about the “internet of things”.

 

Reference: John Deighton & Leora D. Kornfeld, Economic Value of the Advertising-Supported Internet Ecosystem

http://www.iab.net/media/file/iab_Report_September-24-2012_4clr_v1.pdf

The Usage of QR Code – Practical Life and Marketing Application

I have to admit that I am not aware of the popularity of QR code after I read the article. I have heard about the QR code about couple of years ago when I was in China. Many products now are using QR code together with barcode. However, when I go shopping, I still scan the barcode more often than QR code. This makes me wonder why QR code is different from barcode. Thus, I looked up the difference between QR code and barcode on Google. The QR code is the short form for quick response code, which can be read faster and contains larger storage capacity than the barcode. Also, because barcode is a single dimensional code, it only can be scanned on a particular reader (the one we often see in the supermarket). On the contrary, since QR code is a 2-demensional digital image, it can be easily read by any camera-equipped smartphone. There is another sort of code called RFID (radio frequency identification), which is more common in B2B than B2C.

Customer side:

Due to the ease of use, QR code is more close to our practical life than the barcode – we can use it by ourselves. The QR code I used most recently is on WeChat – I have a foreign friend whose name is hard to spell, thus, I asked him to show his QR code, which is much easier for me to add him on my list. Also, I remember last month when I decided to go to Canada for my summer holiday, I bought the e-tickets for my flight, which had a unique QR code on my confirm letter. Every time I can the QR code, I can get my fight number and my e-ticket on the kiosk fast and easily – I do not need to wait in a long queue just for the purpose of obtaining my tickets. Although I may not notice, there are a lot of such examples in my daily life.

As Dave mentioned in his article “QR Code Statistics,” the percentage of scanning QR code at home is the highest. Together with the percentage of the location of QR cade, and the demographic information, it shows that most of male customers whose age is between 18 and 34 prefer to scan the QR code at home in a printed magazine or newspaper, or on the product packaging. Those suggest that the customers nowadays tend to use and read QR code for personal use, especially for the product information.

Company side:

The numbers and percentages of QR code users in “QR Code Statistics” not only display the characteristics of the customers, but also expose the opportunities for business people. QR code is particularly great for marketing – both for generating brand awareness, and reinforcing or retaining the existing customers. For example, a company can print the QR code on the leaflets or brochures and market that if customers scan the QR code on that paper, they will gain a coupon for the company’s product. It is more convenient and faster for customers to do so, because they do not need to type and search the company’s information manually anymore.

In sum, QR code as a kind of emerging technology is more close to the end consumers than barcode or RFID. Because of its ease of use, it will be more widely used in the future. After all, user experience is all about simplicity.
 

Reference: Dave Chaffey, QR Code Statistics

http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/qr-code-marketing/qr-codes-location-demographic-statistics/

Is marketing Really Dead?

The first glimpse of the title of this article, I was shocked – how could marketing be dead? If so, what is the meaning for me to learning it right now? After read through the article, I found that “marketing is dead” actually is refer to the traditional marketing. Instead, the author, Bill Lee, pointed out that the future marketing will be replaced by social media which is more customer-oriented. However, I need to argue about Bill’s opinions somehow.

First of all, I have to admit that I agree with the author to some extent. The three parts of evidence Bill provided is objective and persuasive. In real life, Take me as an example, as a customer, I always look up the information or comments from internet before I make the decision for my purchase. Also, CEO nowadays pays more attention to the result instead of the process. For instance, CEO from my company currently laid of many employees from marketing department, because the company keeps losing money. Often, marketing is the department that takes the most responsibility for the company’s equity. In addition, the tendency of marketing today is more about the experience – user experience, feedback, comments, etc. Just like a company would not hire people who have no related experience, and know nothing about the filed.

Because there is a saying that "customers are gods", the four ways Bill mentioned that how marketing should guide the customers are all from the customers’ aspects. Nevertheless, those four means are partially, but not absolutely right.

To restore community marketing is applicable, because customers need a place to exchange opinions and user experience. The problem is that the comments from the customers are subjective – everyone has different thoughts on one thing, just like two leaves are the same. Moreover, it is hard for the company to define whether all the feedback is from the real customers or not. Sometimes, competitors may hire people to defame their rival’s products or service. It would be better if the customer can combine the community information with the traditional marketing information from the company. Finding customer influencers and assist them to establish social capital is a win-win solution for both company and customers. However, it is not easy to do so, and most of the customers they actually prefer the real incentives, such as coupons and discounts, rather than networking abilities. The part about getting customer advocates involved is a great idea from my aspect. It is not only because referral is more persuasive, but also has more infection to the target customers.

In my point of view, Bill’s future marketing is more like a pull marketing strategy, and traditional marketing from his opinion is nothing but a push marketing strategy. In real life, pull strategy is more ideal, but push strategy, such as adverting is essential. Without push strategy, how could the company reach the mass customers at first step? The best and most effective way would be combine those two strategies as push-pull strategy. Although digital marketing may become more popular in the future, marketers should not fully abandon traditional marketing.

 

Reference: Bill Lee, Marketing is Dead

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/marketing_is_dead.html

Take Away from "Attack of the Customers: The Pampers Dry Max Crisis"

The crisis of Pampers’s diapers is a very typical issue happened in fast consumer industry. There are couple of reasons cause the customers’ dissatisfaction for Dry Max, including delayed announcement and the rash issue. However, Pampers took some action to save the company’s reputation ultimately. Here are some of my take aways:

·         Customer needs weigh much than the technology needs

·         Social media plays an important role in people’s lives and business

·         Competitors could pretend to be customers who preach the real customers to attack your products

·         Public relation (PR) is significant to cover the crisis

The article mentioned the Dry Max is a new product used a novel technology. In real life, technology needs often conflict with customer needs. This reminds me of my internship this summer in a hi-tech company. I had several meetings with engineers; meanwhile, I collected feedback from customers. The information I gathered from customers are contradict with the opinions from engineers. Customers wanted the product to be simpler or easier to be used while engineers preferred the more advanced product with higher technology. Nevertheless, the customers are the group of people who consume and pay for the products. Thus, how to meet the customers need is more important than covering the technology issue.

Another reason cause the protest of Dry Max is because the company delayed the announcement – even when there is an accident such as rash happened to customers, they still denied the innovation. Because Pampers was disingenuous at first, the customers were really pissed off. Due to the slipstreaming, one of the customers used the Facebook to set up a community posting the negative comment and find other customers who had the same experience. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Blog nowadays have a strong impact to the customers. If Pampers could have taken advantage of e-marketing to promote their new products in advance, they would not encounter with such protest.

Although the case does not mention about the competitors, I am wondering whether the complaints are all from the customers or is there any possibilities that the competitors also participated into the protest. It is essential for Pampers to distinguish the complaints from competitors with the ones from their real customers.

However, with those protest and complaints, Pampers implement public relation (PR) to recover the loss. As a marketer, leaning how to use PR to defuse crisis if critical. Pampers emphasized the importance of protecting baby’s health and safety, so instead of arguing and defensing for the company, Pampers sought treatment of rash for the parents and educated them. This is a very clever strategy, because on one side, the customer felt the company paid attention to the severe problem; on the other hand, Pampers successfully protect its brand and reputation through PR.

In conclusion, in order to launch a new product to the market, making a comprehensive marketing strategic plan is fatal. This plan should not only include pre-launch plan, customer requirements and competitive analysis, but also should contain the resolution for post-sale crisis. Also, e-marketing cannot be overlooked during the marketing process, because it connect customers with customers, and customers with sellers.

Reference: Paul Gillin, Attack of the Customers: The Pampers Dry Max Crisis

http://gillin.com/blog/2012/08/attack-of-the-customers-the-pampers-dry-max-crisis/

Thoughts for "Is google making us stupid"

As the metaphor made by Nicholas Carr, the brains of human beings are plasticable, so that the technology like clock can change the patterns of our lives. Similarly, internet as one of the intellectual technologies, has the even stronger impact on human beings. Thus, some of the traditional media change the way it used to be, and transform it close to the new media – internet media.

After read over the article, there are three thoughts that I generated. Firstly, people get lazy when they get the chance to make work easier – they do not practice memory as frequently as used to be. For example, after the Microsoft Office came to the market, people abandon the traditional way to type the word – utilizing typewriter or pen and paper. Although the software is much easier to be used and operated, and with the help of the error check function, plenty of people cannot spell words correctly by themselves right now.

Secondly, although Google engine enable our lives better off and more efficient, it takes much advantage of economy. More people use Google to do the investment, such as advertisements. Sometimes, when I searched for an unpopular topic, I need to flip over couple of pages to find a link that I really need, which is really annoy. Because the top results in the first pages are the ones that is viewed and clicked by most of the audience.

Finally, the issue closest to us students is that when we meet with problems nowadays, the first thing we will do is Google searching. For instance, we use Google search or Google Scholar to find out the answers or references for academic writing. However, this is considered as plagiarism if without paraphrase. Moreover, even we paraphrase the answer, the help with Google does not make us think about the topic ourselves. Instead, we utilize other people’s thoughts or works, which is helpless to our academic lives.

As far as I am concerned, whether the intellectual technology like Google is good or not is hard to say, since it is a paradox issue. Artificial intellectual makes our lives better and easier, but at the same time, also bring us laziness and risks. The effectiveness of Google mostly depends on the individual human being – the way we use it and the purpose we want to achieve.

Reference: Nicholas Carr. Is Google making us stupid?

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/