Week 8 EOC: Small Business Saturday

Created in 2010, AmEx offered 100,000 card members a $25 credit for shopping locally. That's a possible $2,500,000 in free money. (Taken from Cnbc.com)

First observed on November 27, 2010, it is a counterpart to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which feature big box retail and e-commerce stores respectively. By contrast, Small Business Saturday encourages holiday shoppers to patronize brick and mortar businesses that are small and local. (taken from Wikipedia.com)

Aided by a full-fledged radio, TV, and social media ad blitz, credit card giant American Express launched Small Business Saturday on November 27, 2010. The idea was simple: Encourage U.S. consumers to use the Saturday between Black Friday and Cyber Monday to shop at their local mom-and-pop businesses.  

The folks at Twitter want Small Business Saturday to survive. “Twitter is offering $1 million in free ads for small businesses,” writes Dylan Tweney for Venture Beat.

 “In just three years, Small Business Saturday went from an idea to help Small Business find more customers, to a permanent fixture on the holiday shopping calendar,” said Susan Sobbott, president, American Express OPEN. “According to the research, we are seeing the small business community take ownership of the day and make it their own.”

“The inaugural Small Business Saturday Insights Survey, which was released this week, found 47 percent of independent merchants will make a point of using Small Business Saturday as a way to draw customers,” Tim Gallen write for the Phoenix Business Journal.

The study also shows that at least 67 percent of small businesses intend to include Black Friday-style discounts to help drive sales.

“American Express started the Small Business Saturday ‘movement’ in 2010 and last year over 100 million people decided to Shop Small for the big day,” Marketing Pilgrim notes. (taken from theblaze.com)

EOC Week 7: Companies That Can Spy On Me; Legally!

Amazon & Ebay: Edward Snowden is not the only big story here. What he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world... now THAT'S something!

The National Security Agency (NSA) has long been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users' data.

We must be aware of changes to what the internet means. The days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. Today’s internet is headed towards a geographically-divided, government-controlled arena of communications now.

US-based internet companies cannot be trusted with our private information at all.

Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system. Kindle's software "will provide Amazon with data about your Device and its interaction with the Service...and information related to the content on your Device and your use of it (such as automatic bookmarking of the last page read and content deletions from the Device)."

EBay, ever anxious to up profits, bends over backward to provide data to law enforcement officials. "I don't know another Web site that has a privacy policy as flexible as eBay's," says Joseph Sullivan, Senior Director of Law Enforcement Relations. "We don't make you show a subpoena, except in exceptional cases," Sullivan told his listeners. "When someone uses our site and clicks on the `I Agree' button, it is as if he agrees to let us submit all of his data to the legal authorities. Every move an Ebay user makes; clicks, purchases, emails, leaving feedback; is all recorded. And given freely to Law Enforcement upon asking.

http://www.unionbook.org/profiles/blogs/spying-on-us-not-just-us-google-facebook-yahoo-amazon-apple-and

http://cryptome.org/ebay-spy-rat.htm

http://pages.ebay.com/community/chatter/2005march/marketplacesafety.html

Week 6 EOC: There’s an App for That

I would like to invent an app that could tell you your Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) before you get in car to drive. It could be called “BlowHard”. Obviously, not drinking at all negates the problem, but for many social drinkers, the difference between one or two drinks could result in a DUI charge, or worse. There’s a lot of conflicting information out there about what the limits are, and it can’t simply be boiled down to “X drinks per hour” because of varying weight, height and metabolisms. An attachment for the phone with a chemically-reactive surface that could be blown on and measure BAC would take the guesswork out of whether or not to call a cab that night. Presumably, some kind of test strip would attach to your phone via charger wire, and could then display the readout on the screen. In large type, just in case! I think a lot of people would spend 99 cents on this, if it was reliable and accurate. Maybe with a positive result, a built in feature of displaying a few top-rated cab companies’ numbers would be a benefit I’d add in to the app. It would need to be IOS and Android-compatible, to maximize the marketplace. It would have to be simple to use, in case too many drinks have been had. It would have to have cheap test strips, or else the cost would prohibit use. Rather than assume or hope for the best, it seems like this could be a life-saving app for those who imbibe when a drive is in their immediate future. It would need good security built in, so Big Brother wasn’t able to access that data, or else there’d be no trust from customers and the app wouldn’t sell.

Week 6 BOC: 5 Tips to increase traffic to your website

1. Twitter (and other social networks, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Del.ic.ious, etc). Send interesting tweets, and use those to pump new content to website.

2. Forum Groups. Depending on business, these focused groups could be very fruitful in bringing traffic to your site.

3. Shameless Self-Promotion. Use you URL in online signatures, and have business cards with URL too. Hand these out at every possible opportunity to grab mmore traffic.

4. Make the most of Google Product services. Features like Author and Video Thumbnails, SEO and using URLs with pertinent words will help you ride up in searches.

5. Opt-in Email Lists. These targeted lists are people who like and trust you already, rather than a huge list of emails of people not necessarily receptive to your product.

Week 5 EOC: The Making of Our Trick Shots Video

Our assignment for to form groups amongst ourselves, shoot a video, edit it, post it to our blog and twitter accounts, and get 5,000 hits. Ray Aronda and I decided to partner up.

Ray and I first discussed what to film, and that initially presented a stumbling block; with viral videos being so random in nature, we weren’t sure how to proceed. We took a few days, and independently researched viral marketing, watched many videos that had achieved viral status, so by our second brainstorming session, we each came to the table with ideas. We reviewed each, and decided on the Trick Shots concept as our subject matter. This would allow us to work alone, shooting videos separately, and required no other cast or crew to help us. This would streamline planning and scheduling, and allow 
us to finish on time.

We agreed on a timeline, and started shooting. I’m a novice in video. This was actually my first one, that involved any planning, editing or teamwork. Shooting proved enjoyable, as my wife was out of town, and it was a cool project to keep myself busy with. Ray soon shared his first few successful shots with me, and we went back and forth a few more times, until we’d captured enough raw footage to fill the time we needed; 1 minute. Ray did a great job on the final edit, added music from publicly licensed material on Google, and posted the finished product on YouTube. 

Not long after, we learned an intricacy of YouTube’s counter calculation, where if you reach 300 hits fairly quickly, your counter is temporarily frozen. I was alarmed when I noticed this, and it turns out Ray was on it as well, as we both looked up explanations of the phenomenon on (you guessed it) YouTube. We learned the freeze was only temporary, until an actual human can go into your web stats and verify you’re not using some browser-bot to falsely inflate your count. We learned this is because on YouTube, hits are currency. Wow. That was en eye-opener to me. I had no idea of the actual monetary value inherent to a successful video, and that might have been the most valuable lesson learned in the whole adventure. Though it was also cool to now feel able to shoot a rough video and assemble it into something specific. This is a new tool in my design arsenal that I look forward to using again soon.