last post :(

I just wanted to make one final post on my blog to say thanks to Alex for a great semester!! I really enjoyed this class, probably more than all my others combined. The importance of this class was obvious even though some of the material was not my favorite. However, he made every class interesting and related what we talked about to real live situations, including his own life and his love of Barbaro! People keep asking me what teacher to take for buad477 and I would love to say Alex but I cannot since he is quitting. This makes me sad. Alex is a great teacher and an awesome dude :) Best of luck to him in the future and once again thank you so much for an enjoyable class and a great semester.

Evolution of the Dunkin' Donuts wikipedia article

Alright, so originally I had chosen 4 article to edit in class and in the end I only stayed with one of those topics and chose 3 all new ones. Dunkin' Donuts was one of the new ones. When I first started editing the Dunkin' Donuts wikipedia article I thought it would be easy to come upwith information since there are so many products DD creates... there had to be something missing! Boy was I wrong...

In my first edit I decided to update the company information on the right of the page. I added information about the headquarter location, updated information about the number of customers served each day in how many locations, and finally I noticed that the sales revenue figure listed was completed oudated. I fixed that right up. These were minor edits but overall they are important to have on the article because I feel that this might be the type of information someone comes to the wiki article to find.

A week later I got a great idea to create a new section of the article titled "featured products". It was a great idea in theory, but the wikipedia community did not take well to my second edit. In this section I created a bulleted list of all the coffee products DD offers. What I thought was great detailed information about the products the community thought was a sales pitch and rebelled. Yes, I got the information off of the DD webpage which made it slightly biased but I was under the impression that I could write whatever I wanted on the article, thats the point of a wiki! Wrong, upon checking the article a few days later I went to the DD article and found a message asking the community to fix what I had written. Also I got a message in my talk that says, "Descriptions of DD's products in Dunkin Donuts have an advertising tone and have been tagged as such. These need to be presented in a more neutral POV." How rude! Basically I was scared and I hated wikipedia at that moment. I didnt want to sign back in and have people watch wat I edit, I felt shunned from the wikipedia community!

Ok this is an exaggeration but I was definitely upset. I would have edited the section immediately, but I had to wait a week to make it count for class. A week passed and I went back to the article to find that someone else already edited my work. I was mad, but they did a great job. Therefore, I had to come up with a new third edit to the article. Although I did not get to edit my work, I did add one more piece of information to the "featured products" section. I wrote that DD currently has 52 varieties of donuts, thats a lot of donuts! Also, in the trivia section I added a link to the Dunkin' Donuts Center in Providence Rhode Island because although the article talked a great deal about the center they did not provide a link to the cite. Lastly, I added information about DD franchises in the history section that listed off the number of franchise locations in the US, Canada, and around the world.

Overall, this article caused me the most amount of problems with the wikipedia community. Their immediate reation to what I wrote shows that there are some people out there that take their wiki very seriously, which is great, but it definitely scared me out of wanting to edit articles ever again. However, even though they showed they did not approve of what I wrote, no one deleted my work, all they did was go in and make it more objective, which I appreciated. This was definitely my most interesting article to edit in that I truly got to see the inner workings and passion some people have for keeping Wikipedia up to date and current. Maybe next time I edit an article I wont sign in so people cannot track my work though...

Dunkin' Donuts, last wikipedia edit... ever?

Horray! this is the last edit that I need to to do for Dunkin' Donuts as well as for buad477!! I think that it is safe to say that this may also be my last wiki edit ever. This is because I have found that in order to edit a page it is necessary to have a great deal of knowledge on a topic to add meaningful information that the community will approve of. I just dont like the pressure of finding things to write about...

That said, I went onto the Dunkin Donuts wikipedia article the other day and found that the community did not approve of what I wrote for my last edit. Apparently it was worded too much like and advertisement and that was not ok. I thought you could write whatever you wanted but apparently not. My bad. Soooo for this edit I was going to go back and change what I had previously written to make it sound objective rather than in favor of Dunkin' Donuts. However, I had to wait a week since my last edit (because those are the class rules) and when I logged on today I found that someone else had already gone in and changed what I wrote. Surprisingly they did not just delete it, rather they too the time to make it unbiased. Im glad someone did not delete my work, but they totally took my wiki edit idea!! ugh. I had to find something else to write and here is what I came up with:

In the "featured products" section (the one I created, yay) I added the sentence "Dunkin' Donuts currently has 52 varieties of donuts". I found this fact on the DD website and I thought that it was just a little fact that was somewhat interesting to know. Also, I just wanted to add more to the section I made, bragging rights I guess...

Next, in the trivia section the article talks about how there is a Dunkin Donuts Center in Providence, Rhode Island. Since I live in Massachusetts I've actually been to the DD Center and it's really nice. However, in this little blurb of the center nowhere does it mention the actual website to get information on concerts and what not at the center. Therefore, I added this sentence, "The website for the Dunkin' Donuts Center can be found here" followed with a link to the website. I thought that this would be convenient.

Lastly, I noticed that throughout the wiki article and on all the webpages I found when searching for Dunkin' Donuts there was alwasy mentionings of their franchise opportunities and I started to wonder just how many DD's there were. I looked up this information, found it and put it in the history section of the wiki article (I figured this was the best place to put it since it could be considered history eventually...). The sentence I added was this: "Currently, there are 5,505 Dunkin' Donuts franchises in the United States, 79 in Canada, and 1,856 throughout the rest of the world." As of right now this information is correct, however, I am willing to bet that this will change within the next few weeks since a company as large as Dunkin' Donuts seems to always be growing.

Well there it is, my last wikipedia edit for this article, for this class, forever! I understand the reason why we did this exercise and it really did help me in understanding the process and importance of wikis, however, the overall editing process was somewhat stressful. Unless you are a highly knowledgeable individual on a particular topic it is difficult to find information that is incorrect and also to find information that is correct and missing. But that's not importnat anymore as this project is now completed and over. Stay tuned for my summary of the evolution of the Dunkin' Donuts wikipedia article coming up possibly tomorrow.


Now that the stiuqxela challenge is over I dont have anything to put here anymore :(

Evolution of the Sunsilk Wikipedia article

Although I did not create the wikipedia article on Sunsilk, I certailing was the main contributor of content to the article. I came up with the idea to edit this article from doing a project in another marketing class where me and a partner gave a presentation on the Sunsilk brand and their marketing strategies. I realize that wikipedia is not the most accurate source, but it definitely helps, and when I saw that there was basically no information on Sunsilk I saw it as an opportunity as an article to edit for this class.

In my first edit to the article I provided a little background information about the brand including when it was lauched and where. Although the article has only been around since January 2007, this little paragraph of information that I added more than doubled the size of the article.

Following my ouline, my second article edit gave a detailed explaination of Sunsilk's old marketing strategy. I created a heading section just for this additional information and went to town. I used the same method for my third and final edit to this article by adding another heading titled "new campaign" where I went into great detail of Sunsilk's new "get hairapy" campaign that they are currently running. I talked about the target demographs, the types of advertising used and even talked about features of their campaign website.

I definitely dominated this topic, but I did so by adding relevant, important information about Sunsilk that I feel anyone can benefit from reading about (as long as they are looking for information specifically about Sunsilk of course!). ALl the information I added was reasearched and then put into my own words, unless it is a company slogan or campaign motto. Through the duration of my edits I was the only one who added content of any type to the page and only after my final edit did someone else come in and put their own touch on the topic. And, even when someone else did come in and make edits, all they did was correct mys pelling errors and make it a little more gramatically correct. I think I can live with this! If anything I am embarassed that I made spelling errors for the world to see! Overall I really enjoyed editing this article and I definitely feel as though my edits will be well recieved by the general wikipedia community. Only time will tell through more edits how my information will be taken.

Evolution of Tap Dance Wikipedia article

Tap dance has been a passion of mine ever since I was three years old, and being that it has been such a big part of my life it only made sense for me to choose the tap dance wikipedia article as of of my topics to edit for this class. Once I got to the article I realized that although it was not a long article, it certainly did cover a lot of information. This made it very difficult to find information to add or parts to edit, but dont worry, I somehow found things to add.

When it came time to do my first edit to the article I shocked to find that there was absolutly nothing writtena bout National Tap Dance Day, which was a day that I had celebrated through my years of taking tap classes. I decided to add a sentence or two about the Day, when it is, and why that date was chosen. This edit is still in tact even though almost immediately following my first edit another editor came in and added a ton of additional information.

In my second article edit I found it difficult to find information to add since one person added a lot themselves. The edit that I did come up with was a sentence and a link to a webpage where a reader could access more information at the International Tap Association homepage. In addition to this I noticed that the other editor added some common tap steps but, although they got the major ones, they did miss a few, so I went ahead and put them in.

In my final edit to the article I stumbled across a webpage with a lot of tap information and I realized that it was word for word the information also located on the wikipedia article. So, in order to give the original writer credit I added a link on the wiki article to the outside webpage. I also added the britannica definition of tap dancing, which I though was an excellent definition and a vital bit of information to anyone seaching the topic.

Overall, there were not many editors to this page, but rather there was one really intense editor that dominates the history page. This person made it difficult for me to find more information to add but it also increased the quality of the article. Once again, no one deleted or edited any of the information that I added which makes me feel good and that I know what I am talking about. This is an active community of editors and while going through the hisotry of the edits I did find that some people wre agressively deleting information and content that they did not feel was necessary, luckily none of my edits were the ones deleted! I feel that all of my edits/additions were important and added to the overal quality of the page. Hopefully other people visiting the site will feel this way as well.

Evolution of Medfield Wikipedia article

Overall, this was a fairly easy article to edit since I knew quite a bit about Medfield,MA because this is where I am from. As most articles about locations are, this one was already very detailed and thorough which made it necessary for me to really think about what was important about the town. My first edit was an addition to points of interest and is a critical piece of information that I was surprised to find was missing from the article.

Although no one deleted any of my content and only edited the format of the external liks I provided, I did go ahead and delete someone else's addition in my second edit. The reason I did this was the information they added was ridiculous and stated that Uber Jason was a notable resident in the town. In this same post I also took out some links in the page where people can link a word mentioned to another wikipedia article. I found a link to the word "books" which was just silly since I think most people reading this know what books are and do not need an distracting link to take away from the information in the article.

On what was supposed to be my big edit to the article I messed up and did the edits within a week of my previous edits. So stupid. Regardless, the extra edits I did make were excellent if I do say so myself. In this edit I added a bunch of information to the article in three different sections. The topics I added were the towns that Medfield bordered, I added some information to the history to make it a little more factual and significant, and then finally I added a sentence or two on Medfield State Hospital in the trivia section.

Finally, in my last edit I added information about in the education section of the article. What I added was the address of each of the different schools in the town. I blogged about this but going back to the wiki article I just realized that I did not sign in to make this edit. Once again, I messed up. I cannot correct it now, but the edit that is mine is the one titled "02:08, 9 April 2007 64.80.192.54 (Talk) (→Education)". Sorry about that.

Overall, even though this is a very active article for being edited, no one deleted or changed any of the information I added (except for the format of the links). I am very surprised by this and I am surprised at my self for coming up with enough quality information to add to this article that would be accepted by the general public. Also, in editing this article, I noticed that there was another individual who was editing the page with a user name of kylejtod who I am almost 100% sure is a guy that I graduated with. Perhaps he is doing the same project, or maybe he is just a passionate wikipedia editor...

Side note...

I wanted to mention that I thought the demonstration done in class on Wednesday was extremely helpful, at least for me. Although i post on my blog pretty often, it is really easy to do and not frightening. As for creating a webpage, now thats scary to me. Sophomore year all business students were require to take ACCT160 and 261 where some of our assignments consisted of creating our own webpage through our UDel accounts (I dont remember how we did it though). I liked the two classes but certainly not the html parts, it just seemed to go right over my head and as soon as that secton of the course was over I quickly erased all html coding information out of my head. So, when we started talking about it in class yesterday it was a good refresher course and having someone come up in front of the class and give it a try eased my nerves. Html isnt that bad and I do think that anyone could do it :)

Comment on a Teammates blog post

First of all, I wanted to say to Kathleen that I really appreciate her attempt to try and bring my webpage up in the rankings on googles results for stiuqxela. I will return the favor at the end of this post.

Out of all the articles that come into our Bloglines account, I found it funny that the one that Kathleen wrote about on her blog also is one that caught my eye simply because of its title: Wikipedia: Just how Popular is it?. I'm not saying I read the article, just that I noticed it. But now that Kathleen wrote about it and I have to write about her post, now is the time to read the article. First of all, the line in the beginning of the Global Neighborhoods post states that one-third of Americans say they have consulted Wikipedia. For some reason I feel that this number is very low. Is this 1/3 of people in general or 1/3 who frequently use search on the internet. Wikipedia is often times the number one search result on Google and it's hard to avoid, even my Mom uses Wikipedia and I dont even think she knows what it is and what it's all about. If I had to guess, I would say that more than 1/3 of people who use internet search on a regular basis have come in contact with Wikipeida for sure, its inevitable.

Although Kathleen stated that she stays away from Wikipedia when searching on the internet, I find that I am drawn to it. Wikipedia is so easy to use and it's so convenient, it seems as though it has everything! I agree with Kathleens statement that Wikipedia has a bad reputation because of its quality of anyone can change it, like we are doing for this course, however I feel that there are enough fanatics out there that are dedicated to keeping Wikipedia's content valid. At times when writing a research paper I feel that citing Wikipedia as a source creates a sense of laziness and incorrect information in the paper, however, this is usually not the case. Although many teachers frown on the use of Wikipedia of a source, Rubel states flat out that he used it as primary resource when writing his renown book "Naked Conversations". Now that's showing is trust in the wiki system.

Overall, I feel that I see where Kathleen is coming from in her response to the article, but at the same time I feel that I, like Rubel, have faith in the validity of Wikipedia. Rubel mentions something called "Wisdom of Crowds" which to me seems like a term to describe the synergy that exists among Wikipedia editors. As I stated before, although there may be many editors that do not know what they are talking about on Wikipeida, there are plenty of regulators and fanatics concerned with keeping their favorite articles updated. People make mistakes, and other people are annoying and write completely rediculous information on their articles (I came across this situation when editing my article about Medfield, MA). However, I have also had personal experience with someone coming in and editing the work that I had just added. Even though it was only spelling and gramatical errors that they corrected, this shows that someone was regulating the content of the article making sure the information was right.

On the other hand, I agree with Kathleen in that it is impossible to say that Wikipeida is 100% right. Although there are regulators of the content, they do not edit the additions to articles immediately so there is a chance that someone would come to the article and see the incorrect information and take it for truth. Eventually the error would be corrected but it might be too late and before you know it some kid has ridiculous information in his paper and gets a bad grade. Kathleen is right, if you are going to use Wikipedia as a source, which is perfectly fine, just make sure you find other information that supports what you found.

Obviously, the use of Wikipedia is a controversial topic in the world of works cited and teacher preferences. While there are teachers such as Kathleen's that prohibits the use of this online information database, I have had teachers that encourage its use. It all really depends on what that particular teacher knows about wikis. This was a great little blog post that Rubel made and it might actually do some good if teachers like Kathleen's Communications in Business professor read this blog post and saw that even authors of some of our generations greatest books used Wikipedia as their primary source. Maybe this would change the world's opinion of the website and increase the number of users to over 1/3 of Americans.

And as usual, some stiuqxela's: stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiquxela stiuqxela. And for more on stiuqxela you should check out Kathleens stiuqxela challenge attempt

Dunkin' Donuts edits part two

While I was trying to figure out what I should add to the Dunkin' Donuts article I started thinking about the store itself and how badly I wanted a coffee and donut. So I thought to myself, I always get the same thing, an Caramel Iced Coffee, and maybe it was time to try something new, but what? This is when I realized that nowhere on the Wikipedia article did it say what products Dunkin' Donuts offered and a light went off in my head. This was the perfect edit because its informative and new to the article. I went on to the DD homepage and looked up all their different coffee options. I took down the information and put it into my own words as best as I could and voilà! it was genious. What I did was make a new subcategory on the article titled "featured products" and then added information for a number of DD's coffee products. Here is what I wrote:

• In the hot summer months Dunkin' Donuts has the perfect drink to cool you down, their Coolattas. Each of these drinks offers you an icy blend mixed with delicious flavors. The flavors available are Tropicana Orange Juice, Lemonade, Strawberry, Coffee, and Vanilla Bean.
• While the Coolattas offer you cool drinks mixed with ice, DD's Smoothies are made with real fruit and low fat yogurt. Flavors include Straberry Banana, Wildberry, Mango Passion Fruit, and their newest addition Tropical Fruit.
• Although Dunkin' Donuts has always served up Hot Chocolate, they have recently put a new spin on the beloved beverage and have created their very own New White Hot Chocolate. The new drink is rich, smooth, and buttery with a hint of vanilla and then topped off with whipped cream.
• Recently Dunkin' Donuts has come up with a great new way to add flavor to your favorite coffee. With their new Flavored Coffee syrups they can now add flavor to your coffee as it is being poured to ensure freshness. The flavor options are: French Vanilla, Hazelnut, Cinnamon, Toasted Almond, Caramel, Coconut, Raspberry, Blueberry, and Chocolate. Each of these flavors can be added to a variety of coffee beverages including Originial Blend Coffee, Dunkin' Decaf, Iced Coffee, Iced Lattes, Hot Cappuccinos and Lattes, Hot Chocolate, and even to Coolattas. You can even combine two flavors into one drink!
• Turbo Hot and Turbo Iced offer an extra kick to its drinkers by adding an extra shot of espresso to its contents. This drink is offered in a variety of flavors and owns up to its slogan that "Turbo provides you the boost you need to power you through your day".
• Going along with the current trend towards healthy eating and lifestyles, Dunkin' Donuts has created a new Latte Lite. To make it a healthier alternative to their various other lattes DD creates the Latte Lite by combining esrpresso with skim milk and then splenda for sweetness. This combination makes for a low calorie, delicious drink.
• Dunkin' Donuts also offers its drinkers another latte choice: their Indulgent Iced Lattes that come in two flavors: Iced Caramel Swirl and Iced Mocha Swirl. Each of these drinks is made with real espresso, mocha or caramel syrup, and milk. They are then topped off with a heaping mound of whipped cream and syrup is again drizzled over the top. DD says, "indulge yourself!"

So thats a lot of information, but it doesnt even include facts about Dunkin' Donuts bagels, muffins, breakfast sandwhiches, donuts or any of their other food items. Perhaps someone else will come along and add them to the list of featured products, or maybe this will be the outcome of my third and final post? We'll see. But for now, I definitely feel like this edit to the wikipedia article is a great addition that many people will benefit from.

A message to google

Dear Google,
Please crawl my blog sometime soon, its been a month! What gives?! The stiuqxela challenge is ending soon.
Thanks,
Andrea

Sunsilk Edit #3 (aka the last one, woo)

Yup, this was my last Sunsilk edit :( and the only reason I am sad was because this wikipedia article was by far the easiest one I did out of the four. This is because, as stated before, I already had all the research done for it so all I had to do was choose the information I wanted to use and then put it into comprehensive sentence form. I originally came up with a guidline as to what I would write about in each edit and I certainly stuck to it. Normally I past what I wrote in each edit into my blog but this one was HUGE and it would probably take up the whole page. Therefore, you're just going to have to go to the article itself to see my edits!

This time around I wrote about Sunsilks new and current campaign that they are running called "Get Hairapy", which I'm sure most people have heard of, if not, check out some of their commercials on youtube. Basically the purpose of the ad is to make the Sunsilk brand young again and make it appeal to a 20-something year old crowd. This is the main reason why I actually came up with editing this article in the first place. When I had to do my project in a different marketing class we simply had to pick a company and talk about their marketing campaigns. Sunsilk was an easy choice becasue their ads were relatively new and they were entertaining. Although the sunsilk products are not new in the slighest bit, their ad campaign is new and I always see their commercials on tv and their print ads in magazines.

There was a lot of information out there on the sunsilk products and brand and so choosing this topic was quite easy to reaserach and present about. And, since their wikipedia article was completely lacking, choosing this product fit in perfectly with both of my classes!! I have definitely contributed a great deal to this wiki artilce. This time around I wrote everything under the heading "new campaign" and then when I was done I created a heading called "other information" to separate what I have written with what was already existing, which isnt very good. Anyways, enjoy!


and of course, stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela

Related to class...

In class, we recently were asked to subscribe to either Amazon's Associate program or googles affiliates as part of our blogging assignment. I opted to go with Amazon's simply because I thought it looked cool and official. Although I have an account with Amazon it was neccesary for me to sign up for their associate program separately, which was surprising, they even needed my social security number which I was slightly nervous about. However, once I convinced myself that Alex would not give us an assignment where someone could steal our identity I decided to go for it and sign up, it was easy. In fact, the whole process was painless and took me about 5 minutes to figure out how to get the links and attach them into my blog. Since the template is so advanced and knows from experience the type of links people put into their blogs they have specific template formats specifically for additions such as links to the Amazon affiliates program.

The books that I chose to post on my blog were the two required readings for the course, The Search and Naked Conversations as well as two books that I have read recently. The books are The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime and Bringing Down the House. Both of these books are quick reads and ones that I would recomend for pleasure reading.

The great thing about this associate program is that it is like the concept of Digg. If you like something, promotote it to others right? These are all books that I enjoyed so I might as well pass on my opinion to others and if they are interested then I am helping them (while possibly getting paid). On the other hand, if I think a book was horrible, I would not provide a link to it on my page, but perhaps I would instead blog about how much I disliked it. The bottom line is that I get to choose which books (or music and any other items Amazon sells) on my site, which I think is pretty cool!

To think that I will make money off this is not very realistic because this is a class blog and not many random people will come across it, see the link and purchase the book. But if they do, yay for me! In the meantime, I am certainly not going to hold my breath waiting for a check from Amazon to pay me for all the business I supplied them with...

Trust is at the Core of New Web Marketing

Its time for my last posting on our required blog readings, how sad. As I was going through all of the articles posed two caught my eye, one is Trust article I will be focusing on and the other is a tiny little blog from my keyword search... here goes:

The ClickZ article that I found is titled "Trust is at the Core of New Web Marketing" and basically what it is about is how the world of search marketing, and Web marketing in general, is becoming more and more like old-fashioned marketing. Originally, search marketers would buy links and create massively optimized webpages that naive searchers would access. However, now everything is changing. While both ends are changing (the searchers and the algorithms), algorithms can only go so far. People on the other hand are getting really smart and link building is the new way to gain attention and value on the internet, webmasters are getting more and more savvy about the importance of outbound links...

In online communities such as Digg gaining "google juice" is all about joining the community. You contribute to it, especially with material that is primarily non-promotional. You develop relationships with many users, including top users. By building this trust among the community you become a respected writer and your page goes up in rankings, and vice versa if people in the community think you and your webpage is a bunch of crap, you will be shuned and taken out. People at Digg are intollerant and do not like to be gammed. Essentially, in the world of Digg and other online search communities, you are building a personal brand, an image, and you are building relationships.

Basically I believe this is a huge step in the world of online search. Now, it is no longer important how much money one company spent over another to buy search terms or created a webpage with key terms embedded in its html code. The ranking of each site in a community such as Digg relies solely on how people respond to it. If it sucks or if it's a scam, it goes to the bottom, but if it offers high quality content up it goes in the rankings. This is huge. I know that often times when I search on google the first few pages of links are all ridiculous, irrelevant results that someone made to scam people into clicking, and this does not even apply only to the orgainic results. The sponsored links are often times the ones that seem the most relevant for your search, and for good reason... people spent a lot of time and money to make them look that way. In the world of trust this does not happen. Just like in traditional marketing, webmasters must now prove themselves trustworthy on the internet and build up a brand and an imamge to gain respect from the community. Overall, I love google, but sometimes you just cannot trust the websites that are out there and it is difficult to determine which sites are scams. This is why I feel that this article is right on about the value of Digg and similar services. On the web everyone is going to try to promote themselves, but there is no better opinion out there than that of an unbiased internet searcher/reader such as yourself. Because they have no affiliation with a website in question, they have no reason to lie and make its rankings go up, and that is how trust becomes one of the most important qualities in being a successful web marketer in todays world.

I mentioned that there was a second article that caught my eye, it came from my keyword search on JP Morgan, where I will be interning this summer. The blog post that came up stated that JP Morgan would be opening a new branch and will be hiring in the Boston area. This was huge for me because I am from right outside of Boston and have been thinking about moving back there after school. My fear was that if I liked JP Morgan so much that I wanted to stay with them I would have to remain in the DE area or perhaps one of their other locations, none of which were in Boston. Now this is no longer true! The purpose of me writing about this is just to show that I would not have known about their expansion into Boston if it was not for my Bloglines keyword search.

also, stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela

Dunkin' Donuts Edit #1

Ok so it took me a LONNGGGG time to figure out what my final wikipedia article would be on. Originally I signed up to edit Facebook, Bondi Beach, Tap dance and the Red Sox and then I started to realize that I knew very little if anything about any one of those topics, except tap dancing. Therefore, I changed all of my article topics to edit but the one on tap dance. My final line-up of articles is Medfield, MA, tap dance, Sunsilk, and finally Dunkin Donuts. Once again I hope this is alright. I have been thinking and thinking of a final topic to edit and then finally today I decided on the Dunkin' Donuts chain as I passed by their store today on Main Street. The Wiki article on the store is detailed, but it is lacking some criticial information and som eof the information that it does have is very out of date. This being said, it seems like the perfect article to edit.

The first thing I did was I noticed that the headquarter information only stated the town and state and no tthe rest of the address which was listed on their website. therefore, I went ahead and added the street name and number and then then phone number of the headquarters as well. As you can see from the history, it took me quite a few trys to get the ifnromation alligned properly!!

The next thing I did was I updated the number of Dunkin' Donuts stores there are and changed the sentence to read, "serving 2.7 million customers per day at over 7,000 stores globally which includes approximately 5,300 Dunkin' Donuts locations in 34 states". I also took out the link proceeding this sentence because it directed the reader to a website with franchise information that does not coincide with the actual Dunkin' Donuts website, which I believe is the most reliable source of information on the topic.

The final edit I made this time around was I updated the sales revenue figure listed to the right. THe number is from way back in 2004 and there is no doubt that this figure has changed since then. I found a more current figure on the Dunkin' Donuts website and substituted it in on the wiki article. Current sales (as of August 2006) are up to around $4.7 billion world-wide... Wow!

And also, stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela

Using shopping Bots

In class a few weeks ago, Professor Brown began talking about the issue of price and how it relates to internet technology. One of the main qualities he mentioned was the conecpt of price transparency, which is the use of search and shopping bots to compare prices on the internet. This feature of the internet came in very handy for me just this past weekened...

I went home this past weekend to Massachusetts for the first time since Christmas break and because it had been so long, I had not seen my parents for my birthday. While home I got to pick out my birthday gift, which was a new digital camera. Unfortunately for me, I know very little about cameras and what I want from them and there are hundreds to choose from. I was overwhelmed. Luckily, we had just recently discuessed this topic in class.

Knowing that there was such a thing as a price comparison bot on the internet, I got online and began searching. I came across the website www.bizrate.com where they specialize in comparing prices and other features of numerous different products, including digital cameras (they even have their own specific website for the digital camera comparissions). Although my dad helped me pick out the best qualities to look for in a camera on the website, it still helped to narrow down my choices. The website made it possible for me to sort cameras by price, resolution, brand name, type of camera, and many other features.

At the end of the search session I came up with one camera that both me and my parents liked, which was the Cannon Powershot SD800 IS and I love it. The bottom line is that I went on to this website with no idea as to what camera I was looking for and by the time I got off-line I not only had an idea, I knew the exact camera I wanted and the best locations to buy it (which is another feature of the website). There is no doubt that going to this website assisted me in my camera purchasing process. Plus, using the bizrate website probably saved my hours and hours of going to various stores and looking through the cameras they have, and to top it off the service was free!

In class we also discuessed how many websites are blocking these search bots from crawling their website, which to me makes absolutly no sense. While I was on the bizrate page I was looking for a camera, but I was also looking at who had the best prices. If a retailers page is blocked then their price will not be listed and then people will not buy from them. To me it just makes sense to let all search engines crawl your webpage to help get your name out there. There could have been a website out there that was selling my camera for less than I found but chose not to participate in bizrates search results and because of this, they lost my business. In general, I feel that these search bots are extremely helpful through their easy of usem, the large ammounts of information they contain, and their time saving qualities. For a website to not participate is just stupid, just as it is stupid for someone to not use one when making their next big purchase.

stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela

Second Sunsilk Edit

Going along with my original plan, this second edit was supposed to be about Sunsilk's old marketing strategy or campaign, which it is. To do this, I decided to continue on from where I left off, pushing the original content further down the page. I feel that this is alright to do since the information that was originally ther is pretty bad and not very informative at all... I created a new sub section of the article titled "old campaign" where I discussed the image of the brand, where their marketing focus has been in the past, and the reasons for why the brand felt they needed a marketing campaign makeover. Here is what I wrote:

"In previous years, Sunsilk has focused much of their marketing attention on gaining international presence. To do this, they targeted different market segments or coutries with specialized products designed to address hair "issues" of each culture. Because of their high interest abroad, Sunsilk's United States advertising declined dramatically. Becasue of this, many years went by that contained little to no advertising of Sunsilk products, which caused them to be viewed as an band targeted towards older women. Of course this was not Sunsilk's intention; however, it was inevitable. Becasue of the brand loyalty from an older audience towards Sunsilk products combined with almost a generation of non-use Sunsilk found it very difficult to gain market share and attract a younger audience.
A new campaign needed to be launched to gain popularity amongst the younger public (see below). To do this, a younger product also needed to be developed. Sunsilk decided that in addition to segmenting the market country to country, they should also segment by hair type in each market. This showed the company's drive to be a competitive brand in an era where customization is key. Their new products focused on hair color, texture, feeling, dryness, etc. After creating the product Sunsilk was able to create their new marketing campaign and strategy, Get Hairapy, to help them make a bold entrance into the 20-year old and up market."

I realize that this is very long, but I had a lot to say. Once again, for this post I really had to do very little research as I had already done it for my presentation in a different class. Although this was a considerably long post, my last one for Sunsilk will probably the longest, most in-depth addition to the article simply because I have the most information on their new and current campaign.

It was interesting to see that since my last post over a week ago not one single person has added or changed anything else on the article. I guess this goes to show that not too many people really care about the product or brand. Even so, I suppose that popularity is not the point of this assignement. Rather, I am adding this information to make the article more meaniful and useful to others in the future.

And of course, stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela

Last tap dance edit, wooo

Ok, so while I was searching the internet for information to add to the tap dance wikipedia article I came across a website where the information on it looked extremely familiar... Then when I went onto the wiki article I realized that it was word for word the same! Here I was thinking that someone did such a thorough job adding information to the article when all they really did was copy and past someone else's work. Not only this, but they did not cite the webpage that they got the information from anywhere on the wiki page. That's just not fair to the person who wrote everything in the first place. So, my edits this time around consisted of me adding two external links to the article, one of them to the National Tap Ensemble, because that is a very informative website with a lot of information about tap dance, and the other link is to the webpage that the entire wiki article is copied from. I figured it would only be fair to give the original writer some credit. I realized that anyone can add anything they want to an article, that is what makes it a "wiki". However, there is still the issue of plagarism, which can be very serious and in this situation since it is literally word for word I really felt it was necessary to cite where the information came from.

In addition to the two external link I also looked up the definition of tap dance in the Encyclopedia Britannica and added that to the introductory section of the article. I did this because I felt that it would be important to have a general definition of the term rather than only having ones made up my random individuals that could potentially be very biased. What I added was this: "The Encyclopedia Britannica definition for tap dance is: A style of American theatrical dance using precise rhythmical patterns of foot movement and audible foot tapping. It is derived from the traditional clog dance of northern England, the jigs and reels of Ireland and Scotland, and the rhythmic foot stamping of African dances. Popular in 19th-century minstrel shows, versions such as "buck-and-wing" (danced vigorously in wooden-soled shoes) and "soft-shoe" (danced smoothly in soft-soled shoes) developed as separate techniques; by 1925 they had merged, and metal taps were attached to shoe heels and toes to produce a more pronounced sound. The dance was also popular in variety shows and early musicals." Nothing major, just a very informative little addition to the article.

After this post I am now officially done with wiki edits on tap dancing. Horray. Even though I love the topic, it does become difficult to come up with new information to add after a while. I still have two more other article to add my two cents to so look for that in the near future!

Hey, did you hear about stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela

Sunsilk Wiki Edit

Ok, so instead of editing one of my original wikipedia article choices, I decided to switch over to the article about Sunsilk haircare prodcuts (I hope this is ok!). The reason why I chose this topic was becasue I had to give a speech on Sunsilk in one of my other marketing classes: BUAD471 Advertising Management. Although the purpose of the presentation was to discuss the marketing strategies of your choice product, mine of course being Sunsilk, and to go into depth on the formation of, the values, and the vision of the company and how their advertisements relate. I realize that wikipedia is not always the best source of information for research because anyone can add any information they want, like this class for example. However, for many students, myself included, wikipedia provides a great starting point for more research and can provide great background information on whatever you are searching. Therefor, I can say that when it came time to put my presentation together the first place I looked was wikipedia, and to my surprise, the article was completely lacking. Overall, the article had roungly three sentences and none of them were very good.

My plan for this article is to first add some background information about the sunsilk company and products, then to discuss their previous campaigns run in the past and then to go into depth on their new and current campaigns designed to revamp the company image. Therefor, following this rough outline, my first Sunsilk Wikipedia edit was focused on providing a little background information. Although my contribution is small, it already more than doubled the size of the article! Here is waht I added:

"It was launched in 1954 in the United Kingdom and by 1959 it was available in 18 different countries world-wide. Currently, Sunsilk products are being marketed in over 50 countries throughout Asia, Latin America, The Middle East and North Africa. The Sunsilk brand is intended to demonstrate a perceptive and sympathetic understanding of women, communicate the idea of capturing the “emotional drama” in a girl’s life, and to provide a source of expert beauty care for women."

In addition to this I also added a link to their new webpage for their new campaigns in case someone is to come to the article in search of more information.

The choice to edit this article was an easy one as I already have a collection of information and research done on the topic neatly organized in a powerpoint file on my computer. Over the course of editing this article I will slowly add the information I have that I feel is important for readers coming to the Sunsilk wikipedia article. Even if my edits are not the best they are certainly a hell of a lot better than what was there to start with!

Oh, and I forgot to mention stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela

Happy Friday the 13th!

Google Launches Voice-Based Local Search Experiment

Based on the ClickZ article "Google Launches Voice-Based Local Search Experimets" posted on April 10, 2007 Google has recently launched a new service called Google Voice Local Search that allows its users to call up a 1-800 number sponsored by Google to get information about business listings. Although this is only an experiment as of right now the program proves to have great potential in the market. The phone number, 1-800-GOOG-411, will be accessible to anyone, although right now it is only in its experimental phase and may not work, and the caller can say either the business name or category to locate its information. Unfortunately, this program is not yet available to access information for local/residential listings but perhaps in the future this feature will be incorporated into the program.

Reviewers of this service are assuming that by providing the voice search service Google is showing interest in investing in voice interface systems to be used with mobile phones. Essentially, they are creating their own version of a 4-1-1. This is huge for Google.

There is no denying that the Google corporation already has a positive connotation to its name by their users and the general public. Anything Google touches seems to turn to gold (except for a few lawsuits), why should this new program be any different? I have heard many people, myself included, state how much they dislike the way 4-1-1 has turned out. Calling the number to gain information is a genius idea, however, often times getting the information you want can become close to impossible. Usually, when I want to find a phone number or directions to a business or residential location I type the name into Google. Then, Google does its magic and pops out an address, phone number and even the possibility of getting directions all with one click, it just makes sense to add the phone dimension to their program. I am sure that I am not the only person who uses Google’s services as location search and I am also sure that I am not the only person who has been satisfied with my results. This satisfaction only makes me assume that if I were to call and use Google’s phone directory service I would also be presented with an equally satisfied outcome of locating/attaining company information.

Overall, I feel that this is a very smart decision for Google to make. With their past history of success and their widespread fan base their 4-1-1 Google Voice Local Search tool should be a huge success. Hopefully their introductory version makes it big so that they can expand to cover residential locations as well. And if their success is so huge, who’s to say that they can’t take over as the number one phone directory service?

Google's explaination of this new service can be found here.

stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela

Second tap dancing wiki edit

After waiting about a week to do my second edit on the wiki article about tap dance I realized that there had been many changes already made, mostly by one person. I supposed that after seeing my contribution this person felt it was necessary to add as much information as possible as well to make this article as great as it can be. Now that the history and characteristics of tap dance have been bulked up it was harder to find things to add, but luckily I did come up with something. The first edit that I did was in the first section of the aricle where I stated that if someone reading the aricle wanted more information there was a webpage they could access. the sentence I wrote is, "For more information visit the International Tap Association webpage" followed by a link to their webpage. I felt that although this website was listed in the reference section of the article, it may be important to list up front so that someone in a hurry for more information would not have to search through the entire article to find it.

The second edit that I did this time around is in the characterisitics of tap dance secion at the very bottom where it lists some common tap steps. Although the person who added these in did a good job of listing some of the most well known steps, they definitely left out some big ones. Therefore, I felt it was necessary to elaborate on their sentence by adding "cincinnati, the shim sham shimmy, and the paddle and roll" which are also some of the most famous dance steps and combinations known to almost all tappers. The very last edit that I did here was in the history section where the "most prominent tap dancers" are listed. Overall this list was very thorough but I felt that Shirley Temple was an important tap figure that needed to be added, so I did. I also made her name link to the Wikipedia article specifically about her.

What the other editor did to this page was excellent and I am glad that someone else took the time to contribute to this page other than myself. With the combination of our edits (even though mine are small) this wiki article will be great in no time. Also, it probably looks like I went in and deleted other people's edits and then just took them as my own, but what really happened was that I made all the edits without signing in! I know, you warned us about this!!! So what I did was I just deleted all of my edits, signed it and then re-edited the page. I hope this is ok!

Also, stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela

final Medfield edit, finally!

Since I messed up earlier on the wiki edits, this is technically my fourth edit to the Medfield, MA article and I must admit that although I live in Medfield I have completely run out of information to ad. However, I did think of one thing to ad even though it is very minimal. In the education section all of the schools in the town are listed and which grades they provide education for. What it does not include is the location or address of any of these schools. I realize that if someone wanted this information all they would have to do is go to medfield.net to find it, but putting all the information in one centralized location makes accessing this info much easier. Also, at first I was not sure if was safe to put the school addresses on wikipedia, but then I just figured that the information was already on the internet and that adding it to the article would not hurt anyone. So yea, although this was my smallest addition to a wiki article yet, it still makes the article more informative, which is the overall goal of wikipedia. I have now finally completed all the edits necessary for one article, only three more to go!

also, stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela

stiuqxela

As part of our class requirements, all students were asked to blog a certain keyword with a link to a totally unrelated website. This semester, the key word is stiuqxela and we are linking the word to www.packers.com, the official site of the Green Bay Packers football team. The goal of this experiment is to have the packers come up as a search result when stiuqxela is searched in google, yahoo and live. Also, on top of the packers web page coming up, each of our blogs should be a search result connected with stiuqxela, a made up word! There will be a prize for the student whose blog comes up as the highest ranked search result... let the competition begin! Also, stiuqxela.

stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela

Tap Dance Wiki Edit

First off, I want to say that I am sorry that I am two days off from writing a post every week. This was not done intentionally. What happened was that I was forced to go on spring break in Florida and party a lot. Therefore, I did not have access to a computer all week and so I could not blog, even though I truly wanted to... I hop the once a week rule can be bent a little just for spring break.

Anyways, moving on. Instead of doing my last Medfield Wiki edit I decided to move on to the tap dancing article. I chose this article because tap dancing is a big part of my life, or at least it was until I came to college. Instead of participating in sports each season in middle and high school, I spent my after-school time in the dance studio practicing for various shows and competitions my team was competing in. This love for dancing started when I was 3 and my mother enrolled me in my first dance class to give herself some free time away from me. As the years went on I realized that this was something I loved, tap especially. By the time I was in middle school I was participating in tap competitions around the country, and I was pretty good too. One time my team got first place in an a capella tap competition where we had to rely on eachother for rhythm. I practiced every day after school just as any athlete would. Once I got to the University of Delaware I tried to keep up with training but unfortunately the stress of college got to me. I take the occasional class here at UD when I have time, and I have taught a few classes as well. Dancing was much too big a part of my life to give it up all together, but I'll have to wait until after school to take it up again.

So that's my history with tap dancing. Although I am no expert on the topic I do feel as though I know enough about it to contribute to the wikipedia article about tap. In my first edit I added a few sentences right to the beginning about National Tap Dance Day. I remember celebrating this day each year as a child with my tap company down the streets of Lexington, MA. The information I added is, "National Tap Dance Day is celebrated on May 25th of each year and was officially signed into law by President George Bush on November 7, 1989. The day of May 25th was chosen because it is the birthday of the famous tapper, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson."

I honestly do not know how people enthusiastic enough about tap dancing to write a wikipedia article about it would not know about National Tap Dance Day. Therefore, I felt as though it was completely necessary for me to add it into the article, even though I only touch on the topic. Perhaps I will dive deeper into the history behind the day in a later post...

Comment on Kathleen's Post

I was just looking through my team members' blogs one last time before I left for spring break (Ft. Lauderdale here I come!!) and just as she states the article of her article post caught her eye, so did her post catch mine. I cannot remember who, but someone else in my group also wrote about this same article, obviously Internet Curfews for College Students is a popular topic amongst us college students.

This slashdot posting talks about how students at a particular college in India will cut off from internet access during the night hours. It is stated that the internet has a negative impact on students' "academic performance, personality development, and extra curricular activities." Just as Kathleen's reaction to this curfew is that it is ridiculous, I must say that I cannot come up with a better word to describe my feelings about this as well. Not only is the internet an entertaining medium, it is also a great academic resource to have right at your fingertips that college students should have access to. I have absolutly no idea what the work load is like for the students at ITT Bombay is like, but I can only assume that they are kept busy with heavy work loads throughout the year. This being said, being a college student myself, I know that the evening hours are when I do most of my work, and the internet is a big part of that. Like this class for example, right now. It is almost 10 at night and I am on the internet doing work for class, not being distracted. If we were to have a curfew also, what I am doing right now would not be possible.

Also, just as Kathleen mentioned, having internet access shut off by a particiular time each night would be like putting a time limit on all assignments, even if they were not due until the next day. And how about online courses? Personally I love them and I love having the ability to do the assignments on my own time, and yes, sometimes that just happens to be late at night, but I'm ok with that.

Bottom line, I think this curfew idea is just crazy talk. Yes, being at school we are required to complete a lot of work to get good grades, but we are also here to socialize, hang out and party. The fact that we are on the internet late at night really shows no indication that we are bad students! I completely agree with all the points that Kathleen brought up, but her reasons are certainly not an exhaustive list, and I'm pretty sure that those students at ITT Bombay are going to come up with a long list of their own reasons as to why this idea is ridiculous as well.

Vanity Search

In class Professor Brown has metioned a few times that one of the most common searches done on google.com is a vanity search. This is when you type in your name in the search field and see what comes up... possibly actually you. I decided to do this. I tried a few combinations. First I put in "Andrea Lynn Boyer"and all that came up was someone else's blog wishing someone a happy 1st birthday.. not me :( so I revised my search to just "Andrea Boyer" and there were a lot of matches (747 to be exact). What I found is that apparenly I'm an artist from France! Obviously this is not about me, but it is not surprising since my most of my family is of French decent. I looked in the images that came up under my name and saw all of the artwork that this other Andrea Boyer did. Shes actually really good. All of her work is in black and white, but they're all of extremely odd things, such as legs crossed, shoes, and various naked people. Not really my style. Some of the pictures are so vague/weird that you cannot even make out what they are actually of. Pretty cool though.

Another common Andrea Boyer result were news feeds about a woman in Clay County Florida that was murdered in mid-Janurary 2007. Apparently there have been no leads as to who killed her but there are videos of her entering a Vet Clinic that same night and never leaving. There have been a few suspects brought to court but all of them have pleaded non guilty. So far this murder case is still a mystery. There is even the Andrea Boyer Foundation to help raise money for Andrea's family to pay for the funeral and burial arrangements.

Other than these two results the rest of them are just random links here and there. Most of them are in French or some other language I cannot make out. Once again, I am not surprised that my name is associated with a lot of French webpages since both my first and last name are extremely common in France. This was an interesting project to do and I have honestly never done it before. I never would have thought that there would be so many Andrea Boyer's in this world!

Happy 21st Birthday to me!!!

Another Medfield Edit...

Soooo I messed up. According to the syllabus we can only edit a wikipedia article once every week, and I of course went and did my biggest edit after only 5 days of my previous edit so this will not count as the third edit to this article. Regardless, here is what I edited:

• In the Geography section there was only statistics about the size of the town, so I decided to add the names of all the towns that border Medfield. This is a pretty important bit of information and is definitely relevant to the geography of the town.
• The History section was pretty weak and offered very little information about the history of Medfield. I realize that this section is supposed to be a brief explaination of history for someone to read quickly, but it was definitely lacking. Therefore, I did not change what was being discussed, I simply embellished a little and gave more specific details. For example, I added the year of the King Phillip's War and added specifics about what in the town was burned, and also added that Medfield was the 43rd town in Massachusetts to be established.
• Finally, in the Trivia section I decided to add the sentence "The Medfield State Hospital, located at 45 Hospital Road, opened in 1896 but at at its peak housed 1,500 patients. The hospital was closed on April 3, 2003." I added this because I feel that this is an important fact to mention about the town... not just any town has a state hospital!

As you can see this was my biggest post yet, and a pretty good one too! Now I have to come up with more Medfield facts to add to complete my last wiki edit. Then I will move on to my other three articles to edit! Woo!

VALS Survey

Today I took the VALS survey, which is a marketing and consulting tool that helps businesses worldwide develop and execute more effective strategies. What the survey does is break consumers into segments to which companies can choose to target market to based on specific personality traits. The basic theory behind VALS is that people express their personalities through their behaviors, which is why the survey asks mostly questions about what you like to do in your spare time and what type of activities you are interested in.

After taking the survey, my results stated that I am mostly an experiencer and secondly an innovator. While these sound nice, reading the experiencer description actually makes me sound like a slave to fashion, which I am definitely not. Contrary to what the description states, I do not spend too much on fashion related products, nor do I enjoy participating in sports and outdoor recreational activities. Perhaps these qualities were given to me because I agreed with most of the statements regarding fashion. However, if there had been a neutral option to choose, I would have gone with that, but since there was not, I had no choice but to choose "slightly agree". This response probably skewed my results into categorizing myself as highly fashionable individula.

As for the innovator quality, I wish I could say this was true but unfortunately I feel like this is an overstatement. Although I do consider myself to be successful and motivated, I do not feel that I am successful enough (at least not yet) to be considered an innovator. I cannot afford to be an innovator who apparently has upscale tastes for niche products and services. I wish.

After taking the survey and receiving my results I quickly skimmed through the other possible outcomes. Overall, I would say that none of these really relate to the way I live my life. All of them either have an extremely negative connotation or positive one, I think I'm somewhere in between. If I were to choose from these options I would say that I am a combination of an Achiever and maybe a Striver for various reasons. I think that the questions on this survey are too specific to make accurate assumptions about individuals and they were completely wrong about me!

Subliminal Advertising

While going through the required blog readings I found an small article that caught my eye. It was titled "Subliminal Messages Might Actually Work". The reason that I stopped to read this article is that we had been talking about this exact topic in one of my other marketing classes.

According to this blog post and the article linked to it there is a substantial amount of evidence that when we are exposed to subliminal messages our brain can and will register the information and store it without us even knowing. However, whether or not this information can impact our purchase dicisions is still being tested. Dr Bahador Bahrami of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience states that he "believes that it's likely that subliminal advertising may affect our decisions -- but that is just speculation at this point." Studies are currently being done world wide to test this theory.

Although this may seem really cool (or maybe not) there are a lot of implications of sending subliminal messages to the public. Currently this strategy is illegal in many technologically advanced countries, such as England, but is still legal in the United States. By sending a stimulus that is below the level of conscious awareness many people will feel violated. We like to be in control of our lives and what we do. To think that advertisers are impacting the decisions we make as to what we buy will upset a lot of people. One heated response to this blog post states that "just plain old advertising can make people buy things against their will", which is true. When we see ads, pay attention to them and then register the information they can drastically impact the purchase decisions we make. So why the need for subliminal marketing?

Overall, I feel that this is a really new and interesting technique for marketing to use, in theory. However, I also feel like it will not go over well with the general public. As stated before, people do not like to think that they do not control their lives. Sending messages that are stored in our brain without us knowing seems like an unfair advantage for marketing companies to have. I say that while it is interesting and should be tested, if it is to be used marketing companies need to be prepared to deal with the public's reaction. For now, just stick to plain old advertising.

Second Wiki edit to Medfield

Continuing with the same article, I noticed there were a few more changes that needed to be made to the Medfield Wikipedia article. First of all, In the edit I made last time someone went and changed the link to the website. Instead of having the address written out it now has a little arrow to click on that will connect you to the outside web page. At first I was bummed that someone changed what I did, but overall I think it looks better the way it is now. At least they didn't change any of the content I added!!

For my second edit I was originally going to add a link to the website for the Town of Medfield but found that it was already on there. Instead, I decided that there were two edits that people had done that were completely unnecessary. The first one was in the section titled "Notable Residents" This is where all of the famous who live in Medfield are listed. At the bottom of the list someone added "Uber Jason: basically the mann!". I thought this was ridiculous. It was clearly some kid adding either himself or his friend to be funny. I can guarentee that there is no one in Mefield named Uber Jason that everyone is talking about, which is why I decided to delete this entry.

My second change was in the "History" section where the wiki article talks about Richard Desorgher and how he wrote a few books on the history of Medfield. While I feel that this is an important fact to mention, there were many links in this section that were unnecessary. For the word "books" someone made a link to a wikipedia article describing what books are. I think that it is safe to assume that everyone reading this Mefield article knows what books are. Once again, I decided to delete this link.

Comment on a Blog Post...

Over the past few weeks I have been on amazon.com numerous times to try and find all the text books needed for my classes this semester. Currently my inbox is filled with order and shipping notifications from the company, so when I was searching through Slashdot, the blog article with Amazon in its title caught my eye. The article is called Amazon Adjusts Prices After Sales Error. Basically, Amazon made an error with one of their pomotional sales events where DVD's were buy one get one free. Instead of getting one free the total of two DVD's would come up as free or a very low amount, the order would go through and then be shipped as normal. This seems like a great deal to the customer. However, once this problem was found out Amazon began gaining control of the situation in a rather harsh way. They have notified the customers and are currently recharging their credit cards.

Although Amazon deserves to get their money back there is no reason why they should be charging people without authorization. By doing this I feel that they are only making their company look bad and bringing upset to these customers who thought they just got a really really good deal. Being such a large company I feel as though, depending on how many individuals got their DVD's for free, Amazon might have been better off if they had just let everything be. This way, they would be loosing money (probably a lot of money) but they would also be a favored company to those individuals. It can take years to get people to trust your company but it only takes one incident to take all that trust away. Technically it was Amazon's mistake, not the customers' and therefore Amazon should be the ones to pay in the end.

First Wiki Edit

Ok, so I thought editing articles on the internet would be intimidating, but it wasn't at all! It was actually really easy. The hardest part was to find something that the article missed. The article I edited was on Medfield, MA, which is the town I am from. The article seemed to cover everything, including the infamous townie Bubblegum Bob who roams the streets of Medfield. After reading it for a while, I noticed that in the "Points of Interest" section Noon Hill was missing, which is the towns highest point. So, my edit to this article was, "Noon Hill is the highest point in Medfield at 370 feet with a trail to its peak. There are a total of 4.5 miles of trails around the hill and offer views of the hills of Walpole and Norfolk." with a link to Noon Hill's homepage. Here is the link to the article. Enjoy!

Blog Purpose

One of the class requirements at the University of Delaware in the Marketing program is BUAD477: Information Technology Applications in Marketing. Here is our class website. The purpose of this course is to help us students understand the impact of information technologies on marketing strategies and practice. As a part of this course we are required to create a blog and make postings on a weekly basis. The reason we are doing this blog project is to record all of our work throughout the course and to become familiar with an internet tool that is becoming increasingly popular to businesses as a marketing tool. I have always viewed blogs as online diaries filled with useless personal information written by middle schoolers, so hopefully this project will help me see that, although this may be true, it also has many other important uses.

Introduction

Hey everyone, my name is Andrea Boyer and I am currently a junior at the University of Delaware. As of right now I am majoring in marketing and operations management with a minor in international business. Over this past winter session I studied abroad in Australia with the business program. It was beautiful there and I really miss spending every day on Bondi Beach rather than in the classroom. Anyways, this is my first posting on my first blog ever so I hope everything works!

First Post

this is my first post on my first blog ever!