Week 10 - Management of Social Media

I missed the seminar and lecture this week again. It is becoming extremely difficult for me to cope focusing on my studies these days. I find it really difficult to keep straight in the morning not to mention the dizziness and nausea feeling throughout the day. I am worried that I am missing too much. I try my best to keep up to date by checking the information on Blackboard and also by talking to friends on any important issues discussed at seminars and so on. This is the only way I could keep up with my studies.

E-ACTIVITY 3

I realised that the E-activity 3 has been issued at this weeks class. The instructions have been posted in the Blackboard. This is to be completed by 12 noon on 5th April. This involves carrying out two tasks.

Tasks 1 

is to identify a Small Medium Enterprise and investigate how they are varying the promotion component of their marketing mix when delivering services through the Internet. We are also required to consider the general use of the Internet by them for promotion by specifically focusing on the use of web 2.0 applications.  Then we are required to Post a 150 word summary of our findings on our seminar group’s discussion board on GCU Learn.  This task is to be completed by Thursday 29^th March.

Task 2

In this task we are required to actively contribute to the discussion board. All members of the class are required to comment on and discuss each others’ postings. The discussion board will close at 12pm on Thursday 5^th April.

Social Media Implementation
Stages of Maturity

• —  Unawares
•         —Obstructors
•         —Neutrals
•         —Supporters
•         —Champions 

Social Media Life Cycle

Week 9 - Management of Web 2.0

I couldn't update the blog as planned yesterday. Therefore I have just created this new post. This will be updated in detail later on.

Positive features of Social Media

• Collective Intelligence
• Distributed responsibility
• On-line Community
• Personal Freedom
• Digital Democracy
• Digital Distribution
• Social Capital

Challenges of Social Media

• Control
• Accuracy of information
• Anonymity and deception
• Security of the information
• Information accessibility
• Openness
• Legal Aspects
• Privacy
• Spam
• Cyber stalking, bullying, harassment
• Minimising face to face communicaation
• Social polarisation/ fragmentation

Week 8 - E Marketing

My experience

I missed the seminar and lab for this week for the first time. This is because I became pregnant and being in the first stages of pregnancy I am strugling to keep up. However I decided to look into the lecture notes in the black board and maintain the blog as usual on a regular basis. This has become a difficult task for me. Therefore I decided that I will post as usual even though it is a small post and later on whenever I can to update the posts. This way I can make sure that I have at least one post per week.

E-Marketing
With the advancement in technology marketing has taken a new turn.  More and more people have started using new technology for their daily activities such as shopping and this has in turn affected how companies do marketing. For example online shopping as well as the usage of social media has increasingly become popular and this has made companies to include them in their marketing strategies and concepts for example how they plan their promotional mix such as product, price, place and promotion.

As suggested by Beynon-Davies (2004) good marketing approach will be reliant on good planning. Planning is an important element for e-marketing strategy. This will include;

An analysis of the environment for e-marketing.

In this the demand for e-commerce should be determined in particular market segments.

An assessment of current internal infrastructure which is made available to the company for e-marketing.

This will involve determining the feasible options made available to the company and evaluating the performance of the current infrastructure in terms of extending its e-marketing infrastructure.

Establishing a vision for e-marketing

This involves setting clear objectives for the use of e-marketing with regard to online contribution to company performance and the marketing mix of products, price, place and promotion.

5ps - Leverage Marketing

Reference :

Beynon-Davies P, E-Business (2004)

E-Activity 2

We were handed our second e-activity during week 6 lab which is to be completed by week 9 to be handed in on 15th March. this was to do with social networking and e-marketing.  We were given the opportunity to pick a company randomly and were asked to research their use of three social networking sites such as Face book, Linked in and Twitter.

This was one of the difficult tasks for me because I am not interested in using any of these social networking sites. However for the purpose of undertaking these assessment tasks I had to sign up with each one of these social networking sites. In order to do this I did some background research to find out if we are able to opt out of these services as and when you wish to do so and it turned out that we are able to opt out of their services whenever we want. This then gave me reassurance that I dont have to hold on to them if I dont like them.

Finally even though I didn't like the idea of signing up with these sites I decided that it is best that I learn about these and complete the relevant tasks for e-activity 2 and later on to delete my profile on these sites if I still didn't wish to keep them.

Week 7 - Cloud Computing

Future of Computers

This week we started the lecture by going through what we have learnt so far. It was good to recap. This was then followed by a lecture about Cloud Computing. This is about delivering hosted services over the internet service which is managed by the provider. Cloud computing consists of 

• Virtual computers / servers
• Data Storage Capacity
• Network Capacity
• Communication and Messaging Capacity

Cloud computing has two elements. Public Cloud Computing and Private Cloud Computing. This therefore has three categories.

1. Infrastructure as a service. Some companies will make use of this for servers and for storage.
2. Platform as a service. Some companies will use this for product development or the combination of the two.
3. Software as a service. Individuals may use it as a software.

An example of cloud computing is that iPad lets you save your essentials in to a drop box which is effectively cloud computing. The following video clip gives a further understanding of what cloud computing is all about.

How Cloud Computing Works

When your work and responsibilities as an executive or a manager involve ensuring that all of your employees have the right hardware and software needed to complete their tasks, you may need to buy computers but also ensure that you also purchase software or software licenses to  enable employees have the necessary tools they require. This would mean whenever you have a new hire you may have to buy more software or ensure that the current license allows another user.  

As a manager you may want to find ways to reduce spending more money. This is where cloud computing comes in for the rescue.

Cloud computing allows you to load one application instead of installing a suite of software for each computer. This one application will allows workers to log into a Web-based service which hosts all the programs the user needs to complete their job.  Remote machines owned by another company will run almost everything such as email, word processing to complex data analysis programs. This is called cloud computing. 

Cloud computing reduces the need for the local computers to do all the heavy lifting in running applications. Instead the only requirement by the user’s computer needs is that it should be able to run the cloud computing systems interface software, which is like using a web browser and the rest of the work will be taken care of by cloud’s network.



Reference

Strickland J (2012), How Cloud Computing Works, [Online], http://computer.howstuffworks.com/cloud-computing/cloud-computing.htm,  [Accessed 4th March 2012]