Bo Z.

Sometimes, when I google something or search something I want in an online shopping site, no matter how hard I try, and I just couldn’t get the right thing I wanted. The first thought came on my mind was that this site doesn’t have the product that I was looking for, but when I started wondering around and browsing other products, the thing I wanted was listed somewhere, they call it “other customers also bought”. So, I believe that those kind of site didn’t do a good job on search engine optimization, so they would probably lose customers within few minutes or few seconds if customers couldn’t find what they want, becasue customers sometimes don’t have patience. Thus, we need to consider SEO if we want our customers not only be able to find us easily, but also find the right thing they are looking for when they are on our site.

There’s one article says that “search engine and people are alike“, because both search engine and people are looking for the best substantive result that would be rel event to the keywords. Not only that, SEO can also “drive” and “maintain” site’s traffic. Obviously, if one company’s website appear on the first page of search result, or even at the top of first page, it can get the most vsitors to its site, and this can also give this company advantage over its competitors, because the more people go to this site, the more information they would get and the more people will become familiar with this site.Therefore, people would directly go to this site next time from their bookmarks, so the traffic is maintained. A senior Vice President from Network Solution has mentioned that if we want our company to be noticed or viewd on the web, and the best thing to do is SEO. Moreover, if local small business fail to do so, they would probably go out of business. She also provided some tips to do a good SEO.

Now I want to talk about SEO in a certain web site, for example “EBay”. There are way too many things on EBay we can look for, and looking for the right thing is easy, and I believe EBay has optimized their search engine for customers to spend less time finding things they are interested in. First, it has many different categories we can choose from so that we don’t need to waste time to filter things we don’t want. Second, when they search results come up, we can make them into certain order we desire, such as end soon, lowest price and recently added, etc. This gives customers a chance to customize results to the way they want to view, and it is user friendly. Third, Ebay’s search engine automatically corrects the spelling if we typed in the wrong words, and the results are as expected. Great way to maintain customers by saving time for us, and think ahead for us.

SEO is not for everyone, because it reqiures special skills and enough budget to do so. For individuals, we can use google’s web master tool to do it. For other companies, they could hire SEO company to do it for them. SEO.com is a good place. There are also things we should avoid when doing SEO, please see the video.

It is hard to stay invisible for any kind of company on the Internet, and the impact of user-control web contents is more serious than we thought. There are so many web sites provide free service for users to publish their posts online, I consider blog as a personal free web site, which contains information about a user’s interests, perspective and personal life. Users usually post comments about everyday lives, politics and events that happen around us. The problem is that we can’t control people’s opinion; especially we are exposed in all kinds of information every day, and our opinion could be altered due to others’ comments or posts toward something. On the other hand, companies could consider this as an advantage to make it to be visible or popular on the web. As we all know that many companies have their own blogs, which provide information about the company, the current products, developing products and share stories with us. I think the reason they are doing this is because they want to keep in touch with customers by letting people come to them rather than looking for people who are not interested in at all. As I learned in the last class, the marketing public relation has shifted to a new approach from “control” to “creditability”.Almost every shopping site provides opinion for customers to review the products they bought, so that the following customers could get a big picture or general idea of what they are going to get. This could give companies opportunity to increase their sales, but also could bring negative impact, such as the game “Spore”, the DRM issue, because customers are not ready to accept this new technology, and they get used to the traditional technology already.

I don’t think the traditional advertisement is working for nowadays customers, because people are no longer approached by commercial; instead, they look for information they need, and that’s why RSS became popular. RSS brings new things directly to people who subscribe it; here is a simple example from YouTube.

 
Marketers have to come up with a new method to sell their products to existing customers, and try their best to get more new customers.  And they also have to think about a new way to do the public relation online.

Viral marketing is a very interesting theory for me. Although I’ve seen some web sites use this approach to gain profit, I never knew we call it “viral marketing”. Basically, it lets users to promote and advertise certain goods or services in the given web site. In other words, we call it “word-of-mouth”, which people share their good or bad experience with their friends, and then their friends tell other friends. Finally, good thing gets better, and bad thing gets worse. In addition, it’s more like a virus that spreads very fast if someone has been targeted, and more people get this virus in the same way. That’s why I think if people talk about something in a positive way very often, even it is a bad or a lie, it will eventually become a good thing or the truth and more people would accept it and spread it.

There are some strategies we can use in viral marketing, and the elements of viral marketing are,  according to Dr. Ralph F. Wilson:

1. provide free things that would attract customers to your site.
2. easy to use and share with friends.
3. increasing registered users on site to ensure “word-of-mouth” can be used.
4. users generate contents by themselves.
5. user others’ resource as advantage to against them.

I found two major Chinese web sites that use viral marketing strategy to penetrate the market. The first one is called “Public Praise“, (sorry, Chinese contents) which is now owned by Yahoo China. This web site contains information about almost every major cities in China, categories from food to consumer products to automobile and  to real estate, etc. Registered users in different geographic area could contribute information about their cities, such as recommendation about certain stores or restaurants, and rank them to give others a general idea what they could expect if they go there. This site is now one of the biggest viral marketing site in China.

The second one is different, it is called “YoHo City“, (sorry again, Chinese contents) it means yelling in those traditional markets in order to attract customers to buy your goods. This site’s users can be categorized in two parts: consumers and companies. As I mentioned before, the first element of viral marketing is that we have to provide free things for people, well, this is what this site does. It gives out free gift such as samples from cosmetic companies, or books or other interesting things. The purpose of this is to create strong brand images for registered companies by sending out free gifts to customers who interested in. It also use “word-of-mouth” approach, we can see from its picture :

Finally, here is a funny video about viral marketing.