Digital Frontiers

Digital Frontiers, an elective class that I registered on a whim turned out to be one of the most useful and inspiring classes.  The class, which focused on social media marketing, could have easily been another lecture-styled course structured with chapters of textbook readings and binders full of handouts to learn before exams.  Instead, the instructors stayed true to their entrepreneurial spirit and made DF a creative yet surprisingly educational experience.

The weekly speakers, experienced business owners and professors, introduced us to new concepts of social marketing.  Then, we reinforced our learning through giving presentations and writing in this blog.   Finally we practiced what we learned by helping local businesses such as UF Young Entrepreneurs in Leadership and Sustainability and Burrito Brothers jump start their own social media marketing plans.

The class unveiled to me monumental changes in business that I failed to notice before.  Facebook, a social site that I check daily but never bothered to think more of it, turned out to be an increasingly powerful marketing tool for businesses.  We all know that it’s important to attract customers’ attentions and get customers involved, but businesses today are taking this to a new level through User Generated Content, Viral Marketing, and instant feedback platforms.  What’s exciting about all of this is any start-up can get high search returns by following the rules of social media marketing and Google.  This blog is a perfect example.  Do a search on Google, and Digital Frontiers is the first on the list.   DF was nonexistent four months ago.

For tomorrow’ class we are going to play Second Life.  Yes, first day of class I would have reacted the same way and asked, “Why would we do that?”  However, after a semester of discovering value in Facebook and Twitter, I now know better.  Staying open minded and discovering the operational value behind seemingly unimportant things are just a couple of the many lessons I learned in DF.

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Would you rather look up a word in the electronic dictionary or look it up the old fashioned way?  Spending 2 minutes thumbing through the dictionary pages doesn’t mean one is learning a new word any better.  It just means less time to do the important thing: reading.

The internet is like an electronic dictionary.  It allows us to access what we are looking for faster, so we can spend our time on the important things: thinking and creating.  It gives us the works of others so we don’t waste our time reinventing the wheel.

If there is one thing that internet provides, it is a platform to create.  For example, building a website with HTML from scratch can be a tedious process, but it doesn’t have to be.  The internet is kind and allows us to share.  By right clicking “view page source” on any webpage, a notepad will pop up with that particular website’s complete HTML codes.  The programmer can now use existing codes to build a basic website, and then spend time doing the thing that matters: change the basic codes to invent something new.

Some are concerned that easy access to others’ knowledge and work would stifle creativity, but I say society forbids that.  Let’s talk about the website again; if the programmer simply copies the codes and doesn’t create something new, then his website will not differentiate itself.  In business, what catches people’s eyes are things that are new and unique.  Internet gives us a place to learn and be inspired, but in the end we do the honor of inventing.

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Who says education is a gift to the elite few, and the other children of America have to wait around for policies such as No Child Left Behind?  Who says education has to be organized?  Who says learning has to be restricted to what’s offered in school?

Any person can be a teacher, and with that in mind I came up with my million dollar idea of creating a nation wide online tutoring service offering any and all subjects: from the traditional math, science, English, to graphic designing, investment banking, cooking, break dancing, the art of socializing, anything!  As long as there is someone out there willing to teach and someone willing to learn, knowledge can be passed through one screen to another anytime and anywhere.

This 24 hour online tutoring service is nothing more than a platform to connect those who want to learn and those who want to teach.  The more votes a tutor gets from his tutees, the better his ranking and reputation, and thus the more client requests he will get.  The service charge is completely up to the tutor; however, a certain percentage of this income will go to the tutoring service.

Marketing strategy on a “$0.00″ budget:

- Word of Mouth Marketing: the tutors and pleased tutees will be the main marketers for the website.  The service’s good reputation will spread mainly through word of mouth and eventually through recognition by other organizations and news media.

- Social Media: Fan Pages, twitter accounts, and Youtube will be created to advertise for the tutoring service website.  Top ranking tutors are rewarded with spots on the media pages to recruit tutees.  They can post helpful contents, quick tips, or high quality sample videos.  The pleased tutees can create “thank you” videos to help their tutors get more client requests.  The media pages will be frequently updated.

- Feedback: free online feedback tools such as Google Analytics will be used to track what attracts viewer’s attention and what does not.

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An effective marketing plan shouldn’t be complicated.  What needs to be done is: have a great product, identify the problem for low sales, research and come up with the solution.

Product: a 6 week summer camp on a college campus.  YELS, Young Entrepreneurs for Leadership and Sustainability is already an amazing product that ensures a meaningful summer and a ton of tangible benefits for participants.

The problem: low number of applicants.  How can a program that offers a handful of core benefits receive such a limited number of applicants?  A quick survey in the honors class shows that only 2 out of 20 something students have heard about the YELS program.  So, clearly our target audiences, the high school students and their parents, are not aware of our product.  Fortunately, this is an easier problem to solve than a problem relating to the product itself.

Marketing solution:

Channels.  Reach high school students through their way of communication, facebook, youtube, and twitter.  Update these social platforms with quality content that our target audiences care about.  For example, college admission tips, college/high school survival guides, how to master the SAT, current events in entrepreneurship and sustainability, etc. These quality contents will keep the students and parents returning to YELS’ facebook, youtube, and twitter sites.

Branding. We will renovate the website graphics and layout so that it is more appealing or “cooler” to the high school students.  Also, we will communicate the core benefits of the program in easy to read manners

Emotions. This is a continuation of the branding.  Instead of focusing on physical appeals of the website, we will focus on the emotional brand of this summer camp.  YELS is a prestigious club for building friendship among leaders.  Once a YELS gator, you are forever part of the YELS-hood, and loved by fellow YELS leaders.  This is a similar idea to memberships in FLA, Cicerones, or even a Fraternity or Sorority.  We will communicate this emotional brand through pictures, videos, and blog posts.

The best time to collect promotional content for YELS is during the summer.  YELS can challenge participates to come up with the most innovative video to communicate their love for YELS. The Y-Love videos. These videos can be content for the blog, facebook, website, and YELS can make it available to the students to share or put on their own facebook pages.

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21^st century is the century of the people.  The birth of internet, search engines, and social platforms completely revolutionized the way of communication.  Information and the power to spread information are no longer in the hands of an elite few, but in the hands of the masses.  Armed with this new power, today’s buyers no longer want to be the last ones to know about a product; they want to be involved.  Instead of fighting this new phenomenon, businesses are riding the wave and giving the power of marketing and decision making to the people.

A good example is the story of Michelle Phan, an ordinary art student in Boston who started a Youtube account a couple of years ago to make videos on makeup products.  Today she has over 1 million views on each video, landed a page in Vogue magazine, and was recently hired by Lancome as the official Vblogger.  On her Facebook Fan Page, she gave her audience the power to express their feedback on videos and her product IQQU, post their own pictures, suggest future video content, and vote for products.

Michelle succeed because she supplied quality content and products, but more importantly, she invited her customers to get involved (in easy and quick ways), and as a result they wanted to view her videos or buy her products, as well as tell others about her.  In fact, I didn’t know about Michelle Phan until a friend suggested the Fan Page.

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Say you hired a new web developer to redesign your website, and soon your new snazzy website garners an impressive 10,000 visits a day (you originally had a pitiful amount of 10 hits a day).  In a bout of optimism, you award your developer a large bonus and happily awaits for increases in sales.  Month after month, the website traffic rate steadily increases, but number of sales stubbornly stays the same.

What is wrong with this picture? You’re not attracting the right audience.

It may seem wonderful that the website is now getting more traffic, but traffic that does not convert into actual sales is useless.  In fact, this meaningless increase in traffic can actually backfire and increase the owner’s hosting expenses.  The goal of a business website is to gain more sales, and to achieve this goal a business cannot blindly advertise for the simple purpose to increase viewers.  Instead, take advantage of tools such as Google Analytics that analyze the activities of the website viewers and overtime can help the business determine which marketing strategy is more effective. Use it!

For the Young Entrepreneurs in Leadership and Sustainability summer program of UF, my group plans to renovate the website and make it more visually appealing to high school students, rearrange the wording to make the content more readable, and add more sections to the website that display photos and videos of the summer program.  Google Analytics will help track which section of the website the visitors stayed on the longest, and thus point to the section that is most interest or helpful.

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Yell for YELS!!!!!!!!!

Ambitious and innovative high school sophomores and juniors: forget about staying home to babysit your little siblings, forget about your bagging time job at Publix, and forget about doing endless required volunteering hours by yourself.  Summer 2010, you want to get away and be part of YELS – Young Entrepreneurs for Leadership and Sustainability.

Be prepared for a mind blowing 6 week preview of college fun, innovative team building, long lasting friendship, and mentoring from UF leaders and admission directors, all at the heart of the Gator Nation, University of Florida.

Additionally, YELS satisfies two college level courses, 6 dual-enrollment credits, 75 team volunteering hours, access to all UF facilities, a private workshop from the UF Director of Freshmen Admission, and much more.  “Does YELS give me a better chance of getting into UF?”  One word, “YES.”

Do I want to go? Hell Yeah!!! But, I wish I knew about it while I was in high school.  To be honest, I just heard about this precious chance booster and summer fun two weeks ago, but I’m already a sophomore in college.  Looking back, in high school I heard about Duke TIP and the Cornell Summer College Program, but not YELS of UF, yet it’s a program of equal if not higher quality and value.

Why not? One solution lies in advertising.  Not mass advertising in the traditional sense, but advertising through media frequented by the target audience, high school sophomores and juniors; give the power of advertising to the people, in other words, advertising that hypes the target audience and provide tools for them to easily spread this hype.

Just with a quick glance at the popular Duke TIP and Cornell Summer College Program websites, I can locate links to learn more or share the program on: Digg, Reddit, Google, Delicious, Yahoo, Youtube, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and even the dwindling Myspace.  Oh, and links to translate the website into 8 different languages.  No matter what media or language, the reader is covered.

Aspiring Gators, I encourage you to look into the YELS application, the most rewarding summer program of UF.   When you visit again in a few weeks, new ways to share your excitement for YELS will be conveniently located at the bottom of the page, just one click away.

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Accountancy gets very little fame for how essential of an industry it is to the development of businesses and our beloved capitalism.  It is much more than just record keeping; it is a profession that expanded trade, governs the growth of modern businesses, and is currently adjusting itself to ensure the smooth sailing of globalization.

With the creation of new financial regulations and business models, legal and illegal, accounting has grown to be much more complex than it was in the age of Pacioli, father of accounting.  Fortunately, with disruptive innovation,

accountants can move away from basic data entry and focus more on analyzing, consulting, managing, and most important of all, more time with clients.  Can you imagine compiling a book of a corporation’s financial data the old fashioned way, with pen and paper, every three months?  Technology made this possible.

What disruptive technology is also doing in the accounting industry is making the basic accounting work simple and doable for the common people.  Recently I joined VITA, Volunteer Income Tax Assistance.  The software that IRS provides VITA made it possible for college students like me to prepare income tax returns for low income families.  Think Turbo Tax.  It’s the household software that revolutionized the tedious task of preparing income tax returns.

Doesn’t technology eliminate jobs for accountants?  No it does not.  GAAP and IFRS conversion will bring plenty of work for accountants.  What technology will eliminate is inefficiency.

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“We’re playing a game.”  These were the words of Adam and Nikolai, our Digital Frontiers instructors, as they passed out stacks of yellow Post-It notes to each group.  “Now use these, go out and create the most value in an hour.”

“What?”

That was the reaction from most of us.  This didn’t feel like a typical business class, more like an episode out of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice.  After a few moments of thinking, Joey first broke the silence and said, “Let’s cover a homeless guy with sticky notes.”

Hey, why not, all innovative ideas were deemed crazy at first.

The three of us sped to the library to find a homeless candidate.  While we searched, we tossed ideas in the air to complete the plan; some ideas were included and some were dropped, but what came out of a team at work is the common goal of bettering the lives of human beings; human beings who had less than us in every aspect, human beings whom we are all too busy to help.

Within an hour, we built on Joey’s seemingly crazy remark and turned our sticky notes into the voice of a “Blanket the Homeless” campaign.  The resulting value is a reminder for all the busy college students to take the time to donate today, to help out at the homeless shelter this winter, and to simply lend a hand to the weaker souls.

The campaign worked.  Strangers pointed, friends stopped, and stories spread. But why?

Because the age of innovation has begun.  Today’s youth no longer turn their heads at hackneyed posters and pamphlets, but if you give them something out of the ordinary, something like a homeless man covered with Post-It notes, then everyone stops.  Today’s businesses must think harder and smarter, those who do not will be forgotten.

Oh, I forgot to mention naked men, facebook wall, and life size text got Post-Ited this week too.

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Hey everyone, my name is Meng Liu, and I am a second year accounting major.

I was involved in everything in freshmen year just because I was incredibly excited to finally be in college, but this year I decided to only focus on a few and really put time into them.  A few of my favorites are peer leading for FYF, FLA, CRU, and presenting for case studies, so ask me anytime if you want to know more about them!  This semester, I want to read up more on biographies of famous businessmen and learn more about sales.  I’m open for recommendations of good books.

Technology always fascinated me, and I absolutely love the new gadgets that are rapidly being invented.  As far was background, when I was little I would stay up really late to learn html, make graphics with photoshop, and build websites on geocities.  Sadly, school got too busy, so those are things of the past.  However, I still appreciate it when I see a nicely designed website, clean graphics, and a good computer generated commercial or animation.  My parents are both computer programmers, so I guess I have the “coding gene”, but I don’t want to be a programmer.  A good night job would be video advertisement designer though!

Right now I use facebook to stay connected with my friends in America, and Xiaonei (Chinese facebook!) and msn with friends in China.

Through this class I would like to learn more about how merger and acquisition deals are made between tech companies, and how technology will spread to other countries, especially to countries that are not aware that pirating software is wrong.  Until next time!

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