After countless lectures on basically the same thing, it has been drilled into my head that understanding social media is imperative for success in the business arena.
I have realized that it’s time to wake up and get with the program or someone else will wipe you out. Changes are occurring at such a fast pace now it requires more and more creativity to keep up.
The one concept that I found most interesting and plan to incorporate into my future business plans is including customers in the process. Having a company that is open to the masses is such a foreign concept to many individuals because of the way the “corporate” behavior seen in the past of many businesses. After this class, however, I have discovered that more and more companies are changing their mentality and are successful because of it.
The business world is more different than it has ever been and will continue to evolve. Keeping up is just half the battle. DigitalFrontiers has been an eye-opening experience and has motivated me to be just as successful with these tools as our guest speakers one day.
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Being a member of the online community is like being one individual out of millions across the world. Being able to even have one moment of fame in a community so vast requires a great amount of creativity or an equal amount of stupidity.
So the question is: does the internet foster creativity or reward stupidity?
The answer to this question depends on what end of the spectrum you are on. If you spend the majority of your time getting all your intel from websites such as Wikipedia , Facebook, or Twitter the internet is probably hindering your ability to think for yourself. If, however, you are a top participant on websites such as Digg, YouTube, or have your own blog to use as a platform for your creativity, the internet is in fact fostering your creativity by forcing you to compete with millions of other users to vie for the attention of the online community.
The thing is, the masses are not the individuals out there allowing the internet to morph them into creative geniuses. The internet has made it even easier for the masses to become bottom feeders which hinders their ability to think for themselves. That is not to say, however, that the internet should be considered a negative development in society. The internet simply (when overused) has the ability to make us too reliant on others for intel rather than trying to find out for ourselves.
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From the very beginning, Citizens Co-op made it very clear that their main objective was to increase the awareness of the importance of locally grown produce. If this increasing awareness also came hand in hand with an increase in membership for Citizens Co-op, it definitely wouldn’t hurt.
In order to increase the awareness, there must be a platform for people to organize the already established community for locally grown produce. Once the community is organized, they are able to share their ideas with others and potentially expand the community. What better place to form a community than a blog? Citizens Co-op’s Blog Eat Local Gainesville will hopefully help to organize this community and increase the awareness.
To begin with, posts on the blog will be made by individuals already involved with Citizens Co-op so that content can be generated for the general public. Once there is enough content worthy of the public’s attention, our group plans to visit several of the most relevant UF organizations on campus to inform the members of the blog and their opportunity to join in. Facebook, Twitter, and Ning will drive traffic to the blog by updating each time a post has been made on the blog. Once there is a steady incoming amount of posts it will be taken over by the public.
This constant streaming of the blog posts will make the blog more viral which in turn will make the idea of locally grown produce in Gainesville more viral. Once this concept is viral, more traffic will be directed towards Citizens Co-op’s website and eventually Citizens Co-op itself.
Make sure to check out Citizens Co-op’s Bike Tour Event coming up in April!
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Over the last few decades, the internet has rapidly spread around the world. Thanks to blog tools such as WordPress, it is simple to set up a blog to express your opinion or thoughts for the whole world to see. Even platforms such as Facebook enable people all around the world to communicate their ideas.
With this increasing capability of expression, will governments who seek to repress the very civil liberties that we as Americans hold near and dear choose to intervene? Or will the internet become too big for these governments to regulate?
It is my hope that despite the attempts from government intervention, the internet will become too hot to handle. There are too many benefits of the internet to list but just for communication and ease of access to information reasons alone, it is obvious that each nation deserves access to the internet. Admirable organizations such as One Laptop per Child (OLPC) strive to make this possible despite conditions in other parts of the world.
If you want to be a part of the movement towards making the internet too hot to handle, be an active participant on the internet. Share your opinion. Respond to my blog post. Create your own blog post. Do something worth noticing.
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User generated content web pages like Facebook are a great way to make your target audience aware of your presence. Facebook has allowed its users to organize their own community and many companies are beginning to recognize that. For so long huge corporations have been unable to have direct content with their customers because realistically, are you really going to fill out one of those customer review forms? Facebook, however, is a place where people spend from 20 minutes to hours every day which makes it a perfect place for companies to create a platform for communication. <more>
One example of a company that utilizes Facebook wisely is Victoria’s Secret’s line called Victoria’s Secret PINK. With nearly 2 million fans on Facebook, Victoria’s Secret PINK provides its fans with opportunities to save. What better an incentive to be a fan than saving money? I have to admit, I have definitely taken advantage of their promotions and know many of my friends who have done the same. In addition to providing promotions, VSPINK provides fans with the opportunity to give feedback such as this survey posted on their facebook fan page. In an effort to reach out to the college community, VSPINK even has a collegiate line. The next time you’re in need of some Gator gear, ladies, check out VSPINK UF.
Overall, the main benefit of using user generated content is creating a platform for communication between the company and the customer. The main drawback, however, is that all of your customer’s complaints are now available for the public to see. The key to turning this around, though, is quickly addressing the issue and doing something about it!
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The main goal that Citizen Co-op has is to increase the awareness of the importance of eating locally grown foods and in turn gaining membership for its non-profit organization.<more>
Citizen Co-op has a beautifully designed and incredibly informative website, but it is necessary to determine whether this website is being effective in recruiting new members or not.
This is where conversion marketing comes in handy. Google, as always, has given us the perfect little gem for this endeavor. Google Analytics is a tool that allows you to look into your web traffic and determine whether your marketing is effective or not.
With goodies like Google Analytics, our group will be able to see exactly how effective Citizen Co-op’s website is in meeting its main objective. Based on this assessment, we will be able to tweek the website for more effective advertising and hopefully build a local green community here in Gainesville!
By the way, be on the lookout for Citizen Co-op’s bike tour on April 17th. Tickets are $20 but $15 with a student ID.
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Do you ever walk into your local grocery store, check out the supposedly “fresh” produce, read the label, and discover that it’s actually from South America? Citizen Co-op is part of the movement for quality produce fresh from a local farm. Citizen Co-op recognizes the fact that there are people out there who want quality ingredients to put into their dishes. If you’re going to spend time on a meal, incorporating quality ingredients is the key for success. Just ask Paula Deen or Rachel Ray.<more>
Not only does Citizen Co-op provide good quality goods, but it is the perfect example of a company that puts the power into the hands of the people. Everyone has the opportunity to be involved whether you want to become a member or an investor, everyone has a say.
Citizen Co-op as of January 10, 2010 has 475 of the 500 members needed to open its doors to the public. If Citizen Co-op can just tap into the communities already established within Gainesville who believe that food should be locally grown and organize that community they could easily reach the 500 members needed to be in business.
One way to organize this community would be to create a blog, invite activists around campus to join in, link the blog to similar interest groups already established in Gainesville, and start to create some buzz around the importance of locally grown food.
Fortunately, Citizen Co-op offers a discount of $25 per semester to students so it is an affordable way to get quality produce so spread the word and become a fan on Facebook!
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In today’s world, size does matter… the smaller the better. This revolutionary change is seen all over in today’s must-have products such as the Mac Book Air, the world’s thinnest 8-megapixel digital camera, the iPhone, etc.
Imagine the size of a human hair. Now imagine something that is 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. This is the size of a nanometer and the world of nanotechnology operates on things that are between 1 and 100 nanometers.
Nanotechnology is generally associated with computers, but the field of nanotechnology expands to many other industries such as agriculture, medical, and many other industries. Perhaps one day nanotechnology can be used to develop a product to confront issues such as sustainability, life-threatening diseases, and many other issues that plague our world today.
In fact, according to The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars “The National Science Foundation predicts that the global marketplace for goods and services using nanotechnologies will grow to $1 trillion by 2015. The U.S. invests approximately $3 billion annually in nanotechnology research and development, which accounts for approximately one-third of the total public and private sector investments worldwide.”
If the the U.S. is willing to invest so much in this new field, why shouldn’t we consider it?
For updates on the newest and groundbreaking products in nanotechnology, visit Nanotechnology.com for their NanoWeek eDigest.
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What started as something that could quite possibly be the strangest assignment I have ever been given, soon became a challenge that each member of my team was willing to overcome. Together as a team we were able to come up with a creative idea, figure out a way to implement it, and excel. If this is an indicator of how we will work as a team for Citizen Co-Op, they’ve got another thing coming their way.
After a little bit of contemplation, we decided that the greatest value we could attribute to a post-it note would be a potential avenue for the development of friendships.
Despite the takeover by online social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and the old-school Myspace, it’s obvious that our generation still craves a tangible and visible way of meeting new people. What better way to meet a new friend than by a post-it note friend wall in as public of a place as the hub at the University of Florida?
With just a second of your time, all you had to do was provide your name, a way to contact you (e.g. email, phone number, etc.), and an interesting fact about yourselves. Once posted on the wall, another individual could take your sticky note and decide to contact you. Hopefully we’ll be receiving fan mail soon about how someone met the love of their life or a best friend through our wall.
If you find yourself without a friend, be comforted by the fact that making a new one is as easy as posting a post-it note on a wall.
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Hey guys, it’s me again, Meredith Jones that is. At the beginning of the week we discussed how to effectively present an idea to others, this concept is not foreign to me because I was an active competitor in Lincoln Douglas Debate and Student Congress with my high school’s debate team for four years. After four years of debate and a public speaking course here at the University of Florida, public speaking is somewhat of a hobby of mine. To be able to effectively express a message is key to the communication necessary for building and maintaining relationships in business relationships and even personal relationships.
On a more exciting note, this week my classmates and I also found out which local company we will be working with and who our fellow team mates were going to be for the final project. I am proud to say that I will assist Jacob, Savannah, and Allan in helping Citizen Co-Op with their marketing needs.
In the future, as I mentioned in my last blog post, I want to become an entrepreneur. Specifically, I want to become involved in the international business. Over the last few years, I have traveled to places like Egypt, Ukraine, Turkey, and Greece with my father on his business trips. In my Freshman year of high school, for instance, I was able to be a part of a press conference for my Dad’s company in the Ukraine which was one of his attempts to market his product in Ukraine to local farmers and potential distributors.
Assisting a company like citizen co-op would allow me to get a little more insight into the world of business at a smaller scale which could be one of my first steps into the business world on my own. I am extremely excited about meeting with Citizen Co-Op next week and I hope that my team and I have something great to offer them by the end of the semester. Hopefully team Citizen Co-Op and I can achieve the 500 members needed for success!!
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