Blog ready for the exam

Checked the list once again, the blog seems to include all the asked information – okay, including some minor typos and mistakes, but hey.. nobody’s perfect!

Things that are still missing in the blog

Well, as I’ve not been to one of the classes 2 weeks ago, this is what the blog is missing.

Social Networks:

Social Networks, such as Facebook, Youtube and others offer various different advantages as well as disadvantages for companies.

The main ones would be that companies can use the social networks to advertise – which is an advantage. Many users on social networks publish their age, their sex, their internet and often a lot more (private) information. This can be used by companies to target the right group of people.

Also, companies can look for feedback on various platforms, as users come together and share their opinion.

If companies take part actively in social networks they can also enhance their CRM, often seen with with computer games and their forums.

There is also negative aspects of the social networks:

If there is something the customers dont like, they can come together in a virtual place and share their opinion. Other people read the opinion and will rather take another product because of the bad reputation.

Companies could as well experience what happened to HSBC a while back: They changed one of their policies for customers after they graduate – thousands of graduates joined a Facebook group to fight against it. Going all together they have more power and they spread the bad news really fast – so that the company has to react.

If there is 2000 single letters going to a company the public wont even notice and they would not have to do something. If thousands of people join the same virtual group to protest against something the people will know. I always see what groups my friends join on Facebook, for example.

Other platforms such as youtube have their very own advantages and disadvantages, lets just mention copyrights – songs on youtube – everyone can listen to them and is actually downloading them at the same time (most users wouldnt even know that). But the companies could use the platform to advertise the music in a low quality version and offer a link to pay for the same music in better quality.

SecondLife is another world, a virtual one. Advantages for companies are of course the advertisement they receive if they are present.

LinkedIn is a social network to find old friends or meet new people. This might be for professionell or private reasons. Companies could, for example, look for skilled labour using LinkedIn.

SlideShare, as the name already says is used to upload and share PowerPoint presentations and Word Documents. As you are also able to save sound with your presentation, you can basically have a presentation that is available online 24/7, with your own voice explaining the slides. Perfect for business talking to their partners/colleagues/customers.

Flickr is another social network that is mainly used for uploading pictures – and commenting! As competition you might see devianart, which is a huge community of semi/professionals who share one and the same interest – art. (fotography, painting, drawing).

The webquiz is now online, and the teacher received an email with the login. I will not publish this yet because it contains the actual exam questions.

Just some general informatin that shouldnt be missing here:

You can have a multiple choice quiz, true/false and short answer. One of the pages that offer quizes is “QuisStars” for example.

Somewhere Ive talked about the major dot com flops already, just forgot where and cant seem to find it.

Well, I’ll add a bit of my opinion here:

The companies who had to suffer dot com failures where mostly having a good idea and were owning good money, after a year they started to expand and had to carry huge costs – basically they were spending too much money. It all seems to be working just fine and they can expand to other places and get the money back fast enough – which is often not the case, so they go bankrupt as they cant pay their bills anymore. Webvan is the perfect example, a good running business that wanted to expand to 26 cities because of their success. They just did not have enough customers and therefore income to spend so much money and expand that rapidly – not able to pay the bills – bankrupt 2 years after the start of the business.

Of course there is also the businesses that fail because of having a stupid idea. An only currency to replace real money? With the huge market the internet offers they would need every single online store as a partner to make this happen, that would basically require a monopoly for payment options online? Yeh right, as if thats gonna happen.. (my opinion! )