Blue Cross Blue Shield Case Study - Blog Post Assignment

   

Read the Blue Cross Blue Shield Case Study at the end of KDP Chapter 12. Discuss how BCBS could measure the results of their communications plan. How could BCBS-NH measure their communication effectiveness with their own publics? How can BCBS-NH measure the relationships it has with local offices? Be specific.

When you're finished with your post:

1. Click the link above to submit the link to your blog post.
2. Post a link to your blog post on the Blue Cross Blue Shield Case Study discussion board for Module 11.
3. Comment on your peers' posts.

By reading BCBS case study, I think BCBS is a good franchise example because it has very independent and diverse franchisees. This is different from many other franchisees companies.  For a franchise company, the hardest thing is to control and keep the right extent relationship with franchisees: Too far will cause the management confusion and too close influence the normal operation of franchisees and also influence the relationship between each other.  To make the whole strategy coordinate and fit can improve the overall image of company.

To measure communications plan, we can go through some main ways. From the review from all kinds of ways like: e-mail, phone, website and Social media. Focus on the content of media report. Though these different ways, we can get the real perspective in different angles.  I think the only way to measure the communication effectiveness with their own publics is research the satisfaction of their public. Good relationship will lead to the good reputation. If the communication is not effective, the result must have many dissatisfied voice and lots of suggestions, actually that is a good way to improve. To measure the relationships with local offices. I think they can hold local regular meeting, which can make the relationship become close and do some survey at regular meeting at regular intervals to collect different ideas and also the satisfaction and then submit to parent company to improve their relationship.

Communication Across the Sales Channels - Blog Post Assignment

1. Instructions

Pick a franchise and discuss whether or not the communications at the franchises are the same as the parent corporation. Give specific communication examples and discuss why these do or do not match the messaging of the larger brand. How can the parent corporation measure its relationships with the franchisees? Be specific.

When you're finished with your post:

1. Click the link above to submit the link to your blog post.
2. Post a link to your blog post on the Communications Across the Sales Channels discussion board for Module 11.
3. Comment on your peers' posts

The franchise I picked up is Avis.  Avis is a famous car rental company. You can see it almost everywhere especially near airport and train station.

I think Avis doing great job to make communications at the franchises are the same as the parent corporation.  People usually using phone or web to make an appointment. The phone call this company provide is the telephone terminal, and then the task will be subdivide to local shop, it is fast and convenient. Half a year ago, I went to New York, Washington and PHL I rent the car from New York Avis and return it in Washington Avis. The only thing I feel is convenience because you can rent in anywhere an return it in any shop you want. Also the company provide GPS rental and other service to make travel easy. Because everything will via the reception desk to each shop, the communication with either parent corporation or franchise is convenient and normative.

The parent corporation can measure the relationship through phone review and website review. Because of the unity of management, measurement become easier. If problem appears, parent corporation will get the massage at the same time with the shop.

PR Crisis Discussion - Blog Post Assignment

    

In a blog post, discuss a company that had a PR crisis. What was the crisis and how did they handle it? How could they have measured their communications effectiveness during and after the crisis? What could they have done differently?

When you're finished with your post:

1. Click the link above to submit the link to your blog post.
2. Post a link to your blog post on the PR Crisis discussion board for Module 11.
3. Comment on your peers' posts.

What was the crisis and how did they handle it?

Gucci is a famous luxury brand in the world. In China, it has great public’s praise and corporate image. Last year, it experienced a serious crisis in Shenzhen China which in my recollection. Sep. 23, 2011. Two former employees of Gucci public a letter online named < an open letter to top management from mass resignation employees> which made media reported for a long time.  Since that time, Gucci become a “Sweatshop”, “Abuse employees”, “management confusion”, “employees overworked”.

After employees abused event’s exposure, it damage Gucci’s social image deeply, Gucci use PR means immediately.  Firstly, Button their lips from top management to laborial staff, and they made a statement that pointed out this event was distorted and enlarged. Everything they did is wanted to stop negative massages’ spread and become worse. But this action did nothing to do to solve this crisis. Media continue follow-up report and government start to investigate.

 

 How could they have measured their communications effectiveness during and after the crisis?

What they did after this crisis is trying to hide everything. Employees and managers silent on this topic and publish a statement explain that this event is not exist. The words to clarify themselves can’t change public thinking.

The only way for Gucci to measure this PR crisis is after their action, how is the negative reports and disgruntled discussion from people? I have only to say, this PR crisis is totally failure. They want to cover and hide the truth, whatever the truth is, what they did just make people don’t trust them anymore.  The core of it is communication, not about how to pretend it never happen.

 

 What could they have done differently?

In my opinion, their PR crisis can’t do any help to this situation but make it worse. It can’t cover the management confusion. I think what they should do is:1. Enhance their internal communication in the company; provide a way to make employees an top management communication directly. 2. Multinational corporation like Gucci, Converse, Zara have this kind of scandals in China. Actually it have already have thorough management system in mainland. They should treat their employees equal in different places.

After crisis, most companies anxious to clarify the event or list the truth, they trying to use their own words to change media’s report direction and public perceive. But this method usually useless.  The first thing they should do is to get the trust from public. Make business practice hyalinize temporarily. And find out management loopholes and  improve it. So that the social image will reverse.

Multichannel Campaign Analysis - Blog Post Assignment

In a blog post, explain:

• What type of campaigns is your company using?

Dell using the campaign that ran across web-connected TVs, desktop Web and mobile devices. DELL trying to track every individual consumer through this three platforms. They try to find out how each correlate channel impact the others. This campaign is cross-channel .

 

• How might they be able to tell which channels are giving them results?

DELL using WPP mobile agcy Joule to working on it. The company deliverd 15- and 30-second Dell spots to connected Tvs. They using website or app list, the targeted consumers have already seen the connected TV. The other group can’t see, so they can see the difference of performance between these two groups. But if customers don’t have connected TVs, they can’t link a specific TV and smartphone to the same person.

 

• How can they track results that may flow across online to offline (or vice versa)?

 

I thinking if tracking offline is hard for DELL to get accurate data. I think the only way for them is when a customer firstly bought a computer, he will have an account, after that, his any purchase behavior can be tracked. But why this customer’s acting happened we still can’t to measure.

Long-Tail Search Strategies - Blog Post Assignment

    

As a web analyst for your company, you've completed the search budget distribution below. Does the search traffic appear to match the budget? What recommendations do you have?

 

 

When you're finished with your post:

1. Click the link above to submit the link to your blog post.
2. Post a link to your blog post on the Long-Tail Search Strategies discussion board for Module 10.
3. Comment on your peers' posts.

 

 

 

 

 

From this budget form we can find out, The total budget of Head key phrases is 33% and the total Budget of Tail key phrases is 66%. From the percentage of contribution from SEM and SEO, We can tell that, in head key phrases, the contribution from SEO is 80%, but in tail key phrases, the contribution from SEO is only 10%. For contribution from SEM, in head key phrases, it only have 20%, but in tail key phrases its contribution occurred 90%.  When we focus on the distribution of SEM Budget,  Head key phrases is 25% and Tail key phrases is 75%.

It seems that we use most of budget to buy the advertising place to increase traffic. In Tail key phrase, I think using most of budget on SEM is reasonable because the contribution from SEM is up to 90%, but from head key phrases, using more budget on SEO I think is a smart way to increasing the traffic because in this part, keywords or relevant keywords is more useful to this website. My recommendation is continually optimize the search engine and increasing the success rate of keywords and relevant words. Reduce the budget of Tail key phrases appropriately to get the most use of budget.  

 

Path Analysis - Blog Post Assignment

Read Avinish Kaushik's post Path Analysis: A Good Use of Time? Do you agree or disagree with his post? Why? How could your company use Path Analysis? What advantages or disadvantages would path analysis provide?

When you're finished with your post:

1. Click the link above to submit the link to your blog post.
2. Post a link to your blog post on the Leveraging Competitive Intelligence discussion board for Module 10.
3. Comment on your peers' posts.

Actually I can just agree part of Avinish Kaushik’s blog. I think path analysis is useful without a doubt. But path analysis is worth or not, we should treat it as appropriate.

I think path analysis is essentially to find out the logical visit behavior of visitors. But to be a visitor of website, I know some of our behavior is logical, but we can’t deny that the other behavior is nothing to do with logical, sometimes just simply looking around for nothing. How to measure improvisation of visiting without any purpose? I think the answer is no. So I think path analysis is only making sense for logical visit behavior. We can’t adjust the website to suit everyone, even it is hard to say most people.

I visit DELL’s official website, seems their website updated frequently. The first things show up is kind of shopping guide. We can’t deny that most people visit DELL’s website is trying to buy something or at least checking the product information. DELL did the segmentation of products so that it can guide you to see what you want.

The advantages of using path analysis is: convenient visitors, make searching efficiency, through analysis, the website will understand what the most people searching for, put it in the most showy place to let people see it as quick as possible.  Also can increase the amount of visiting and sales.

Disadvantages for it I will say, considered the cost of analyzing. Especially for a large website which has a lot of segment pages, the path of it will be countless. Trying to analysis the visit behavior is definitely a huge project and the result is accurate or not? Nobody can make sure.

Context is Queen - Blog Post Assignment

You're a web analyst for a company and are handed the following report on search traffic to your website. What would you do to provide context to the data? Explain what context does for your reporting to management.

The picture is showing the search traffic of one website since May,1,2012-Oct31,2012. Time period is 6 mouths. Although it seems provide a lot of data like amount of visiting, average time of visiting, percentage of new visits. I have to say, only from this one picture, the data means nothing.  

To change the data to make sense. We can compare it with :1.Time. We can compare the data with the data 6 months ago or 1 year ago to find the difference. 2. Also we can compare it with segmentation to compare the specific change during this time period.  3. We can also use the data showed in the picture to compare with the average data of this website. 4. The data we can measure is also include how many visitors are sent from referring sties. 5. We can also set up the benchmarks for every particular data to measure it.  6. Compare with competitors is a good way to measure our site.

Using the measure method above, the core task is to compare with something. Independent data without comparability means nothing basically.

Measuring Influence with Employees - Blog Post Assignment

    

Choose a company that is using social media effectively to communicate with their employees, explain in a blog post:

• What are they doing to communicate effectively with their employees?

DELL using their own community, facebook and twitter to realize using social media to communicate with employees. For their internal communication, the main topic focus on activity news, opportunities, resent performance and so on. I think communicate by social media is a very popular and efficiency way to make communication effectively. They won’t face to face talking, it can reduce time and also it is not that rigid like email. That is more flexible for a big company like DELL.

• What are your recommendations for how they should measure their influence?

I think when people interested in DELL, products or other things. They will be also interested in the conversation content of internal things. Social media give them a lot of convenience to understand what is the real world of DELL. Everyone can see the community, facebook page and twitter page of DELL if they want. The thing we should to measure is to figure out the percentage of each page view. How many is the employees and how many belong to other consumers. Through percentage of page view we can know the sketchy influence.

• Do you have any suggestions for improvements they could make in their communications?

I think the most important thing they should improve is the communication content. Remember what they are talking is being see by people and also affect the market. DELL’s internal conversation is more about the information staff will interested in like exchange to somewhere and what kind of honor they got recently. If they can consider some information consumers will interested in like: how is the using experience of a new product that not issue. It will attract more people to look at.

Behavioral Targeting & Predictive Analytics - Blog Post Assignment

    

For your company, explain in a blog post:

• How could your company use behavioral targeting to improve their customer experience?

I think DELL really catched what is the most important thing for them. Keywords. They not only optimize the searching result when you are typing words involve dell but also increase the extent of related words like “laptop” “Hp” and also some product model of its products. That would be very convenient even though sometimes you are not thinking about to see dell’s products.

How could your company use predictive analytics to improve their customer experience?

DELL’s website will analysis your visit behavior, what products you have viewed selected or not and purchased or not. Keep it in record. When you go back to see the website, they will show up automatically. And also, if you have viewed some products. When you view other pages. The products you have viewed become a advertisement page located in what you are seeing . I think that would be a nice action to increase the sales because people only see what they are interested in. Seeing one time and not buy it, maybe second time, they will buy. I think that performance will be good enough. Just keep it.

1. Building an Action Dashboard - Blog Post Assignment

Choose one of the measurement strategies you've created in a previous week. Choose one of the KPIs and discuss how you would build an Action Dashboard to improve executive decision making. Include what would be in each quadrant and why.

When you're finished with your post:

1. Click the link above to submit the link to your blog post.
2. Post a link to your blog post on the Building an Action Dashboard discussion board for Module 9.
3. Comment on your peers' posts.

I choose the assignment “Twitter measuring” of DELL I written before. And build an action dashboard for it.

First quadrant, amount of followers and growth rate of followers.

This is the basic information of the attention of one company. This is the most basic data and important one. We can tell how many people interested in this brand and care about the information of this brand. Also, from the growth rate of followers we can measure the efficiency of publicity and popularity.

Second quadrant, massage views and rewtweet, rewtweet/massage view ratio.

The first quadrant, I will say the twitter massages’ amount of visitors and times of retweet of that massage. And also calculating the ratio of reading and retweet. I think massage views can show the public attention of the massage and also the company. Rewtweet rate can measure the practical applicability of each massage because no one want to rewtweet a massage that is useless.

Third quadrant, compare the different types of twitter massages.

The most regular massages of dell are: product information, promotion information and PR information. Compare the performance of each type of information can help us measure what part of information people want to know most.  So you can tell which one is the most useful one for DELL.

Fourth quadrant, timing.

By analysis what time is the most time people using twitter and check/ retweet massage. It can helps to figure out what time to release new information will get most attention and have the most efficiency result.

Measurement Best Practices - Blog Post Assignment

1.Is your chosen company following these best practices? How?

In Avinash Kaushik’s blog post, 9 best practices are:

1: Tag all your pages.

 2: Tags go last (customers come first :).

 3: Tags should be inline.

 4: What’s your unique page definition?

5: Use cookies intelligently (they are delicious).

 6: JavaScript wrapped links might be a issue.

 7: Redirects, be aware of them.

 8: Validate data is being captured correctly.

9: Don’t forget Flash, Flex, RIA, RSS, Videos etc.

Basic on what I learn from this blog. I research DELL’s official pages and blog. I feel DELL does a great job. It almost finishes the full use of technology to track consumer behavior and make visitor comfortable with their settings. It not only put tags in the dulcet places and makes the full use of JavaScript and cookies. But seems DELL forgets using flash or videos to demonstrate products in the homepage.

 

How can they improve their measurement practices?

Through researching, the only thing I recommend DELL to improve is the 9^th one: Don’t forget Flash, Flex, RIA, RSS, Videos technologies to attract and analysis customers. I remember every time I visit Vans’s webpage I always attracted by the videos on the homepage. Although the page of DELL is forthright and have clear classification, I think if the site can add some flash or videos and analysis visitor’s behavior. I’m sure that most of them will choose to see it. We can analysis it via the length of seeing, conversation rate and other ratio to measure it.

Measuring Local Community Influence - Blog Post Assignment

 

Instructions   For your company, explain in a blog post:

•How would you recommend they measure their influence with their local community?.

•What tools and techniques should they use and why?.

 

 

When you're finished with your post:

 

1.Click the link above to submit the link to your blog post..

2.Post a link to your blog post on the Measuring Local Community Influence discussion board for Module 8..

3.Comment on your peers' posts.

I still use DELL to be my chosen company.

1.How would you recommend they measure their influence with their local community?.

Because of DELL is a computer company. Too much competitors in the field, I think the most important thing for DELL is to understand what the actual demand of people is. So my recommendation for measuring is questionnaire in the local community and also online. The direction of questionnaire should be different type of consumer. Individual and group.

2.What tools and techniques should they use and why?.

Considered the need of cost, I will say the first step to measure is to contact the people who already bought the products that DELL sold. Information from them and also the feedback and also the user experience. We can use online survey or mail to do it. One thing we should notice is trying to avoid make survey with single group because different type of group have different needs and spending habits.  

Twitter Measurement - Blog Post Assignment

1. Choose a company that has a Twitter profile. Look at the types of tweets and conversations they are having on their twitter profile. Is the content relevant to their target audience? Are they engaging their target audience? Using TwitterCounter, evaluate their follower growth and compare them to their competitors (put the twitter handle in the small box that says Show Twitter users). Using RetweetRank, evaluate their retweet & message amplification and compare it to their competitors. Use stats.brandtweet.com to evaluate their conversation and compare it to their competitors. In a blog post:
• Report on your findings using TwitterCounter, RetweetRank & BrandTweet -- how does your company compare to their competitors?
• Discuss how the company is using their Twitter profile
• Discuss differences & similarities between how the company is using Twitter and how their competitors are
• Make recommendations for how they might improve in their use of Twitter to engage their target audience

 

When you're finished with your post:

5.                   Click the link above to submit the link to your blog post.

6.                   Post a link to your blog post on the Twitter Measurement discussion board for Module 8.

7.                   Comment on your peers' posts.

•             Report on your findings using TwitterCounter, RetweetRank & BrandTweet -- how does your company compare to their competitors?

Using Twittercounter, I compared DELL with HP. And the result is from 08-03-2012 to 11-03-2012, the number followers of DELL is increasing from about 43k-49k, But for HP, the followers are from 150k-more than 160k. I can tell that HP’s followers are much more than DELL’s but during these 3 mouth, DELL’s increasing speed is faster.

Using RetweetRank to compare DELL and HP. The results are as follow：

Although the followers are much less than HP’s, Dell’s retweet rank is higher than HP. The retweet rank of DELL is 63,599- approx. 98.6 percentile. HP’s Retweet rank is 21,286-approx 99.53 percentage.

 

Using Brandtweet to compare DELL and HP. I can find that DELL’s interaction with people is obviously more than HP’s. The specific data of two company is similar but DELL’s data is better than HP’s totally.

 

• Discuss how the company is using their Twitter profile

For these kind of big company, the main use of twitter is to publish new product information or activity information. And also a good platform for customer to contact the company. They can use twitter to realize the public praise of products and also solve the problem online also make the relationship with customers become closers.

• Make recommendations for how they might improve in their use of Twitter to engage their target audience

I think this period of time, DELL’s performance on twitter is pretty good, because the retweet rate is high that is means much people are pay attention to this brand. And also the followers are increasing dramatically during these three years. Unfortunately the followers are less. I think DELL should focus on how to increase the amount of followers in short time like tweet more product information or hold activity online.

Blog Measurement - Blog Post Assignment

Choose a company that has a blog, or evaluate a blog in your company's industry. Looking at a couple of month's worth of posts, calculate their Raw Author Contribution in Posts per Month and Content Created. Also, calculate the Conversation Rate and look the blog up on Technorati for an Authority rating. In a blog post:

• Post the name and link to the blog you are evaluating.
• Report on your metrics for the blog:
•  

• Raw Author Contribution: Posts per Month & Content Created
• Conversation Rate
• Technorati Authority
• How might they measure the cost & benefit of their blogging?
• Do you have any recommendations on how they might improve their blog?

 

When you're finished with your post:

6.                   Click the link above to submit the link to your blog post.

7.                   Post a link to your blog post on the Blog Measurement discussion board for Module 8.

8.                   Comment on your peers' posts.

 

For my chosen company DELL, I looked up its official blog: Direct 2 Dell. http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/direct2dell/b/direct2dell/default.aspx

This blog has a lot of author post blog on it. The one I chose is Lionel Menchaca which is the Chief Blogger of DELL.

 

Raw Author Contribution: Posts per Month & Content Created

 

8 posts from this author since the beginning of Jan 2012.

8/11=0.72 per mouth

Content created =1757/8=219.6 words per post

Conversation rate=2/8=0.25

Technorati Authority

I’m not sure because I can’t find anything on the Technorati .

 

How might they measure the cost & benefit of their blogging?

I think they can measure the page view, the content of the blog, and also figure out the cost of keeping this blog. Also measure the visitors’ type of visitors and returning rate of visitors.

Do you have any recommendations on how they might improve their blog?

I think the home page of this blog have too much words that when I open it I just feel lost. Make the home page simple and make each button showy. Also, this blog’s aim should be interaction with customers. But obviously it never happen. The author post few blogs and the content is more about their internal matters about their staffs. Put more information about product I think will be better.