Kabani, who founded and runs the social media agency The Marketing Zen Group, developed an “ACT” framework for a successful online and social media strategy. The acronym stands for “Attract, Convert, and Transform”—and I find it a useful framework for positioning an online business. To paraphrase Kabani: Attract: To attract likely prospects, you must stand out from a crowded field with a clear and unique brand, a strong value proposition, worthwhile content, social proof (testimonials and an active, emotionally engaged community), and an appealing incentive for individuals to sign up for emails or fill out an inquiry form. Convert: Optimize…
Author: Michael
Facebook offers three basic ways to build your audience: Invite friends, Share your page, and Employ paid Facebook advertising. These are in order of scalability. Inviting your few hundred friends is a nice start, but it’s only a start. Sharing extends your impact, allowing you to post about your page on your own timeline, a friend’s timeline, in a group you belong to, or in a private message. Again, these techniques can get a community started, but they don’t scale—and you need to be judicious in what you share and with whom. Never spam your friends! With the initial alpha…
As an organization, if you were to engage on just one social network, it would have to be Facebook, which dwarfs its rivals in both membership size and the passion of its audience (as measured by visits and time on site). But being on Facebook alone would be a mistake. You owe it to your business to participate on multiple networks. You should be using the strengths of the different platforms—and the different missions and mindsets of the people on them—so that you can achieve the following goals: 1. Your brand’s social presence is essentially wherever consumers seek it 2.…
You shouldn’t neglect an ironic new opportunity for social media ad campaigns: poking fun at social media. There’s no question that for many people, the hype surrounding social media is a touch overdone. Toyota recently seized on this trend—and the generational tensions stoked by Facebook’s rise—with a series of clever television ads by Saatchi & Saatchi for the Toyota Venza crossover. In one, a worried twenty-something woman sits alone at her kitchen table, browsing Facebook and addressing the camera. Having read “the majority of an article online” that reported “older people are becoming antisocial,” she was aggressive about getting her…
Before we dig into the ad offerings, let me point out that Facebook supports a number of different levels of engagement for its advertisers, depending on the size of their ad budget, sophistication of the tools required, and willingness to do self-service. Facebook is ramping up ad opportunities very quickly, and its sales and support staff is challenged to keep up. That’s likely one reason why, when it launched Facebook Exchange remarketing, the company selected several partner agencies to help sell the program, get clients onboard, and execute campaigns. Your options as an advertiser are to self-serve using the online…
You can use Excel’s functions to calculate a confi dence interval if you know the standard deviation of the underlying probability distribution. For example, suppose you are conducting a survey on the cost of a medical procedure as part of research on health care reform. The cost of the procedure follows the normal distribution, where s 5 1,000. After sampling 50 different hospitals at random, you calculate the average cost to be $5,500. What is the 90% confi dence interval for the value of m—the mean cost of all hospitals? (That is, how far above and below $5,500 must you…
A parametric test assumes a specific distribution such as the normal distribution, and the t test is an example. A nonparametric test does not assume a particular distribution for the data. Most nonparametric tests are based on ranks and not the actual data values (this frees them from assuming a particular distribution). The study of nonparametric statistics can fi ll an entire textbook. We’ll just cover the high points and show how to apply a nonparametric test to your data. The Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test The nonparametric counterpart to the t test is the Wilcoxon Signed Rank test. In the…
Questions answered in this chapter ■ What is net present value (NPV) ■ How do I use the Excel NPV function? ■ How can I compute NPV when cash flows are received at the beginning of a year or in the middle of a year? ■ How can I compute NPV when cash flows are received at irregular intervals? Consider the following two investments, whose cash flows are listed in the file NPV.xlsx and shown in Figure 8-1. ■ Investment 1 requires a cash outflow of $10,000 today and $14,000 two years from now. One year from now, this investment…
Physicians are individuals who through training, experience, and certifi cation are allowed to provide care to patients with a variety of illnesses. A Physician can be a general practitioner such a primary care physician or a specialist. Typically physicians are employed by a hospital or clinic. A general practitioner is someone that is qualified and holds a degree in general medicine. GPs typically work in family medical practices and on average they earn between $200,000 – $300,000 in Australia. If you are interested in a job in this field, it’s advisable to explore jobs in different Australian cities. At the…
Instagram is a great tool to use, but you have to know how to use it. Most businesses like to engage users who post photographs for them, but you can easily post your own for your business and obtain even more followers. So why choose Instagram over the other social media websites out there? Well, Instagram has over half a million active users every month. These users have shared over forty billion photos since the conception of Instagram, and they share an average of ninety-five million photos and videos every day. Eighty percent of the users come from outside of…