LAST BLOG POST!

I am finally done my blog! It took a lot of time and effort, but I am finally finished. I learned a whole lot through this process. I feel like I can confidently say that I am very knowledgeable in the area of blogs. I also know much more about Wikipedia than I did before I took this class. This was one of my favorite classes here. It was not torture going to everyday like it is for some of my classes here. Professor Brown always made classes interesting and very informative. I especially liked his touch of humor, his phrases from England, and his self proclaimed obsession with Barbaro! I am glad I was able to take this class with him and not another professor because I do not think I would have enjoyed this course as much with any other teacher. All in all, I enjoyed this class very much and I wish the best of luck to Alex in whatever he does after his days at the University of Delaware! Thanks for everything!

Evolution of the Fuze Beverage article

I chose to edit the Fuze Beverage Wikipedia article because one of my friends was doing a project for food marketing at her school and she gave me the idea to edit the Fuze Beverage one. The Wikipedia article actually was redirected to this link, so it is not the same link as I had been referencing before. I had the most problems with this article and I will explain it all in the end. It started out as a very weak article with the types of beverages and the official website. I had many options of what to add and I was just going to keep going with what was already there.

For the first edit I chose to keep it simple. I saw that they had listed the flavors of Fuze Beverages, but there was one missing so I added it. It was Fuze Vitalize and I added that it contained vitamins A, C, and E. Later I found out that you are not supposed to list these, but I had no idea seeing as how that was basically all the article consisted of when I first looked at it.

The second edit is where I added some background history of the company. I included the founder, how and where it was created, and how it became successful and spread across the country. Again, I think that sharing the company's history is very important and can be helpful for someone curious about Fuze Beverage and how it came to be.

For the third edit I decided to delete the whole article. I was curious to see what would happen and how the Wikipedia community would react when they saw that this article was no longer there.

There were several edits besides mine. One edit was that they changed the slogan, did some maintenance, clean up, and made some small changes. Also, they redirected the article's url because it was better used to describe electrical fuses. Then they started saying this article was spam (saying: "Yeah, the subject matter may be legit, but the way this is written sets off my spamdar, big time.") and they said it was advertising because you are not supposed to list the flavors because then it seems like it is advertising the product. Someone even wrote this in the history, "Have you seen the state of this page? It's about as encyclopaedia-like as this comment." Pretty harsh and by the way they did not even spell encyclopedia correctly. So that is when I decided that this article is hopeless and it should just be deleted. So I erased the whole thing. Surprisingly exactly 12 minutes after I deleted it I got a message saying that I was not allowed to delete it without having a good reason. Then in the history when they undid my deleting they said it was "blanking silliness." I thought that was pretty humorous. I have no idea why they would even care if the article was there or not since it was such a bad article that they criticised for everything about it. Instead of criticising it they should have deleted the advertisement things and added more substantial information that would be appropriate for an encyclopedia to make the article better.

Since this is my last comment on Wikipedia I thought I would share my overall thoughts about it. First, the Wikipedia community seems rather weird to me. They seem very particular about what they want in the article and do not like new people and outsiders messing with the proper rules of Wikipedia. Second, I do not think this should be used as a primary reference source because of the fact that anyone can edit it. Third, I believe this only works for articles in which many people have high interests in. In this case many people will be continuously looking at the article trying to improve it and edit the errors put in. Finally, I think with more and more users everyday, Wikipedia does have the potential to be great, I just do not think it is at that point right now.

Evolution of the Villa Maria Academy article

I chose to edit the Wikipedia article for Villa Maria Academy. An article did not actually exist before I chose to edit it so I created one! I thought it would be rather hard, but it was actually just as easy as editing an already existing article. I chose this subject because this is the high school my sister and I went to. I was surprised that there was not an article for this already. I would think that the high school would have been teaching how Wikipedia works to the students and would have suggested they create a Wikipedia article for Villa Maria Academy, but that was not the case. I was eager to jump in and get this article up and running.

The first edit for Villa Maria Academy started with me creating it. Like I said, this was really easy. I started out by just explaining what the school was. Then I listed some things that the high school has to offer. Some of these aspects included music, athletics, and guidance. Then I gave some more brief information of the school. I also listed the address and phone number for VMA. I thought this was a good start because it was the basic information that I thought the article needed to get going.

For the second edit I added some information that was a little more detailed. I listed a bunch of events and activities that take place at the high school. From pep rallies to dances and other memorable and traditional events, I thought that this would be a nice addition to the article. It shows more about the high school than boring facts that you might normally see in a traditional encyclopedia.

The third edit I added the box of information that I also did for the MGIC article. I did it for this article first before I did it for the MGIC one. I got the idea from another Wikipedia article of high school that is all boys near Villa Maria Academy called Malvern Preparatory School. I thought that VMA deserved to have a similar article, so I helped it to get to that level by adding that box with the brief, quick information.

There were two main users that contributed to this article, besides me. They erased the phone number and address. They also categorized the article because I did not do that, but supposedly you are supposed to when you create an article. Also they fixed and cleaned up the article a little because I guess I was too descriptive and not as information and straight to the point as an encyclopedia edit should be. I think I did a pretty good job laying the framework for this new article. If I had more time I would expand on it to make it a great article to properly represent how much that high school means to me. Hopefully someone else will become motivated and take over the article and make it an impressive one. There is many more thing that can be added to it, so that should not be a problem. Like I said before, maybe the students will even be directed through a technology class to work on this article. I am proud that I was able to create this article. I think it is was more rewarding to create this article from scratch as opposed to editing the other already existing articles. I hope someone else finds it just as rewarding as I did as they make the article better!

Evolution of the MGIC article

The reason I decided to edit the Wikipedia article for MGIC (Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Company) is because my dad works for this company. Although my dad does not work in an MGIC office, he is a contract underwriter for MGIC in a Sovereign Bank office. I thought it would be interesting to learn more about the company and be able to personally contribute some more useful facts and information. When I first looked up the MGIC artcile I noticed that it was not very developed so I saw that as a great opportunity to improve upon it.

For the first edit I had just heard that MGIC announced a major change in their business. I wanted to add that to the article. The change was that premiuims are now tax deductible with MGIC. This was a significant advantage of the company and I thought that it should be available for people to see in the article.

In the second edit I added information about the company history. I explained how the former real estate agent and founder, Max Karl, realized his clients would benefit from insuring only the top portion of their mortgage. I think the company history is important for any subject matter. It is always good to know how a company or product came about.

I decided to add a summary box of the corporate profile for the third edit. I really like this feature because you can look at the box real quick for some fast facts without having to read paragraphs of information. This is very useful for people who just want to know a little bit about the company and it easily directs you right to the corporate website where you can find tons of information on the company.

In the end, no one really contributed much to this article. There were a few edits before I started editing it. These of course were the start up edits and then some people added some extra information. The article was still pretty lacking in some information before I started editing it. It was interesting to see that the people who began the article did not add anything to it after their initial edits. Within my edits there were only two additional edits. Thankfully again, they did not change anything I wrote. They just added to the categories of the article. After my edits there is still plenty of information that can also be added. I am curious to see if the other people who added information will add anything more. I will probably be checking back in the history even though I am done editing the MGIC article to see if this happens. This article has great potential and maybe it will even be comparable to the corporate website. I also enjoyed editing this article and I am glad I chose it as one of my four articles to edit on Wikipedia!

Evolution of Forever 21 Wikipedia article

To reiterate, I chose to edit the Forever 21 Wikipedia article because I worked there over winter break. I wanted to see what the Wikipedia community had to say about Forever 21. I found the article to be very interesting and very informative. I learned a few things by reading it. Also, the article was not too long so I knew I could find several things to add to it.

My first edit I just added other stores that are in the Forever 21 chain. Those are Heritage 1981 and Gadzooks. I did not add a lot at first because I was still getting used to Wikipedia and did not want to push the limit too far right away.

For the second edit to the Forever 21 articles I added a little about the history of the company. I explained where the first store was and how the size of the store and number of them increased dramatically.

The last edit was a little harder because I felt that the article contained all it really needed. I decided to add that you are able to shop online on the Forever 21 website. I thought this was a useful piece of information.

After looking at the history there have been many edits that were done in between mine. Most of them were by three different users. The others I guess did not log in and there were about four or five that only edited once. Thankfully none of the things I added were deleted. I guess I was right that my additions were helpful and useful to readers of this article. The article is still not very long, but I think it contains all the useful information that this article needs. If more was added I think it may get turned into an advertisement in which I will definitely be blogging about concerning my other Wikipedia article edit. I enjoyed editing this article. There was only one problem, when I would look on the official Forever 21 website for ideas on what I can add to the article I would get distracted by looking at the clothes. I think that will stay my favorite store for a long time. I was happy to be able to contribute to this article and hopefully more people will find the interest to make this article even better than it is now.

Last Wikipedia Edit for MGIC

Finally, I am on my last edit of my last article! For this MGIC edit I decided to add another box with general information on the right of the page as I did for the Villa Maria Academy article. I do not know why, but I really like this feature! Included in the box, I added the corporate profile. I thought this would be useful for people who just want a quick summary. It seems as though the information would be good for someone who is looking to invest in the company or may just want to know some general financial information about MGIC.

I added this exactly:
Name Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corporation
Headquarters Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Symbol MTG on New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)
Index Included in Standard & Poor's 500 Stock Index
Principal Subsidiary MGIC, the nation's leading private mortgage insurer
Financial Strength Ratings Standard & Poor's, AA; Moody's Investors Service, Aa2; Fitch Investors Service, AA+
Company website www.mgic.com
Investor website www.mgic.com/investor
Industry website www.privatemi.com

I do not know if all this information is relevant, but I found it on the main website so it should be useful to at least one person. If it is not, I know by now that someone on Wikipedia will definitely fix it.

Last Wikipedia Edit for Fuze Beverages

The third and final edit to the Fuze Beverage article which was redirected to this link consisted of me deleting the whole article. Now you may be thinking why would she do that? I have a good reason, do not worry. First of all, like I mentioned above, someone redirected Fuze Beverage's Wikipedia article and made the old one into an article about electrical fuses. In order to do this you must give a reason and apparently it was because the current Fuze Beverage article was horrible. Second of all, Wikipedia said that the article looked like an advertisement. I am not sure how just listing the flavors is advertising, but to them it is. I must say though that they were already there before I started editing, I just added one flavor. The other thing I added was some history and I do not think that was advertising either. Third of all, I think that maybe because the article was so small and underdeveloped that another article was allowed to take over the site. So, I will wait a couple days to do my final wrap up of the Fuze Beverage Wikipedia article so I can see if anyone cares about it enough to put the information back or to improve on the article. We will see...

Last Wikipedia Edit for Forever 21

For this last edit I decided to only add two additional lines of information. The Forever 21 article is already well developed and I did not want to enter lots of useless information just to make the article longer. I ended up adding, "Also, to compete with competitors, the website for Forever 21 contains the online shopping feature. Customers can purchase additional items that may or may not be found in the physical stores." I thought this would be good to add because it never before mentioned that you can order things online. Most companies have this feature, but some still do not. I thought it would not hurt to mention that Forever 21 is one of those participating companies. If someone was to read the Wikipedia article without going to the website after they may not have known that you can order online also because the article discussed the development of the physical store and not its switch to the Internet. This is not exactly an essential contribution to the Wikipedia article, but I thought it was something extra that may be helpful to people who read this article. Another reason why I added those things was because when I used to work at Forever 21 we always had so many people come in the store and ask where they could find the white dress with pink polka dots, for example, that they saw on the website. Several times we had to explain that just because they saw it on the website does not mean that it will be found in the stores. This is because some items are found solely on the website or only sold in stores in particular regions of the country, not necessarily at your local Forever 21. So although this was not a huge addition to the article, I feel that it may still be helpful for some people.

Last Wikipedia Edit for Villa Maria Academy

For my last edit to the Villa Maria Academy Wikipedia article I decided to make a minor change. I wanted to do something different than just adding more text since I already know how to do that. I looked through other Wikipedia articles to find out what other features are capable with Wikipedia. I went to the article for Malvern Preparatory School, an all male school about five minutes away from Villa Maria, to see what their Wikipedia article looks like. That article was extremely well done and I thought that Villa Maria's Wikipedia article has the potential to be that good. The first thing I saw was on the right hand side of the Malvern Prep article. It had a rectangular box that summed up key points of the high school. I thought that it made the article look more professional and I wanted Villa Maria's article to have that same feature. I went to the history portion of the Malvern Prep article and I found out how to do that. I simply copy and pasted it into the Villa Maria one and I even kept Malvern Prep's address the same at first by accident, but I quickly corrected that after.

Specifically I added:
Name Villa Maria Academy
Address 370 Old Lincoln Highway
Town Malvern, Pennsylvania, 19355
Established 1872 (at present location in 1924)
Community Suburban
Type Private (Independent)
Religion Roman Catholic
Students Female
Grades 9 through 12
Nickname Hurricanes
Colors White and Blue
Web site vmahs.org

It seems complicated, but all you need is the first line which is:
{| id="toc" style="float:right; width:220px; margin-left: 1em;"
followed by a series of these: |- and end it with this: |}

I really like this feature because you can go to this article and find quick facts right away without having to read all the text which may be quite boring. If I were to make another Wikipedia article I would definitely add this cool feature again!

Global Neighborhoods article comment...last one!

I am finally on my last comment on an article from one of the required blogs. I found one that ties into what we are doing in this class. We are all well familiar with Wikipedia. So, when I found the article titled Wikipedia. Just how popular is it? I thought it would be perfect to talk about because it incorporates the other aspect of our blog project.

The article says that Steve Rubel found that one-third of Americans that use the Internet have used Wikipedia as a source. Also it is used more than all written encyclopedias combined. I find this interesting because I have never used Wikipedia before this class. I have heard of it before, but for some reason I remember hearing that it is not really a reliable source so I stayed away from it. Rubel also says that more young people than old people take advantage of what Wikipedia has to offer. He also mentioned that him and Robert Israel used Wikipedia as a main source when writing one of our class books, Naked Conversations, believing it to be 100% accturate. Lastly, Rubel discusses something called “Wisdom of Crowds.” I did not know exactly what that term was so I looked it up on Google. Ironically enough the website that was first on the list was the Wikipedia article for it. Basically I found that it means that when a group of people work together they usually come up with better and more accurate information than a single person working alone. Rubel feels that this idea is correct and it helps that Wikipedia can be corrected by anyone and improved on by whoever is interested.

I actually do not agree with Rubel on some of his points. I do think that Wikipedia can be a good source, but it has its faults. When I read that Rubel said more young people use it he attributes that to the fact that young people are more technologically advanced and into the new trends. I do not think this is the reason. I think it is because younger people do not exactly understand the concept of a wiki. For example, in my Communication in Business class in which we create and deliver speeches, my teacher told us that we were prohibited to use Wikipedia as a reliable source. Most of my classmates had no idea why we could not use Wikipedia and when I told them what Wikipedia really was they were very surprised. They really did not know anyone could add or subtract from those articles. Also, I was amazed at the fact that Rubel said he and his coauthor used Wikipedia as the main source for Naked Conversations. I think it is acceptable to use it as a secondary source to simply verify the information that is found on a reliable source first, but he said they used it as a primary source. As long as they checked with other sources to make sure the information on Wikipedia was the same, then I think that is all right. The only problem would be if people did not check with other sources believing that Wikipedia was nothing but accurate information. I do not agree with Rubel when he said that it was 100% accurate. It is possible that the articles he used were accurate, but I am sure that there are plenty that are not. For articles in which people have a lot of interest in, people are motivated to make it accurate and keep it accurate, but for articles in which people do not seem to care about it is extremely probable that they are not totally accurate. Finally, I kind of agree with the “wisdom of crowds” theory. This seems correct, the only issue I have with it is that it takes one person in the crowd to ruin things for everyone so that is a problem.

All in all, I am glad I found and read this article. I am very surprised about all that Rubel said. Maybe I will change my opinions later to match his as more people become familiar with Wikipedia and understand what exactly it is and learn to respect it and only add accurate information to it. As for now I will just stick to using Wikipedia to finish up my blog work.

Amazon's Associate Program

I finally became a member of Amazon's Associate Program. I started to do it before class today, but I got nervous at the billing part where it made me give my social security number. I got to class and talked to some people about it and we decided that since it was Amazon it is a pretty secure company and website and they probably would not use that number for anything else. It explained it needed to know it for tax purposes which is understandable. Other than that it was quick and easy to do. I chose the two books from our class, The Search and Naked Conversations. I also added The Devil Wears Prada because I love that movie and I always wanted to read the book to see the comparisons, but I never got around to it. The other thing I added was a collection of the Shopaholic books. My roommate reads them and I have heard of many other girls who have read them so I thought I would add that too. All in all, it was way more intimidating than it actually was. It is a great way to earn some extra change which I doubt I will ever get, but at least I know how to do it!

4th and Final Class Material Content Post

In class today we talked more about promotion including sales promotion, public relations, personal selling, and media changes. With sales promotions we went over how coupons, contests, and free trials are now all available online. An example of the coupons online is that DealCatcher website that the owner came in and talked to us about. I found a website with many contests and sweepstakes with this link. I have also come across many free trials throughout my searches.

With public relations we learned that it is no longer command and control. Buyers want to participate and be involved in the sales process from the beginning to the end. This means that there are going to be alot more blogs and user generated stories or opinions about products on the Internet. The people responsible for public relations of their company should try to track down these user generated sites to monitor what is being said about their companies. All the money being spent on advertising and marketing by the company can be canceled out by these user generated sites, so making sure they are saying positive things is extremely important.

We discussed with personal selling how the traditional salespeople are being almost replaced by online retail. I do not think we will ever not need traditional salespeople however because I feel like I can trust someone in person much better than what something says online. We also talked about fragmentation, integration, time shifting, and mobile media which are all examples of changes in the media.

Also, we read over an article titled, Mixed Media: Traditional companies are feeling threatened. I say, bring on the changes. This article talks about how in the past there were very limited options. For example, there used to be only one movie that played at the one theater in town which guaranteed its' success. Now there is a huge variety of entertainment so marketers cannot use the same techniques as in the past. Today the buyers are not passive, but active in the buying process. Also former ways of advertising are not as effective as they used to be. With TV commercials there are DVRs in which one can fast forward through the commercials. With newspapers there are many that are simply online or in print, but online also. I found one example of a newspaper website called onlinenewspapers.com. Professor Brown mentioned earlier in the year that there is a newspaper in England that stopped its' print version and is solely available online so this makes newspaper ads real difficult to continue their effectiveness. One last thing that the article mentions is that people want to be more active in getting their news. They want it right now, continually updated, and they want to discuss it with others online. This is a huge change from when newspapers were simply just in print. Like the article says, it is a challenge but also a great opportunity to allow the audience to be more active. Instead of being intimidated by these changes, the author Rupert Murdoch, suggests that companies take advantage of these changes and use them to benefit the audience and therefore your company or product.

One last thing...I think it is great that Professor Brown is getting the recognition he deserves for his great Barbaro website, Tim Woolley Racing. From being mentioned on tv to being featured in an article on ESPN, I think that it is quite exciting. All that hard work and tons of time spent on his website and Barbaro is really paying off! Congrats!

and ps. stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela beat that Andrea haha... I'll track your stiuqxela progress through this link... stiuqxela: Andrea's BUAD477 Blog. maybe it will help Google finally crawl your site. I don't know why they haven't in so long especially after your lovely note to them.

2nd Comment on Teammate's blog

I was looking through my teammates' blogs and I came across Andrea's blog and her posting from a ClickZ article titled "Trust is at the Core of the New Web Marketing". The article discusses how Web marketing is changing as consumers or searchers have become smarter. It talks about trust because now, in order for a business to have a successful website searchers have to be able to find it easy, fast, and first. Also the trust is important because once the searchers find the site they have to also like it. The most important thing is for the company to gain enough trust from the searchers for them to spread their admiration of the site and continue to frequent it themselves. Unlike websites before, they used to just rely on people somehow stumbling upon their site. This is not the case anymore.

As we talked about in class today and as Andrea mentioned in her post there are new sites that have helped change the way Web marketing is carried out. The one site we focused on was Digg.com. This site revolutionizes Web marketing. The site takes articles from other websites and displays them on their web page in order of popularity. If it is not popular than you can "bury it" and make it go down the list. If you like it you can "digg it" and keep it at the top or move it up. This has everything to do with the searchers and not the people who own the websites. That shows that if searchers trust the website they will "digg it" and searchers will visit those sites more than any other sites.

This seems like a great idea because this way it makes it easier for searchers to avoid irrelevant websites or ones that are not truthful or credited. As Andrea mentioned this also shows how search has changed. With Google Juice, rankings in the Google search list make all the difference. I do not think anyone goes beyond the first or second page of search results. So, it is very important to gain more Google Juice in order to have your website come up at the top of the list. One way as Andrea mentions is to utilize Google's sponsored links. Websites can pay Google to have their websites sponsored and they will appear at the very top of the search list. I do not know why but for some reason I never click on those links. I even asked my roommate and she said she did not even realize those sponsored links are there. It may be because they appear smaller and are just highlighted in a very pale color. It also may be that they kind of appear to just be ads or popups that we have just been accustomed to ignore. I am sure that many people do click on those first, but for people who are not so technically advanced I do not think they realize what sponsored links actually mean. Also now that I know what they exactly are I probably still will not click on them first because I kind of do not think it is fair that those companies in a way pay off Google to have their site be the best. This is how traditional marketing has worked because for companies with the most money they can utilize the best and most advertising which puts their product at the top.

So, all in all, there are some major changes in marketing as technology advances. The marketers and advertisers must be aware of these changes and be able to change their marketing strategy to incorporate those chances. Also, that is great that Andrea was able to find the news that JPMorgan was opening a branch in Boston through her Bloglines. Just one more proof on how technology continues to change the way people are doing things and getting news!

and Andrea I match your stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela and raise you 6 more stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela haha