Creative Technologies Analysis Essays

Creative Technologies Analysis Essays Creative Technologies Analysis Essay Creative Technologies Analysis Essay Essay Topic: and hate comments come up very regularly, which are often left unmanaged and not replied to. Moving on to Twitter, Creative has an account at http://twitter. Com/#! /creativeness, which has amassed 3,555 followers and 1,379 tweets as of 26 October 2011. The account mainly serves as a platform for Creative to address any general issues about their products and to promote their events such as Omega Contest. Apart from Faceable and Twitter, Creative has integrated the IRS feed. IRS (Really Simple Syndication) is a web standard for the delivery of content blob entries, news stories, headlines, images, video enabling readers to stay current with their favorite publications or producers without having to browse from site to site. In short, it is a one-stop location where users can stay updated on blobs and news content of their choice. Creatures website is embedded with IRS feed, which lets users subscribe to news and updates on Creative products automatically on a computer or a portable device. By doing so, loyal customers can effortlessly stay up to date on Creatures announcements and news on its new products without having to source for them manually. However, because the IRS feed simply broadcasts news to subscribers whenever there are updates, there is no proper system to sieve out news updates that customers are not interested in. For example, if a fan of Creative technology likes Creative music players only, he would not be interested in hearing news about its new Sandblaster card. Worse, the user might view subscription to the IRS feed with Creatures website to be an annoyance, leading him or her to inscribe. What is most impressive is Creatures Youth channel. On this channel, customers can choose to view video demonstrations of its various products all at one location, hence getting a further understanding of its capabilities, visually. In addition, the comment thread in Youth allows for interaction between Youth seers who participate in active discussions on the pros and cons of the various products. This information is very useful for customers to make sure that the product channel does have its demerits. The videos uploaded are controlled by Creative Headquarters and are usually nothing more than promotional videos to showcase the features of the products, Just like any commercial advertisements. Consumers may be more inclined to search for user-generated videos on Creative products which usually provide more information, especially if the consumer wants to know more about the faults and problems associated with the products they are about to buy. Although Creatures attempt at tapping into social media to expand its reach is laudable, the poor management of its foray into the social media channel has severely dented its objective in trying to retain it loyal customers by connecting with them and creating greater customer value. Clearly, more has to be done on Creatures part to integrate and improve social media into its operations and business strategies. This will portray an image of it being a firm that is up to date with technological trends for its customers to trust that they are indeed a brand that sells state-of-the-art technology, Just like Apple. . Our Proposals For Social Media The incorporation of social media generally achieves three goals for businesses: 1 . Create product awareness among the massive online audience. 2. Enable user content creation and distribution and creating a many-to-many model of mass communication, hence building customer relationships. 3. As a platform to make sales. 5. 1 Faceable Importanc e of Faceable The term social media would not have grown to such popularity and prominence if not for Faceable. It is now the worlds largest social networking website with a membership base today of more than 800 million users and growing, of which 50% go in to the portal every day. Its sheer size and scalability offers an excellent platform for viral marketing through positive word-of-mouth, leading to the coinage of the term Faceable Commerce (E-commerce). The E-commerce model relies heavily on social interactions and user contributions. A successful Faceable platform shapes dialogue and interaction to be multi-way, between the consumers themselves as well as with the companys customer service personnel. Consumers must be actively engaged and encouraged to contribute to the Faceable experience in order to increase fan conversion to customers, as well as customer retention. Integrating a successful F-commerce model into the companys existing business model will bring tremendous improvements to brand visibility, product/service relevance and quality due to direct feedback from customer base, and ultimately sales revenue. It also reduces costs associated with physical advertising by making the customers promote the companys products instead, thereby increasing profits and shareholder value. F- commerce Proposal for Creative We propose Creative create and maintain separate Faceable pages for each country and set up a social media management team consisting of technical personnel as ell as customer service representatives, with divisions for each country to maintain them. Having localized pages will better relate to the consumer base and can help the company understand specific local tastes and what the consumer preferences are, on their products, in each target market. Creative wishes to brand itself as a friendly interfaces and cool industrial designs to attract not Just the tech-sway, but also mass-market consumers. To do this, it needs to promote a culture of using Creatures products in everyday life and make the culture look accessible, hip and cool. As such, we propose modifying existing fan pages (Ireland, Italy etc. ) and creating new ones around the concept of a community lifestyle portal for this purpose. Within each fan page, segmenting the mass market users, and targeting each group individually through separate tabs would make content more relevant for consumers. Based on its target segments, we propose tabs for youth, family, kids, and mobile on-the-go. Garnering fans is essential in extending the reach of its advertising efforts. Creative should promote its Faceable page aggressively on its corporate/e-commerce website as well as physical store. Installing a fan-gate (where user has to like the Faceable page before he gets access to any page content) as well as providing one-time promo codes or discounts to anyone who likes the page are also options. Purchasing Faceable displaced would also market the companys page to accounts that may not know of its existence. Getting product content into fans news feeds, and making sure the content is impact is the next step. Creative should customize its fan page content based on local IT/music/movie happenings and integrate its products with the snippets, instead of Just posting sales announcements eke it does currently. Emphasizing email subscription is also important to reduce dependency on news feed edge rankings, which might lead to Creatures news not being posted onto fans news feeds at all. Additionally, Creative should post news on its public relations activities to increase awareness of its corporate social responsibility initiatives. This, in turn, would spread the image of a socially-conscious company, which creates positive branding. This will lead to increased sales. To make content delivery interesting, Creative should use other medium besides the usual pictures of its products and words. The social media management team could, for example, take videos of itself at work doing day-to-day activities using Creatures live! Am, and post it on its wall to give consumers a better idea of the products capabilities. This is because raw, viral videos often do more for publicity than professionally mastered advertisements. In addition, Creative should do more to encourage customers to post feedback on product purchases on its wall by replying to their comments as soon as possible, so as to create greater interaction. If the feedback is positive, staff should thank the consu mers. If it happens to be negative, staff should apologies, and clearly state the actions taken immediately to rectify the bad experience in the wall post. Doing so will prevent Creatures reputation from going down further, and makes customer service transparent. Potential customers have a better opinion of customer service, and will want to do business with company, increasing fan conversion to customers. Creative should also increase consumer input by actively engaging the Faceable fans in product discussion, design and implementation. Organizing contests for example to design skins for Zen players, beakers and tablets increases participation from young, vibrant design communities and hence increases consumer touch points. It also adds to Creatures cool, hip, and fun image. Asking for ideas on new products through the discussion tab will provide valuable information of what the market wants, and will ensure the new products products, Creative could test-drive them with a select group of active Faceable fans and ask them to post reviews on both Creatures and their own walls. This serves as an incentive for fans to be active contributors to the portal, and also increases word- f-mouth advertising of the products even before they are launched. To tap on the F- commerce phenomenon fully, the last step for Creative would then be to create a virtual seafront on Faceable itself. This allows users to complete transactions without ever having to leave the platform, reducing the hassle of multiple pop-up windows and instead making the shopping experience seamless. Creative could partner with Tack This! A third-party service from Everywhere Pet Ltd that allows companies to a seafront widget on multiple social media pages(egg. Faceable, blobs etc), all under one synchronized inventory system. Its automated order management system makes logistics easy, and automatic inventory updates reduce any chances of technical glitches in delivery. Payment is processed via Papal, debit/credit card, and even inter-bank transfer for Singapore, a feature not currently found on Cre atures e-commerce site. Challenges: There are three big challenges in using Faceable for business: building the number of Likes for its page and getting its posts noticed on a users wall among the numerous posts by a users friends and other pages that are so easy to Like these days. On December 17, 2010 The Auks Independent newspaper reported that Kit Cats Break by Break competition in combination with the advertising campaign around the brands 75th birthday has led to fans flocking to the brands Faceable page. 0,000 new users liked the brand on December 15, as of 12:00 GMT on December 16 Kit Kate has attracted nearly a further 2,000 unique likes and Jumped straight to number 8 in the daily fan charts. Hence, as mentioned earlier, Creative can organize contests and competitions, especially during special occasions, to attract attention onto its page. The last halogen is that there are still areas of the world today that has limited penetration by Faceable, for example, China, a major customer segment of Cr eative. Entities in China predominately use domestic versions of Faceable. 5. 2 Twitter Twitter and Its Impacts on Modern Business In todays globalizes world, it is important for businesses to stay as agile as possible. For corporations such as Creative, it is important for them to be informed about latest trends, updates, news and information about relevant products from their competitors. Twitter provides such capability by creating a platform for businesses ND consumers to give real-time feedback loop instantaneously. Twitter is a powerful marketing tool because it not only allows businesses to receive feedbacks and comments on their latest products, it also provides a platform for businesses to introduce their products and any upcoming events. Moreover, individuals today have developed sophisticated applications that will aid businesses in marketing analysis. Applications developed and hosted on websites such as Enforce allow users to be connected to Twitter through their mobiles and also, data to aid users in forming strategies to attract clients to their Twitter accounts. Proposal On Possible Improvements For Creative While Creative has made an attempt to respond to customers feedbacks and to make use of Twitter to promote upcoming events, it can do more. Creative can segregate marketing applications from web stores such as Enforce to analyses consumers responses and feedback about their products and events. Applications such as Crossbreed provide statistics of Creatures re-tweets from followers. Followers responses would give Creative a gauge about customers impressions and satisfaction levels of their products and events. From there, Creative can model their true events and products to better cater to customers needs and preference. Creative can also make use of applications like Twisting to forge strong relationships with important clients. Through tweets and responses, Creative can filter out customers who are unhappy about the services and products provided. From there, Creative can make use of Twisting to send real gifts to the clients. This will help to not only appease unsatisfied clients, but also to prove their customer eccentricity. Challenges: Twitter, on its own, lacks facilities for group interactions. Twitter often acts as a one-way communication platform. Many Twitter accounts, in fact, are setup to be this way with automated feeds that post content or links, especially for businesses to simply get the word out or to promote links. In such cases, people arent as invested into the service, with little or no relationship building with customers as a result. Furthermore, a concerning development for Twitter is the reports that state the percentage of users who sign up for Twitter that actually turn into daily users. A recent article on the Business Insider discussed the fact that only 15 million people in the US use Twitter. Twitter has said it has 65 million US users. That is a huge gap, and this discrepancy comes from people trying out Twitter but never becoming a frequent user, hence creating many dormant accounts. Both of these factors pose a real challenge to Creative when tapping on Twitter, as it will be unable to reach, attract, and interact with a large enough audience to Justify its initial investment. Also, Twitter does not have penetration in certain target markets of Creative. . 3 Blobs Blobs And Their Impacts On Businesses A corporation might also choose to create an external blob. A corporations external blob is a public wobble where employees or representatives of the corporation make announcements or share views about anything related to the operations of the corporation. It is generally used to promote latest products or any upcoming events organized by the corporation. Externa l blobs can be written for BBC (Business to Customers) or BIB (Business to Business) and they are generally open to comments from the public. This is to allow communication between the public and the corporation, which is crucial is a corporation wants to produce goods that are favored by its clients. Although Creative has an official website, it does not have a corporate blob that allows interactions between the company and the general public. For a large corporation like Creative, it is crucial for it to be aware of customers concerns and feedbacks. Having an external blob would allow creative to interact with its customers and to create products that are more customer-centric. Proposals on possible improvements for Creative Creative can set up an external corporate blob that allows the public to keep track of the latest products and up-to-date announcements about events and promotions. The public should also be allowed to give replies and comments about any posts should be assigned to keep track of any possible spam mails and also to reply any concerns as soon as possible. An effective blob would benefit Creative as it would be more informed about the various concerns and they can pass information efficiently to its clients. Alternatively, Creative can set up a CEO Blob. In this case, Creatures CEO Simi Wong Who can set up a public blob that addresses concerns and issues regarding his company. CEO blobs are favored by the public because they allow total transparency between the CEO and the consumers. Consumers can post concerns and Simi would be able to address those concerns personally. Creative can enlist the help of lifestyle/entertainment/tech floggers to do independent reviews on heir products for them, effectively reaching out to its target consumers. Challenges: Blob posts are generally long and tedious to create. Creative may not have the time or resources to update and maintain its blob regularly. 5. 4 Youth Youth uses Adobe Flash Video and HTML technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blobbing and short original videos uploaded by individuals and unregistered users may watch videos, while registered users may upload an unlimited number of videos. Recently, several companies have created their own online channels within Youth, and as for Creative, this takes the form of a website with video commercials and demonstrations uploaded by Creative Headquarters there is a clear absence of user-generated videos which is what Youth prides itself for. The existing Youth channel could be further improved by featuring user-generated videos that provide more useful and independent information regarding their products. This will help to increase user time spent as an interactive online community is created. E. G. Person X could create a video based on he pros and cons of buying a TO speaker, and when someone posts questions on the video, Person X and the entire community can engage in discussions about the product, with the Creative administrator simply Just going through the threads to see if queries and information are accurately answered. Through the creation of an online community, formation of interest groups will be facilitated, leading to sharing of knowledge and experiences regarding products. There will also be increased sense of belonging to the community associated with ownership of videos.