(Somewhat) Private History

If you’d like to know about the company’s muddled inception, I’d check out The Social Network. If you are interested in the more meat and potatoes side of what they did and when, I’d suggest Wikipedia.

However, I’d like to focus on how they don’t fit in to the mold of your average startup:

The usual startup Internet companies almost always try to capitalize on their potential growth by sprinting towards building a large audience and going public.

Facebook seemed to do the opposite.

While most internet companies resemble the sleek rabbit, facebook has proven to be more of a tortoise...

Through gradually growing from purely a Harvard networking site, to Ivy league, to college, to high school, to anyone 13 or older instead of just initially opening it up to the world; they have really controlled their audience size and effectively crawled to an initial public offering 8 years later.

(Very) Public Future

Here are Mark Zuckerberg’s reasons for going public as listed in a letter to his potential shareholders.

Inspiringly broad and idealistic language aside, the most foreseeable reason is that the SEC requires that once a company reaches 500 shareholders, they are automatically required to start publicly releasing financial details.

(effectively placing them a smidgeon away from just being a publicly traded company anyway).

Another reason, which I see as more appropriate, is that he wants to quickly raise cash to reinvest in his company.

facebook could buy another instagram to further its mobile presence....or it could use the money to fight off patent litigation...

Should You Invest in the IPO?

I am not a professional analyst, but to me the positives for investing far outweigh the negatives.

Naysayers believe that, because they have entered public trading so late, the potential for growth is greatly diminished.

In addition, they “do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of facebook mobile products, and [their] ability to do so successfully is unproven”

This is a big sticking point with investors on Wall Street. That and the hoodie...

But lets be honest, not only do numerous reputable companies believe that mobile use will outpace desktop use by 2015 (another reason facebook still has more room to grow), but it also inherently makes sense.

To me, the only places seriously lacking Internet availability/users are places where desktop computers are too much of a hassle to use (like Africa or the Middle East).

I think that its becoming more and more impossible to stay connected to the world in general without social sites like facebook, so these places need to get connected somehow: and the answer is mobile.

Will I Invest in a facebook IPO?

I doubt the growth would be anything like Google’s stock steadily rising from $85 to $600, but I believe that as long as the world’s population is growing (and facebook keeps generating a product that everyone wants) facebook will keep growing.

As for the making money part, they’ve always found a way before and there is nothing keeping them from figuring it out right now.

Strategy is a funny thing.

For further reading on everything facebook IPO, check out these two Cnet articles and a story by CBS

A Cool Tool I Found to Help With a Big Trend

Since, according to www.mobilemarketer.com, mobile search queries will outpace desktop queries in 2015; I wanted to make sure that my website was mobile compatible.

I got the beeeeeeest of both worlds!

What I didn’t realize that Google analytics already generated a huge  amount of mobile information and presented it to you. For example:

1. They separate Desktop and Mobile searches.

I never mentioned my site was mobile compatible, but here people are...accessing it with their phones!

2. They detail what devices were used for the search.

Get a load of those smart phones

3. They even break down the operating system, browser, screen resolution, and colors used when accessing my website!

I suspect this would be useful if you're selling something with a lot detail involved

All of this will definitely come in handy as mobile devices become the preferred method of searching and , I believe, by just getting acquainted with these tools, I’ll have a leg up on the competition.

The Big Takeaway

When I first started the class, I thought you needed a masters degree even attempt to market anything on the internet. As I quickly learned the answer to getting anything done on the internet is quite simple:

Content is king

No matter what you are attempting to get people to do, the one way get people to oblige is to create timely, relevant, and quality content.

Take for instance ESPN:

ESPN: Updated Daily..No Wait....Hourly?

They continuously update and add vast amounts of content and because of this (and a couple other factors)m they have become the place to go for anything sports related on the web.

The Future

If the biggest lesson producing quality content, the second biggest lesson is never stop learning. The internet and all of its capabilities are always changing and I plan to keep up with it.

Here is a list of just some of the people/companies I subscribe/follow to keep me updated well into the future:

Mashable, eMarketer, Mobile Marketing Association, Brian Solis, Christopher Penn, Pete Cashmore, Valeri Maltoni, and (of course) my marketing teacher, Theresa B. Clarke!

The latest assignment in my MKTG 487 class was to try to optimize the organic rankings for the JMU page on my website.

As you can see...I'm not on the first page. But Melissa is!

What it all boils down to is picking a key phrase and using it as much as you can (in a way that it doesn’t obviously look lie you’re trying to optimize your site)

As you can see, I love JMU

To optimize my site, I used the phrase “love jmu” twice in headings, twice in captions, twice in picture titles and descriptions, twice in the body, and it is mentioned in two comments on my page (a total of 10 mentions)

I wasn’t even listed in the top 20 pages

From what I can tell, the highest ranked person in our class used the same aforementioned terms only 8 times and still ranked ahead of me.

Melissa loves JMU a little more than I do I guess?

In light of this, I’d like to propose a theory:

The reason Melissa faired better than me was, not only because she used the term “love jmu” more organically, but also because of the number of non-organic clicks she received as a result of the parameters of this project

The first reason is inherent; I solely used the term “love jmu” while she used love and jmu more often separately than together (saving the exact phrase for the important things like titles and headers).

The interesting thing to me is what our teacher requires for the assignment.

Searching out who is number one, I wonder what they did different than me....

The key is that we have to find which person has the top rated website in our class.  Then, without even knowing it, everyone enrolled in MKTG 487 helps that person increase their rankings.

Quite simply, curiosity gets the better of us; we want to know what that individual did with their website and we click on their link in the SERP.

What we fail to realize though is that when a website gets more clicks, it can artificially boosts it’s rankings.

Thereby hurting everyone else in the competition.

Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of having Lindsay Crone as a guest speaker for my MKTG 470 class.

Lindsay is currently Creative Editor at The Search Agency and has worked as SEM Creative Manager at Advertising.com/AOL Advertising.

I found her insights in to the professional world of online advertising extremely interesting and walked away with 3 new tidbits of knowledge.

Cross-Media

Internet marketers need to understand the intricacies involved with advertising on different platforms

People have the ability to do a ton of research on what keywords are searched from computers. But experts have taken notice of this cross media trend and are starting to analyze, not only effectiveness of keywords when searched from these different devices, but also what the most searched product is on each device.

Search Engine Optimization

When working on our various blog/website promotions in class, we’ve focused on getting to the top of the SERPS using basic PPC and organic methods.  Lindsay introduced our class to a method that takes this idea a step further; Don’t just strive to sit at the top of the SERPS, control all of the space above the fold.

Bank of America has succeeded in their quest to control everything above the fold

Bank of America accomplishes this by structuring their website so that Google’s algorithms can easy sort information and create sitelinks. This allows them to dominate half of the page through being first in PPC and organic results.

Job Search

As with many other seniors around this time of year, I’m anxiously searching for a job. Lindsay offered some valuable insight for me on this topic.

1. Be focused on a certain area

You may think that employers are looking for a person that is willing to go anywhere and do anything,

They don’t.

They want people that are passionate about a narrow selection of things so they know that you will stick around because you love what you do, not because of the paycheck.

2. Use Linkedin to connect with anyone you know professionally

I thought that Linkedin was solely used to connect with those who you have strong personal relationships with, Lindsay proved me wrong.

Its perfectly acceptable to connect to a person who’s lecture you’ve attended, have had  a chance meeting with, or have even attended the same University.

All in all, it was a very helpful talk and I’m glad she came to speak!