...1 INTRODUCTION Since San Walton opened his first store in 1962, Wal-Mart has grown into a global retailer with more than 4,000 store in the United States and more than 6,000 internationally. According to Wal-Mart CEO, Mike Duke, Wal-Mart’s strategic focus areas are •Making sure the company has the best retail talent at every level of the organization by recruiting, developing and retaining the best associates; •Delivering on the productivity loop that enables Walmart to operate for less so the company can drive prices even lower for its customers •Being even more disciplined about operating expenses and capital spending; •Investing to serve more customers globally and accelerating the vision of anytime, anywhere access by bringing together best-in-class online, mobile and social capabilities and our more than 10,700 stores; and •Benefiting our communities and having a world class compliance organization. Walmart has been the giant of brick and mortar retailers having topped the Fortune 500 list on more than one occasion. Several business news agencies have notde that Wal-Mart is stumbling into E-Commerce market as it attempts to adapt its click and mortar business strategies to its E-Commerce business. According to CNN Money Wal-Mart plans to become an online juggernaut, but its online business numbers have been disappointing. Walmart’s E-Commerce has come up with a plan to do e-commerce right. The • Walmart began recruiting top Silicon Valley talent...
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...The Twitter Case Final for Advanced Business Structures Ivana Paraca April 30, 2013 Table of Contents List of Figures 3 List of Tables 3 Introduction 4 Business Background and Specifications 4 Product and service lines by revenues and profit margin 4 Twitter’s Rise in Revenue 5 Twitter’s products and services 6 Twitter Business Model 7 Geographical distribution of Twitter services 7 Competitor analysis (sales, products and geographical distribution of services) 9 Size of the Marketing and Communication budget of Twitter and that of its competitors 10 Twitter’s Business Strategies 10 Define and characterize the type of control strategy Twitter uses 11 Company Policies 12 Define and characterize the type of change 12 Identify the growth and differentiation policies of the company 13 Twitter and Virtual Teams 15 Innovation and Improvements 16 Wholefoods and Twitter 16 Improvements for stakeholders 17 Conclusion 17 References 19 List of Figures Figure 1: Twitter Ad Revenues Worldwide, 2011-2015 (In millions USD and % change) 6 Figure 2: Global Distribution of Twitter Users 8 Figure 3: Twitter Users Created, 2006-2010 9 Figure 4: Porter's Generic Strategies 11 Figure 5: Twitter's Product Differentiation 14 List of Tables Table 1: Twitters Financials 5 Table 2: Facebook's Marketing and Sales Costs 10 Introduction Without a doubt social media has greatly altered the way people, companies...
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...Summary: The fundamental problem that Twitter is currently facing is whether the current projection of future revenues and profits justify the current stock market valuation. The following analysis takes into consideration underlying factors in Twitter’s environment and provides recommendations for marketing-based solution. Company: Founded by Evan Williams in early 2006, Twitter was initially started as a status update project for Odeo Inc. Podcasting. Odeo was a podcasting form which aimed to successfully create a system that would make it possible to produce podcasts with as little as a mobile phone. However, as major competitors with bigger budgets, such as Apple Inc., entered the market, the board of directors for Odeo asked the company to strategize their business in a new light. The result was an internal project, Twttr Beta, which allowed staff to update each other through the service. In October 2006, newly re-named “Twitter” was acquired by Obvious Corp., a company set up by Williams, Jack Dorsey and Christopher Stone to allow the group to focus on the project. Today, with 140 characters or less, subscribers of Twitter can update their followers with a “tweet” in real time. Twitter, a micro blogging service, is built on open service and allows its’ over 200 million active users to broadcast over 500 million tweets per day. Currently, it is one of the most popular social media tools after Facebook and Google. Product: Twitter is essentially text based, which means...
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...On September 12, 2013, Twitter confidentially filed for an I.P.O. with the S.E.C., but made it publicly known through its own website (Sommer, 2013). It does not seem to be a coincidence that they have timed their offering with the rise of Facebook’s stock and the overall market. Wisely, Twitter has waited to make the offering until the disaster of last year has begun to dissipate, but it is possible that it will crash and burn at the beginning just like Facebook. Twitter decided to take advantage of the confidentiality provision within the JOBS Act that allows companies to “limit transparency” by keeping company financial information private up until three weeks before the company promotes its offering. However, the only companies who can use this provision are those that have annual revenue less than $1 billion. This gives us a little insight into how well Twitter is doing financially (Sommer, 2013). The confidentiality provision in the JOBS Act was intended for entrepreneurial firms who want to avoid too much attention and “prying eyes that might deter them from going public and growing to maturity”, said Kate Mitchell, a former chairwoman of the private I.P.O. Task Force. When asked about why the limit was set at $1 billion she stated, “We did that because we wanted I.P.O.’s to succeed. Had the limit been lower, it might have given smaller companies an incentive to rush to take advantage of it too soon, before their revenues had grown and, maybe, without a business plan...
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...ACC501 Twitter, Inc History of Twitter Twitter started in 2006 when the podcasting company Odeo realized they needed to reinvent themselves and began brainstorming new creative ideas. Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of creating an SMS(short message service, texting for example) that would allow a user to communicate with a small group of people. Twitter was first called "status" until the group looked in the dictionary for names and found twitter which fit it perfectly. The original product name was twttr. The project work began on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 12:50 PM (PST): "just setting up my twttr". The prototype for twitter was tested as an internal service for Odeo employees but later launched publically in July 2006. In October 2006, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams formed Obvious Corporation with other members from Odeo. They then bought out Odeo from the investors and other shareholders. In April of 2007, Twitter became it's own company. Twitter really took off in 2007 when they used a marketing plan to display streaming twitter messages on massive plasma screens at the South by Southwest festival. On that day, twitter usage went from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. During that event, Twitter won an award in the Blog category, and Jack Dorsey thanked everyone in 140 characters. Now Twitter is estimated to have 2.5 million users, with 20 million unique U.S. visitors in June 2009 and 628 million pageviews. Twitter...
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...Battle for Social Media Dominance As Facebook currently holds 800 million current active users worldwide, they maintain the world’s leading social media sharing website. Facebook has jumped past other social media websites like Linkedin and MySpace within the first few years of existence. Google has tried time and time again to get to the place where Facebook currently has a strong hold on everyone’s online identity. Google has poured tons of money into years of development with several projects to mimic Facebook. Google has once again begun the implementation of a new social media website called Google+. Google+ is Google’s fourth attempt at mimicking Facebook’s social media website. Another powerhouse in social media is Twitter. Twitter currently has 300 million users. Before getting into the competitors of this industry, one must know how each social media network makes revenue. Since all of these companies do not force people to pay a premium in order to gain a membership they must find an alternate way of generating money. There are two ways these companies make money, investors and IPO’s, ads, and premiums from satellite companies. For example, Facebook is able to charge companies likes Zynga a 30% charge of all virtual purchases done on their game from allowing Zynga the ability to put their game on Facebook’s platform. Mainly these companies form money from companies who wish to display ads for their companies on people’s sidebars of their profile. This is mainly...
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... http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/15570378-how-has-advertising-changed-in-the-last-10-years "Let’s dial back to 2004. In a vote of confidence, General Pervez Musharraf wins re-election — Janet Jackson’s breast exposed during Super Bowl halftime show — Google introduces Gmail product. (The launch is met with skepticism) — Dick Cheney and George W. Bush testify before the 9/11 Commission — Oldsmobile builds its final car ending 107 years of production — Facebook launched as social networking site open only to Harvard students — Statue of Liberty reopened to the public. None of the following were around in 2004: Android; Instagram; Mashable; BuzzFeed; The Cloud; Netfix; Tablets & Smart Phones; Huffington Post; Tumblr; Hulu; Twitter; iPhone; Wikipedia; iPad; or YouTube." -Matt Scheckner, Executive Director, Advertising Week The world has certainly changed a lot since 2004, and the field of marketing is no exception. On the occasion of Advertising Week’s 10th anniversary, we ask: What are some of the biggest changes advertising has seen in the last decade? 1. Mobile Popular consumer mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) simply didn’t exist 10 years ago. (The iPhone was first released in 2007 and the iPad came in 2010.) But already, a third of all visits to the most popular online retailers come from mobile devices. Writing in Harvard Business Review, Harvard Business School dean of marketing Sunil Gupta sees the current state of mobile ads as “a period of fumbling...
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...high level of productivity and employee retainage. In this paper, two organizations based in San Francisco, CA, listed as 2015 Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® are evaluated in terms of their human resource structures (Great place to Work, 2015) , I will make suggestions as to how to best integrate HR strategies to each firm. Twitter and Genentech Twitter One of the organizations is Twitter, Inc., the online social network for public self-expression in real time. The company has 2,730 US employees at 14 different locations and with revenue of $664.89 million today. Twitter was founded in 2006 and rapidly gained popularity; its website is listed in 8th position as most visited websites globally as of May 2015 according to Alexa Internet, Inc. 37% of men and women Twitter users are 18 to 29 years old, 25% by 30 to 49 years old, 38% is over 50 year old user. It has very effective tools for marketers to censes predict activities for each generation by surfing the conversations they tweet on any given day. Under the first amendment, we all have a freedom of speech; however people are subject to some regulation non Twitter which is privately owned website, and your speech is protected under Twitter’s term of service of use. This fairly new company is said to be one of best place to work in US by their employees, mostly they are satisfied with human resources...
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...Social Networking (Today and Tomorrow) By: Gaurav Mehta Aashish Raina Vivek Wadhwa “Social media was born from sites not trying to change the way we behave or to provide us with extra information, it was just to assist our behaviour” Well if you say it all started with Facebook or Orkut, you will be surprised. Social Networking has been in our past, present and will continue in our future. So when did it start exactly? To understand that let’s first understand what is social networking? Social networking is about meeting new people and communicating with those whom you already know. So technically, social networking has been there for ages. The concerts, family functions, weddings, plays etc. can be termed as ways of social networking. However we consider the online networking as social networking. So let us focus on that part and see how it developed into what we have today. The online social networking: It’s about 6 C’s: 1. Communications 2. Connectedness 3. Common Experience 4. Content 5. Commerce 6. Cool Experiences (or Entertainment). The online social networks mirror our offline lives. It all started with CompuServe, which was the first online service to offer internet connectivity, albeit limited access, as early as 1989. It connected its proprietary e-mail service to allow incoming and outgoing messages to other Internet e-mail addresses. In early 1990’s, CompuServe was very popular with thousands of users visiting its numerous...
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...prepared by me specifically for this course. ____________ 03/02/20xx Signature Date Today, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, MySpace are well-known social networking brand names that many of us have grown accustomed to making part of our daily routine, whether it be for staying in touch with friends, networking, or micro-blogging. Social networking tools have the potential to revolutionize e-commerce as we know it today through “social commerce” platforms. A 2011 study by Booz & Co estimates that social commerce is currently a $5 billion market with the potential to grow to $30 billion in five years (Booz & Co., 2011). Social commerce's transformational power lies in its personalization of the internet experience, connectivity with an individual’s network, and the dynamic customer data collection that can drive current and future marketing and sales efforts. In this paper, the author will introduce the social commerce concept, examine the social commerce market, explore the effect of social commerce on consumer behavior, discuss social commerce pricing strategies and valuation of social commerce networks, evaluate the industry concentration and look at the future of the social commerce. What is Social Commerce? Even though today we equate social networking with Facebook and Twitter, social networking itself is not a brand new concept. “Early forms...
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...Topic Paper: Social Media Trends In China Investigate the Microblogging—Sina Weibo Heng Zhang Digital Strategic Communication East Tennessee State University Introduction Social media channels continue to grow in popularity across China in recent years. For a country with over 1.35 billion inhabitants, using social media has become a key way for individuals and businesses to communicate. Of all the Chinese social media products to join the market in the last few years, none has had as great effects as Sina's Weibo. Sina Weibo is a Chinese microblogging website. It was launched by SINA Corporation on 14 August 2009. Similar to a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook, it is one of the most popular sites in China, with a market penetration similar to what Twitter has established in the USA. Sina Weibo presenting a relatively unfettered space for speech. In just four years, the site has attracted over 500 million members, more than the population of all but two countries in the world. For all its success, though, Weibo has confined itself to China; until 2013, when Sina introduced an English-language version and allowed users to login via Facebook, Weibo made virtually no effort to expand to foreign market and focused instead on recruiting users from within China. Given the country's large population -- and still-modest level of Internet penetration -- this strategy makes sense; however, there are still plenty of people in China who don't use Weibo. Weibo as the most...
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...Innovation Theory and the Social Learning Theory are just a few of the theories that can be applied to the use of social media for Public Relations purposes by the NSW RSPCA. The NSW Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) was founded in Sydney in 1873. The organisation receives less than 2% funding from the government, therefore relying on donations and fundraisers to effectively maintain their 40 shelters (RSPCA NSW, nd). The RSPCA have embraced the new age technology of social media, and combine their integral website with several social media channels (digitalbusiness.gov.au, 2012 [3]), the most popular of which being Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, which as of July 2013 the organisation had over 54, 000 ‘likes’ on Facebook (RSPCA NSW Facebook, nd), over 6, 000 ‘followers’ on Twitter (RSPCA NSW Twitter, nd) and over 150 subscribers and over 100, 000 channel views on YouTube (RSPCA NSW YouTube, nd). Social Media has been defined as a “collection of web based outlets that allow individuals or companies to create a public or semi public profile which allows the user to gather a list of followers with whom to share information with” (Reynolds C, nd). This new...
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...Social Media’s role in Political changeced In early 2011 revoulution seemed to sweep across much of the of oArab world. Long standing dictators were overthrown after unarmed and largely peaceful protest in Egypt, Tunisa and Libya. Protests seemed to have have also had profound effects in Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. Demonstrations have arisen in most other Arab states as well as Spain and Uganda. The role of social media in these uprisising has been dubbed the “Twitter revoulitons.” Does social media, really deserve all those accolades? Revoultions have been overthrowing oppressive governments long before web 2.0. Iranians in overthrew the Shah in 1979, Filipinos overthrew President Marcos in 1986, and the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe crumbled one after another in 1989. This paper will explore the phenomenon of social media nad its role in promoting and prompting progressive political change, particularly in countries with oppressive leaders. Social media has been defined as “a group of internet based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, which allows the creation and exchange of user-generated content”. (Kaplan) “Web 2.0” is the name for internet platforms which allow for interactive participation by users thereof. It may be contrasted with Web 1.0 platforms, which simply provide content to users, without giving them the opportunity to interact with or modify that information online. This content is all considered...
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...I would enjoy working in a school because it is a creative and vibrant environment that is also stable and a place where you can be sure that you are working with good and knowledgeable people. I am on a marketing course but I was intrigued by the web design part of the job description as I have always had an interest in websites and social media – I ran a blog & twitter account for 6 weeks in the summer that I had to shut down due to university commitments – but I have never had the chance to pursue or build on this interest properly. Although I am not the most experienced with Photoshop I have a fair knowledge of it and some of it features after I taught myself in year 9 when I was making basic backgrounds for people’s MySpace pages, experience which i also used to gain a 1st in a assignment in my Advertising and Promotions module where i had to design a poster. I had a channel on Youtube i started on my own for a short while during secondary school that gained over 50,000 views for videos that i had downloaded, cut and edited through teaching myself how to use a video editor so I do feel like i am quite a technical person that wouldn’t take too long to fit in to the role. I am very modern and i use most forms of popular social media to this day and have a very good understanding of them also. The current course that i study at university has helped me to greatly improve my communication and interpersonal skills and it has also helped me understand what would be expected...
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...media websites specifically throughout Twitter and Facebook first thing in the morning instead of reaching for a newspaper. Since people are spending such a large amount of time surfing social networks, it is important to point out some of the positive and negative effects that social networking can have on a society. The positive effects of social networking sites are allow people to create new relationships and reconnect with friends and family. Increased communication, even online, strengthens relationships. And the other is social networking sites make people share everything that they want and bring people with common interests together, offer exposure to new ideas from around the world, and lower inhibitions to overcome social anxiety. Social networking could be your business media promotion for examples a marketers at small companies can post on Twitter, in addition to generating revenue this way, companies also can get positive and negative feedback directly from consumers. While social networking sites have a positive effects, they also have negative effects for society. Social networking sites entice people to spend more time online and less time interacting face to face. The sites offer many time wasting activities that supplant more productive activities. Also social networking sites make cyberbullying, a type of bullying that occurs online, easier and more public than bullying through other online activities like twitter and facebook. Social networking sites...
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