Many people are competing to create some business out from Facebook. Internet users’ demand are indefinitely expanding, I can’t see an end to their satisfaction.

At one point, new technologies become old at the very instant another new pop ups. Playing in this dynamic market is never an easy task.

While I am not so familiar with FourSquare as well as the new feature Place from Facebook, I just come up with OnStar from Adage just now. It targets car owners who are in need of real time communication and information update from the world.

Amazing enough, it also aims to satisfy the need to update facebook information while driving by developing a Voice-Texting technology.

Click here for the article.

I just listened to an online recording from The Economist, and here are my learning from it.

Due to economic recession, there is an existence of trade down effect among customers. People engaged themselves into the stage of budget cut down for each meal, or rather choose to eat at home. This gives a challenging time to the industry, strategic planners would have to turn on their brain machine and serve themselves coffee in the Room-for-ideation for a long time.

Interestingly, Mcdonald is still taking the lead in the market, among the pool, it stands out and ramped up their advertisement budget by 7% this year while others are cutting back.

Some companies offer dollar menus as a tactic to bring in traffic. Burger King ventured a large sum of money for a marketing campaign. At the cost of $1.1 for a double cheese burger, they sell if out for $1 for the sake of bringing more traffic to their store, wishing that the customers would spend more than that when they come. However, a tension existed in this issue between the franchises and the company. Franchises were forced to follow the plan despite tremendous unwillingness.

Marketing terms for restaurants which I newly engaged “dollar menu”, “barbell menu strategy”

These are some pricing strategy for restaurants’ menu. Profits are made when the restaurant can hook customers with affordable specials and steers them to buy add-ons. For barbell menus, different price points are being set.

Marketers would also run Breakfast strategy, which is to catch in customers earlier. especially when those food items like coffee, biscuits, eggs etc are high margins products.

Health has also been raising more attention, to follow the trend and match customers taste, more healthy products are included in the menu list. In terms of PR, food are being presented more “greeny” and well partner will fruit juice. The main target would be health conscious customers, which is the women. This could also be considered as a tactical method, by means of utilizing the halo effect created by the lower calories products to interfere perceptions for other products like fried chickens and burgers, which appear to be more healthy.

In United States, there is a labeling law set for menu, which require restaurants to put calories counts on the respective items. However, this could dismay people from ordering high calories food

In China, there is a huge growth of market for young brands like KFC, pizza, the third largest in coming profit for these companies come from China. The strong demand for western brands strongly encourage western brands to focus on them. However, the food being offered is different in different markets, taste is specifically adjusted for the local preference.

The definition for fast food stores are also different for different countries. Usually fast food refer to buying food from roadside stands. But from the American stance, there is a different translation. It is rather luxurious, referring to a place which provide with a place to sit. Like Mcdonald, it has undergone extensive revamp, such that the in-store provide customers with free wifi, modern and clean stores, such that people would love to stay there longer which lead them to eat more.

At very high walking speeds you are using more muscle groups with arm motion and with a racewalking stride. Those extra muscles burn up extra calories with each step. Running may burn more calories per mile as there is an up and down motion lifting your weight off the ground as well as moving it forward. (About.com)

In the article, the term “impression” was being used, which refer to word of mouth. It carried out a Peer Influence Analysis, which count every instances a person influences another person online about a product or service.

There are namely two types of influence, firstly, which is influence from people posting within social networks, like Facebook and Twitter. This was named as influence impression. Base on the survey, it estimated people in the U.S. create 256 billion influence impression on each other in social networks every year. Of these influence impressions, 62% come from Facebook.

Secondly, are those influence created by posts: blog posts, blog comments, discussion forum posts, and ratings and reviews. It was named as influence posts. They estimated that people in the U.S. create 1.64 billion influence posts every year. If around 150 people view each of these posts (a conservative estimate, based on our research), that’s another 250 billion-plus impressions. Blog posts and blog comments account for about 40% of these posts.

As written on the article, there are three main conclusion from the survey. Firstly, people’s online impressions on each other about products and services are about one-fourth of the online advertising impression. And peer impressions are more credible than advertising, since they come from friends.

Secondly, It’s important to find out that minority of people who generate the influence impressions and posts.

Thirdly, to build word of mouth strategy, start with getting information from the mass influencers, which are far more concentrated.

The full article could be found from here.

Seems I have gone a little bit far from my focus, what I want to bring out, is that social behaviors has influential effect on ones acts. Facebook grabs this special common act of humans and helps itself to generate revenues. Social is inevitably a strong element within the media Facebook, it is a diverse network comprising of numerous ideas, acts, feelings etc and etc. The platform has a rich collection of precious information for marketers. Consumers demographic information, habits, feedback, and more importantly, it helps provide a platform for business to create word of mouth from users.

Nielsen has recently worked on a research to measure the impact of social on Ad effectiveness on Facebook. It discovers that an ad recall and brand awareness is more pronounced when the social element is added to the ad.

Below are the results from the research:
“But the increase in recall jumped to 16% when ads included mentions of friends who were brand fans, and 30% when the ads coincided with a similar mention in users’ news feeds. Brand awareness saw similar bumps: up 2% from just a home-page ad, 8% with a “social ad” bearing mentions of friends who were brand fans and up 13% when a home-page ad appeared along with a mention of friends who were brand fans in the users’ news feeds.

Purchase intent was 2% higher among viewers of home-page ads vs. nonviewers, but got a four-times-bigger bump, up 8% either from social ads or when ads appeared alongside organic mentions of the brand in the news feed.”

To read the full article, please click here.

Technological world is very dynamic. This reminds me about my internship experience in Yahoo!. When i first joined the company, the colleague sitting beside me always draw data on websites metrics, display and search ads performance. While after seven months, when i turned right, looking at the same person, I can feel that her tasks and work objectives totally changed. She kept looking for mobile related data. Then i can feel something in the market has changed during my short period of internship.

However, six months is definitely not a short period in technological world. So, if you want to be a digital person, or join the field for your future career. Stay tune, and don’t be lazy in obtaining new and update information from your surrounding.

Please treat me as a total new audience to this story, though with limited knowledge about the plot. I wouldn’t comment much on the storyline, as to me, every fairytale story got similar plots and ideas.

I appreciate the emotions, the feelings, the atmosphere created by different actors, especially Johnny Depp of course, his articulation, his body posture, movements, voice, eye expression, etc, all are nicely matched in the wonderland. I really enjoy watching Hatter, his role, throughout the movie.

The last phrase from the Hatter is “Fairfarren, Alice” which fairfarren means farewell, “May you travel far under fair skies”. This word is nicely chosen, a terminology with strong sense of fairytale feel.

Some additional comment for yesterday, there is intermission for the movie. Well, excuse me from being so narrow-sighted, I never have this experience in Hong Kong before. Kinda shock when the film was paused in the middle. Indeed, this is a nice experience as a foreigner. Worth the 8 euro.

I seriously wish the heater can get back to normal by tomorrow. Else, I would keep myself warm by eating more high-energy food. Sure, this is merely an excuse. Anyhow, I can only wait for some light shedding into my room, and wait for the natural heat.

Well, as i just returned from Prague and after verification from my Czech Friends, I learned that the Czech People got their own unique and special custom.

They told me that they celebrate it on Monday, which girls will decorate hard boiled eggs and give them out to boys. However, under the concept of “fair trade”, which is actually base on my own interpretation, they got something in exchange for that. And it is a BEAT from the boys.

The boys will use a long stick called Pussywillow twig to whip the girls, so those being whipped would gain Health and Youth.

I learned that Czech got many interesting customs, I would share more about that in my later posts. While if you are interested in reading more about Czech Easter, please click here.

Well, allow me to answer the question after one or two months.

Exchange is suppose to be a time for relaxation, and who say so? I am the first to object. I think it’s a time for you to take up more work, and an excuse for others to cast more work on you.