We have a live client to work with this semester: yardlover.  Visit yardlover.com to begin familiarizing yourself with the nature of the business. 

Familiarize yourself with yardlover's business by exploring its website.  We'll help the client this semester with these five taaks.

  1. marketing support for a new site launch
    1. Develop a marketing campaign to promote the brand eGardenSolutions.
    2. The campaign shold use online (digital) and offline, or traditional, media.
  2. search engine optimization (SEO)
    1. Ranking in Bing as well as Google (recent reading indicates they value different things)
    2. Optimizing OakGroveAvenue.com
    3. Promoting the niche sites
      1. OnlyCuttingBoards.com
      2. TheBottomPrice.com
      3. TheWineRackDepot.com
  3. metrics: measuring marketing performance
    1. asking the right questions
    2. interpreting the data correctly to answer the questions
  4. social media for marketing purposes
    1. developing Facebook for OakGroveAvenue.com
    2. developing Twitter for OakGroveAvenue.com
  5. email marketing
    1. segmenting & targeting Lists
    2. growing the subscriber list
    3. improving conversion rate

midterm status report A brief status report is due Friday 05.Mar.10, a copy for me and a copy for the client.  Deliver the client's copy to them.  Send my copy as an attachment to my my Gmail account.  Address the following issues.

  • research What resources have you tapped into as you gaher information and inform yourself about the issue you're working on for the client?  This includes anyone you've interviewed in connection with this work.

    Is there data or information you want but have been unable to locate?

  • findings What results are your reserach efforts producing?  What are you learning that's informing your thinking about the client's issue?

  • recommendations Do you have any tentative ideas yet based on your findings regarding how you'll encourage the client to proceed with the issue?

This can be accomplished well in the span of 1 - 3 pages.  Observe the same formatting specifications indicated to the right for the final documentation due at the end of the semseter.

We're addressing all five issues for yardlover.  You'll work in teams of three or four.  I determine composition.  More than one team is addressing each issue, but each team is addressing only one issue.  Which teams are addressing which issue is deternined by means of a drawing.  These slides depict section 1 teams and section 2 teams.

The client, yardlover, needs a take-away.  Each team prepares a report describing basically three tasks performed for the client: the

  1. research,
  2. findings, and
  3. recommendations based on the findings.

document specs These are the requirements and guidelines for the document you produce.

requirements

  • Use the 'Calibri' font style. 10 point (pt) size.
  • Use a 1" margin all around on all your pages.
  • Number the pages in the upper right hand corner.
  • Double space your narrative.
  • Mange your time so you ample time before the due deadline to proof your entire document carefully and make all corrections.  There should be NO hand written corrections anywhere in the document.
  • Your document must have a cover, or title, page containing
    • the document title,
    • the course, section number, & semester, and
    • team member names with signature.

guidelines

  • My sense is that this document should be in the range of 7 - 15 pages.
    • I'm skeptical of the thoroughness and quality of your work if it's fewer than 7 pages.
    • Exceeding 15 pagers is acceptable IF the content is good; i.e., it's important to help the client.
  • The 3 sections, research, results, & recommendations should probably be in the following ranges.
    • research: 1 - 3 pages
    • results: 4 - 7 pages
    • recommendations: 3 - 5 pages

peer evaluation  Complete this peer evaluation and send it to williamsonkn@gmail.com by Monday 03.May.  Read and follow the instructions faithfully for completing the peer evaluation.