week 10

Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management is an umbrella term for making more efficient use of the human knowledge that exists within an organization. The major focus of knowledge management is to identify and gather content from documents, reports and other sources and to be able to search that content for meaningful relationships. (http://www.findwhitepapers.com)

 

Essentially hmv.com could use knowledge management to help give them a better competitve edge over their main rivals. If knowledge management was unable to improve the business in anyway it would be very suprising.

Recenctly hmv.com used a from of knowledge management to help increase their customer numbers through advertising. In 2001 Hmv.com used a company called eGain. The eGain Campaign is an e-mail marketing and proactive customer service solution that offers functionality based on proven one-on-one marketing techniques for planning, targeting and executing high volume direct marketing programs. Basically this means that hmv took time to target their mailings based on customer preferences to ensure that emails only go to people who would be most interested in them. This means a higher percentage of emails will not be “wasted” on people who are never going to use hmv.com. Therefore more potential customers will recieve the advertising emails and hopefully like what they see and make a purchase.

Another imoportant form of knowledge mangement hmv.com have implemented is thast they allow their customers to rate the items which they have purchased. These ratings are then made available to all customers who can relate much easier to the review than the could to say a coporate review. This may not increase sales but it is a form of customer service and may incourage more customers to be loyal to the business. This may also prevent the customer service departments’ time being wasted by questions that could be answered in these reviews.

Staff employed at hmv stores are more than likely into their music/gaming or both which is probably why they are in the job. Their knowledge of new bands, albums, games and consoles will be plentiful but unfortunately is probably wasted as they probably only get it across to customers who ask questions. An online blog or a few pages on the website could display the staffs thoughts and knowledge of all this for potential and current customers to read. Kind of like the customers reviewing their purchases but more in depth and probably coming from people in a better position to be giving their opinion on the products.

week 9

Traffic Building

Search Marketing
SEM is a form of internet marketing which aims to increase a websites visibility in search engines.
Increasing visibility in a search engines gives a website more chance of being returned as the first site in the results pages. Hmv.com pays search engines to return their site at the top of the results pages (talked about in last weeks blog) these sponsored links ensure hmv.com is as visible if not more as its online competitors.

Online pr
PR is the practice of managing the flow of information between an organization and its publics. PR exposes a website to their audiences using topics of public interest and news items that do not require direct payment. These can be in the form of blogs or media alert services for example. Hmv.com have this year set up a site specifically for hmv blogging customers. http://hmv.com/blogs. HMVblogs is designed to allow communication with HMV.com customers, and to provide further leverage of the company’s “Get Closer” brand. Get Closer is hmv’s social networking site. The site allows users to import music and film files and create their own library. They will be connected to other users with similar tastes to form so-called ’spider clouds’ around the artists, genres or films that they have in common.

Online Partnerships
As Hmv.com is a leading player in its market in both high street stores and online, a partnership would be of no benefit. There would be no need for sponsorship as the hmv group is a huge company and more than capable of funding themselves. Co branding is more so for companies who create their own products. Hmv.com mainly sell products bought from suppliers and record companies for examples.

Interactive Ads
Advertising is a huge deal in e-marketing and will contribute a lot to traffic building. In the sites i have visited today i haven’t come accross an ad for hmv or any of its competitors, though in the time i have been writing this blog (with the tv on in the background) there has been an hmv ad on tv. For this tv ad to increase the traffic flowing to hmv.com the customer would have to go out of their way to access the internet and visit the site. Online advertising means the site is literally one click away when the advert appears, a lot more users would be inclined to access the site with one click than have to put in the effort of moving from the tv to the computer and searching fot the site or typing in the address.

Opt in e-mail
Opt in e-mail is when a customer is given the option to receive “bulk” e-mail, that is, e-mail that is sent to many people at the same time. Typically, this is some sort of mailing list, newsletter, or advertising. Obtaining permission before sending e-mail is critical because without it, the e-mail is Unsolicited Bulk Email, better known as spam. Hmv.com uses confirmed opt-in (COI).
A new customer is asked if they want to subscribe to the mailing list when they purchase a product a confirmation e-mail is sent to verify it was really them. Many believe the person must not be added to the mailing list unless an explicit step is taken, such as clicking a special web link or sending back a reply e-mail. This ensures that no person can subscribe someone else out of malice or error.

week 8

In this weeks blog I will be assessing search engines and where hmv.com appears for particular searches. The most popular search engine on the web is arguably google. This will be the main engine i will use.

Obviously if i search for HMV with google the results will display hmv.com at the top of the list. The highlighed link at the very top is a sponsored link, which means hmv.com pay google for this ad to appear there. Below this sponsored link begins the list of results returned from the search, hmv.com at the top again.

search results

This search is quite specific which is fine if the website address isn’t known. If however some one is searching for a product that hmv sell, say dvd’s, this changes the search results quite a bit.

If i searched for dvds for instance, which is where hmv.com generates a lot of its revenue, the first sponsored link is to one of its main competitors, zavvi.co.uk. Forgetting about the sponsored links and looking through the results, hmv.com doesnt appear in the 1st three pages. By this point i had lost interest looking for it. Most user would probably only look as far as the 2nd page at a push. In the first page alone both hmv’s main competitors, zavvi.co.uk and play.com, appear. These findings are almost exactly the same when “cds” and “games consoles” are searched for on google. Though with these last two searches hmv.com doesn’t even appear as a sponsored link.

When searching with various other engines, yahoo and ask.com, hmv appears again as a sponsored link but is not returned as a result in the 1st three pages. This prob doesnt effect hmv.com too much as they are sponsoring their links but if for some reason this was prevetned they would struggle to be recognised a head of their competitors when customers are searching for general goods which aren’t exclusive to hmv.

week 7

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is becoming the next big thing for smaller businesses who are expanding at a high rate. There are three basic layers to cloud computing, Application, Platform and Infrastructure. Companies use these layers differently to suit their needs.

Infrastructure is the foundation layer of cloud computing. This is where things start and companies begin to build their web site. Cloud hosting is contained within the infrastructure layer. Usually a business would create their web site and have it hosted on a dedicated server. A few people use the website to begin with and then word spreads and more and more people begin to use the site. Now the website has become successful but customers may start to get frustrated as the sheer volume of users will slow the service down as the equipment can’t cope with the demand. This means that the company has to buy or rent more servers and set them up or get someone else to set them up which costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time. Cloud computing aims to solve this problem. With cloud computing you have access to computer power whenever you need it. If your site is hosted on a cloud server and more people start to visit it you may need more power dedicated to your site. Thanks to cloud computing you can scale up the amount of computing power you need from the cloud almost instantly. Having this at your disposal means you can keep you users happy with out them noticing a change. If your business starts to slow down and you find that you need less computer power, which will cost less, you can release servers back into the cloud. This reduces costs for the business since you only pay for the service you use. Cloud computing allows you to concentrate on building your business and not waste time and money worrying about your hardware.

Cloud computing has great potential with smaller businesses and e-commerce. Businesses selling products rather than providing a service may benefit more from cloud computing as they may find that business picks up and dies off around different seasons. Most commercial products will be more in demand in the run up to Christmas for instance. This may mean that a business will attract more sales from its website and this could mean more computing power may be needed. To buy/rent another server to cover this wouldn’t make sense or be cost effective and the increase in sales would have to be anticipated to give the business time to set up the new server. Cloud computing eliminates the need to anticipate a boom in sales as almost instantly the business can increase its computing power to the level needed. When the seasonal sale boom is over the extra power added can be released back into the cloud instantly so the business only has to pay for the power it needs to run the site efficiently. Also if there is no increase in sales then money won’t have been wasted buying or renting server power as with cloud computing the business only has to increase power if and when its needed.

Larger more established companies who have already spent a lot of money on their sites and servers over the years won’t be willing to throw all that time and money away to move to cloud computing as readily as smaller companies. Cloud computing controls all the hardware and equipment used for hosting a site. Big companies like to be in control and know everything that’s going on, so not being able to control the hardware and equipment may well be off putting to them as they could view it as a big risk leaving an aspect of their business in the hands of “strangers”.