Fiona Harte, The second last week of college
This week Fiona Harte came in to talk to us. She spoke about her experience in the field, as she worked on Palm’s Web-store.She spoke of her duties eg. creating loyal and satisfied customers and providing market intelligence to the Palm organisation. It’s also extremely important to keep up to date on data-protection & privacy Law. Accessibility is also key when managing an online store, you must make it usable for visually impaired, etc.
She told us about the biggest problems she encountered while running the online store, namely fraud, which is quite common as people try to “rip-off” businesses. The tell-tale signs of a fraudster is when the billing address and shipping address are different, or if the contact information is merely an email address.
Fiona spoke of marketing techniques also, search marketing is a good out there, while advertising social networking sites can be good to raise awareness but is not proven to generate sales. Marketing on sites such as YouTube has also proven effective recently, one case in particular is a perfect example as Blendtech a company that sells blenders made a series of short videos on YouTube that showed them blending various unusual objects such as iPods, etc. This quickly gained a following and resulted in the company launching a full-blown ad campaign.
Ok that’s enough about the guest lecturer, in other news this week we submitted the web dev assignment in which we created a form, also we are close to finishing the last multimedia assignment where we’re creating an interface in flash. We did the interviews in working in digital media this week too, they lasted 15 mins and we were interviewed by members of HR. A portion of the marks went for appearance and this resulted in suiting up in some cases but for the majority of us a shirt and tie did the job, we scrub up well if I do say so myself.
Ah that’s it for now I think will be back with more next week.
