This quarter, I learned a lot about blogging and the necessities. I learned that blogging really has to be your own opinion on the topic being discussed. It can not be something that you know nothing about because then you can’t educate your reader. It also has to be a  topic you know a lot on. If you blog about something or write something that you, yourself, are not clear and understanding on, it makes zero sense.

My biggest challenge this quarter was finding time to really sit down and put effort into my blog posts, finding something I would love to discuss was hard as well. If it were a free write blog postings, I’d write a lot more and put effort and energy into it.

Something that would be useful in the future that I have learned from blogging is the skill of typing and learning bigger words to make it sound more classy. I find that many people cannot type an essay well or even know the difference between there, their, and they’re and that hurts me to read because I do know the difference. Those people, I feel, can take away proper spellings from blogging as well.

I had a great time in this class and I learned so much and I am really excited to put everything I learned towards my future learnings. Thank you so much!

Graphic Designer for Express

Express is a clothing store that meets many people’s needs. Party, work clothes, casual, and everything in between. For Express, I would love to reinvent their website and make it more stylish to live up to the brand. A graphic designer would be responsible for creating graphic elements and implementing navigation components.

What do Graphic Designers do exactly?

As explained above, they create the website and the favorable components to implement a larger fan base. To be a graphic designer, you must meet the requirements of having prior experience in the graphic designer area. You also need a very colorful portfolio of previous websites you have created. In addition, you must have good time management skills and knowledge in wireframe tools. Above all, the requirements for schooling and education would be a bachelors in computer science, design, or any related field of study.

This is something I would be interested in because I love websites and knowing how everything is put together, how it all functions. I have previous knowledge from a class I took last semester and believe I can embed those learnings; However, the hardest part of getting a job that requires prior experience is finding that one job that will give you a shot and become your experience.

How much do they make?

On average, as a junior graphic designer, you would start out making $50,000-$70,000 a year. On the otherhand, as a senior graphic designer with 10 years of experience, you can make up to $185,000 a year.

I agree with him when he says that when we are young, we have dreams and passions but that those get crushed, we are told we don’t study enough or hard enough. People want to get us a tutor in what we suck at and I understand why. However, you crush kids by not focusing on what they are really good at and strengthening those. I believe it is important to strengthen things you are already good at rather than try and strengthen things we already are not strong in because they are just not our things and what we are interested in.

Schools put ideas in our heads to be lawyers and doctors and accountants but why can’t we do something we are really good at rather than working 50x harder in something that we just are not going to understand? I really liked this weeks ted talk because of how much it makes you think.

I was raised by parents who wanted to force me to be a firefighter, force me to go to college. The issue with that is that when you push something on your kids, they don’t want to do it. I wanted to be a sign language interpreter and coming out of high school, I already had 4 years of classes under my belt. I am fluent and that is something I want to do. However, I am getting pushed to go to college simply to get a small AA Degree.

I think my mom finally realized that I don’t need it and all college will do after my AA is put me in debt with student loans. She is not pushing me to become an entrepreneurial and I’m excited to see where it takes me.

As a customer at Express, it was super easy for me to turn into a loyal customer because their E CRM and face to face customer service was exceptional. They always came to check on me as well as gave me smiles and answered any and all questions I had. If I was in a fitting room and needed a different size, I would not have to leave as they would go and get it for me.

On my first visit, I signed up for emails from Express as well as their credit card. I felt special from these because when my birthday rolled around, Express personally emailed me a $45 off reward. I think this is a great idea to boost their E CRM and customer loyalty because they are frequently sending me emailed alerts as well as alerting me that I have rewards.

It was super easy for me to turn into an employee for them because I wanted to be a positive aspect for Express like they were for me. Their customer service can also expand to online when you are face to face. Let us say that you are in the store and you see something that is to die for and you must absolutely have it but that particular store does not have your size. 😦 While you are in the store, we can order it online for you as well as ship it right to your door for free! If you needed it that very day, we could also see which stores have it and call a nearby Express and have them put it on hold for you. Overall, Express has amazing E CRM as well as great customer service face to face.

From the article, I read that people least mind tv advertisements rather than any other one. There are a few side notes with this, however because people do not want to be yelled at through their commercials. People also do not like how often ads show up while they are online or watching shows. As one person said, “I would like the marketing of companies to stop invading every aspect of my life. I would like to avoid some advertising when using the internet or watching TV. I’m okay with some advertising sometimes, but there are times when they become annoying seeing the same thing over and over” (Marketing Sherpa online). I would see how this person would be annoyed with the amount of advertisements that pop up on their screen especially when it is the same ads over and over. What tends to happen is people get irritated with how many commercials and advertisements show up and they veer away from that channel or that screen to avoid them. Sometimes, they do not even return to that particular screen or channel because of how annoying the advertisements were.

To make the advertisements more valuable for Express and have people less likely to veer away from them, I would make the commercials more vibrant and have the perfect mix of sound and length. Making sure that the sound on the advertisement is not too loud is very important because when they are too loud, the customers change the channel. The same happens for when the length of said ad is too long. It has to be bold and interesting to hold the consumers attention. I may one day relay these thoughts to Express to help improve the company.

Express has many competitors that they must worry about. There are two in particular that get attention stolen most frequently; they include https://www.abercrombie.com and https://www.ae.com . Looking at these two stores sites, I understand why they are competition for Express. Abercrombie and Fitch is an edgy store whose site is clean and precise as well as super easily function-able. The site is fun and satisfying the the eye as well as very organized in terms of the proportion between pictures and words. There are not too many pictures without explanation and there are not too many words to drown out any pictures.

American Eagle is most likely a highly competitive store with anyone. They sell underwear which can be competitive to Victoria’s Secret. To me, their website seems the best  out of all three companies. I believe this because their website gives pictures with words and those words have a straight shot to that description. The site is clean, well thought out, and can be maneuvered without any trouble. I enjoy Abercrombie and Fitch’s website because the sites white space is filled with pictures, making it way less harsh on the eyes from the lack of white and easier to look at for longer periods of time.

If a site is easier to look at, it is common sense that that website also gets more clothes bought online. Express has a similar setup so I wouldn’t doubt that these two companies are competitors to Express.

In the video, he talked about a movement where people didn’t want to see whales getting killed so they decided to put trackers on these whales and name them. One whale in particular, they named Mister Splashy Pants. Now Mister Splashy Pants got a lot of love and attention simply because of his name. He got voted up on reddit and the attention in the beginning of the movement only reached about 5%. After Mister Splashy Pants made a splash on other social medias, it boosted up to 70%. This was interesting to me because it just took one corny name to build a quick fanbase and bring attention to something. There were Facebook groups being created because people wanted Mister Splashy Pants to win this poll on best name (which he did). After the poll and voting was all done, the group of people who actually started all of this went on to make merchandise around Mister Splashy Pants. Of course people will buy it because it is a cute whale with a funny, corny name.

The best part of the whole thing was the expedition to kill whales was cancelled because of all of the attention that Mister Splashy Pants drew. He has many people on his back and many people wanted to see him live and if the expedition was to go on, I believe that would have really been an end to the company that wanted to do it in the first place.

Author’s name: Alexis Ohanian

URL: https://www.ted.com/talks/alexis_ohanian_how_to_make_a_splash_in_social_media

Date accessed: October 21, 2018

The most interesting and surprising detail i found from this site was that teens from lower-income households use Facebook more than teens from higher-income households. It’s interesting because I didn’t know that was a thing, I just thought anybody used it and that there wasn’t really a comparison to be made. In the article, they also said that Facebook was no longer a ‘dominant’ social media platform. It is not Facebook, nor SnapChat, nor Instagram, nor Twitter. It is YouTube. It makes sense to me though that it’s Youtube because a lot of teens are making and uploading videos now that they know there is money involved. This generation has got to be the most lazy so when they hear that you can make money simply by posting quality videos, obviously they are going to try to achieve that because it is easy.

There is also a majority of teens who say that social media has a positive effect on their lives. 45% neither agree or disagree that it is positive or negative, and 24% say it has a negative impact. This day and age, social media is prone to some sort of cyberbullying. The 31% who said social media has a positive effect are most likely the popular, high-income household teens who may do some cyberbullying or spend all of their time on social media. The 24% of teens who say it is negative to our lives are most likely the teens who don’t explore social media a lot or are cyberbullied themselves. I’ve seen it happen. And I believe the 45% who say it has no effect just go about their lives without social media really effecting any aspect of them.

I really enjoyed this article and I think it was an eye-opener.

 

Article by Monica Anderson and Jingjing Jiang posted May 31, 2018

Date accessed October 12, 2018

 

My new business would use the subscription model. The business I believe would be great for everyone is combining all year 2000 video games and putting them into one subscribe-friendly application. My application would be enjoyable for men and women who played video games in the 2000’s as well as kids nowadays because they would get to enjoy and play all of these old games that everyone forgot about.

I can share my business idea on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter where I have friends who support me. I can make flyers and hang them around my college campus so that people my age or older are able to see it and maybe even search it. I can also create a website and describe, maybe list, all of the video games I plan on putting into this application. Being that it would be using the subscribe model, it makes it more appealing because if they end up not enjoying it, they can unsubscribe.

For the Tiki Beach 5K and 10K, a few ways it can be promoted and accumulate interested people are as follows.

Think. What do people like? What gets people interested in events? Maybe a raffle for money. Or it could be as simple as a competition to see who wears the best outfit/costume. Money gets everyone excited and out of their chair but if it’s also fun, like showing up in a costume and running in it while laughing and joking around with friends, there’s no way people can resist.

Where do people go to find their information? Almost everyone nowadays goes to the internet or social media to get the news. A great way to get people to come to your event can be posting about it, tagging pictures, using a hashtag! It’s simple. Those who see it and are interested or know others who are will tag them in it and generate interest in the event.

My final good idea for marketing this event would be to allow pets to run with you. Most people can’t or won’t go places because they cannot bring their pet. It makes sense. Advertising that your furry friends can run right next to you with water bowls set up along the course would be an attention getter to everyone. I know for a fact that if there was an event I was interested in but was on the fence about it because I wouldn’t know what to do with my doggos, I most likely wouldn’t go. Bringing your fuzzies generates pictures with the hashtag which generates interest for the next one.

Happy Running!