INTERNET MARKETING PROJECT REPORT 2011

INTERNET MARKETING

Introduction
Internet marketing is one of the hottest subjects on the internet, with almost endless websites devoted to the subject. More and more people are realising that there is a lot of money to be made online through legitimate businesses, such as selling on Ebay, promoting affiliate products, and developing and selling your own products. The major attraction of internet marketing is that there are almost no barriers to entry. You don't need any substantial capital to set yourself up, as you would in the offline world. For example, you can immediately start selling unwanted household items on Ebay, or you could sign up as an affiliate for a company and start promoting their products on the numerous sources of free ads, such as free classified ads sites, safelists and traffic exchanges, and earn a commission for each sale. Most of the resources that you need to start making money online can be found cheaply, or indeed free in some cases. I recommend creating your own website if you want to increase your earning potential, but again this can be done cheaply if you are on a limited budget. Registering a domain name can cost less than $10, and the cost of web hosting varies, and although I recommend finding a quality web host, it is possible to find free web hosts that will host your site. To build your site, there are various free tools that will simplify the whole process by using simple, easy to understand editors, so this needn't be daunting either. A good way to get started is simply by creating your own blog, using a service like Blogger, for example, who will host your site on their server for free. As you can see it's obvious why internet marketing is now so popular, and will only continue to grow in the future. However, if you want to be successful marketing online there is a steep learning curve, and a lot of people simply give up after a few weeks because they haven't made any

money. It takes time to learn how to be successful. Experienced marketers have endless resources they can draw on, that will most likely have come from years of testing and researching. In the early stages of your internet marketing career there is a lot to learn, and you should absorb as much information as possible. Look for the more renowned internet marketers, and subscribe to their newsletters for ideas and tips. Also be sure to check out the Warrior Forum, which is frequented by some of the very best online marketers, who you can learn so much from. There are also numerous ebooks and websites devoted to the various aspects of internet marketing. There will come a time though when you have to take action. A lot of new potential marketers end up spending hundreds, if not thousands, on ebook after ebook, trying to learn as much as they possibly can, without actually devoting much time to doing it themselves, and learning as they go along. Don't get caught in this trap. It's very easy to do. I know because I did it myself to some extent when I first started out. If you don't make any sales straight away, don't panic. Just keep trying out different things and learning from your mistakes. No-one makes lots of money instantly with no experience. It takes time. One thing I would recommend highly is having an opt-in form on your front page, where visitors to your site can choose to receive emails from you. This way even if you are not making any sales at the present time, at least you are building up your mailing list, which many successful marketers claim is their most valuable asset. This will enable you to market your product to the same prospects in future emails, increasing the chances of making a sale.
How significant is Internet marketing to businesses? Today, the answer to this question varies dramatically according to who is answering. For companies such as electronics company Cisco, the answer is very significant Cisco sell $9 million worth of hardware using the Internet each day. For fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies such as Unilever the answer is insignificant the majority of their consumer sales will occur through traditional retail channels in response to promotional campaigns in traditional media. In 1998 advertising expenditure for Internet placed adverts was estimated at 8m, compared to 3 billion for TV and radio adverts.

Does, the relatively unimportance of the Internet to companies such as Unilever indicate that Internet marketing is of specialised interest only? We believe not, because the interesting question to ask is "how significant will Internet marketing be to businesses in the future; in 2, 5, or 10 years time?" This is the question many companies are asking themselves today, and is why it is important to understand this relatively new marketing phenomenon.

For example, Unilever is starting to use the Internet as part of brand building for its new products. In 1998 it launched its Mentadent toothpaste in the United States using traditional media campaigns and also offered samples in response to users clicking on an advert placed on health-related web sites. It received more than 40,000 requests for samples, far exceeding its expectations for this new medium. If businesses do not understand and start to apply the new marketing techniques and technology in this way, then they may not only miss an opportunity, but may even cease to exist.

The media portrayal of the Internet often suggests that it is merely an alternative for traditional advertising. In fact, the Internet can be readily applied to all aspects of marketing communications and can and will need to support the entire marketing process. As we move into the new millenium, organisations will use Internet technology in the form of intranets and extranets to support the operation of the internal and external value chains.

This book will cover all the different ways in which the Internet can be used to support the marketing process. Many organisations have begun this process with the development of web sites in the form of electronic brochures introducing their organisations products and services, but are now enhancing them to add value to the full range of marketing functions.

When reading this book, we would encourage a healthy cynicism in the reader; to adopt a questioning approach. When referring to the case studies and

estimates of growth, ask what are the tangible benefits that have been delivered and what are the growth estimates are based on? Remember, also that for every success story, there may be unrecorded instances of companies failing to deliver the foreseen benefits. The case study INTERNET: Europe sales 'could top $1,990bn' highlights the reasons for growth in Internet sales to both other businesses and consumers and describes some of the barriers which make estimation of the level of sales difficult.

The Internet and the marketing concept

The word marketing has two distinct meanings in terms of modern management practice. It describes: 1. The range of specialist marketing functions carried out within many organisations. Such functions include market research, brand/product management, public relations, and customer service. 2. An approach or concept that can be used as the guiding philosophy for all functions and activities of an organisation. Such a philosophy encompasses all aspects of a business. Business strategy is guided by an organisations market and competitor focus and everyone in an organisation should be required to have a customer focus in their job. The modern marketing concept unites these two meanings and stresses that marketing encompasses the range of organisational functions and processes that deliver products and services to customers and other key stakeholders such as employees and financial institutions. Increasingly the importance of marketing is being recognised both as a vital function and a guiding management philosophy within organisations. Marketing has to be seen as the essential focus of all activities within a organisation.

The marketing concept should lie at the heart of the organisation, and the actions of directors, managers and employees guided by its philosophy.

Modern marketing requires organisations to be committed to a market /customer orientation. All parts of the organisation should co-ordinate activities to ensure that customer needs are met efficiently, effectively and profitably. Marketing encompasses activities traditionally seen as the sole domain of accountants, production, HRM and information technology. Many of these functions had little regard for customer considerations. Increasingly such functions are being re-orientated, evidenced by the importance of initiatives such as Total Quality Management, (TQM), Business Process Reengineering, Just in Time (JIT) and supply chain management. Individuals functional roles are undergoing change from functional to a greater emphasis on process. As such they are being encouraged to become part time marketers. Processes have a significant impact on an organisations ability to service its customers needs.

The Internet can be applied by companies as an integral part of the modern marketing concept since:

it can be used to support the full range of organisational functions and processes that deliver products and services to customers and other key stakeholders as a communications medium it can act as a corporate glue that can integrate the different functional parts of the organisation it facilitates information management which is now increasingly recognised as a critical marketing support tool the future role of the Internet should form part of the vision of a company since its future impact will be significant to most businesses.

Without adequate information, organisations are at a disadvantage with respect to competitors and the external environment. Up to date, timely and accessible information about the industry, markets, new technology, competitors and customers are a critical factor in an organisations ability to plan and compete in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

What business benefits can the Internet provide?

The case study INTERNET: Europe sales 'could top $1,990bn' highlights the key reason why many companies are seeking to harness the Internet. The reason is an additional source of revenue made possible by an alternative marketing and distribution channel. The marketing opportunities of using the

Internet are indicated by the traditional marketing strategic grid for targeting new markets and products (Figure 1-1). The Internet can be used to achieve each of the four strategic directions as follows:

1. Market penetration. The Internet can be used to sell more existing products into existing markets. This can be achieved by using the power of the Internet for advertising products to increase awareness of products and the profile of a company amongst potential customers in an existing market. 2. Market development. Here the Internet is used to sell into new markets, taking advantage of the low cost of advertising internationally without the necessity for a supporting sales infrastructure in the customers country. 3. Product development. New products are developed which can be delivered by the Internet. These would typically be information products such as market reports which can be purchased using electronic commerce. 4. Diversification. In this sector, new products are developed which are sold into new markets.

The Internet and other new media The generic term new media is widely used to distinguish between the traditional delivery of information to consumers and digital or electronic methods of delivering this information. The Internet is only one of the new media. Other significant types of new media include digital television, CDROM and information kiosks. In this book we focus on the Internet and World Wide Web. Note that there is a consolidation of the way in which these new media are delivered with the potential for all these information sources to be accessed via a world wide web browser. Initiating communication with customers

<Web site promotion> The location of web sites is promoted by using online promotion methods such as advertising or listing in electronic catalogues and offline promotion methods which involve publicising a company web address in traditional marketing communications.

A notable difficulty for web marketers indicated by Table 1-1 is that it is difficult for potential customers to find a company web site. It is estimated that there are over 100 million web pages amongst which a company is competing for the attention of customers. It follows that promoting the location of the web site is critical for companies. There are two methods for this. First, offline promotion is used to provide users with the web address. This can be achieved by including the web address on traditional advertising newsletters, company stationery and other marketing communications. Second, online promotion is used to help users find the web site. Online promotion targets a number of methods which are summarized in

Alternative methods of customers visiting a corporate web site

Staff monitoring web sites find that the most common method of people visiting a web site are search engines or directories, so it is important that each company is listed with such directories. Search engines and directories that are now commonly referred to as portals or Internet gateways are described in more detail in Chapter 4. Many larger companies now place adverts with news services, search engines or other widely used sites to attract customers to their sites.

Sites are also reached by users typing in the location or web address of the site which they will be aware of through offline promotion methods. A web address such as http://www.ftmanagement.com is technically referred to as a URL or universal resource locator. The format of web addresses are described in Chapter 3.

A detailed coverage of how to promote web sites is supplied in Chapter 10.

<Search engines> Search engines are a special type of web site that provide an index of all words stored on the World Wide Web. Keywords typed in by the end-user are matched against the index and the user is given a list of all corresponding web pages containing the keywords. By clicking on a hyperlink the user is taken to the relevant web page.

<Web directories or catalogues> Web directory sites provide a structured listing of web sites. They are grouped according to categories such as business, entertainment or sport. Each category is then sub-divided further, for example into football, rugby, swimming.

Advertising

Since the Internet is a new medium, marketing staff are still undergoing a learning curve in terms of exploiting its full potential and integrating it with their offline promotional activities. Essentially, users have the choice of two options for advertising on the web. The first is to set up a web site and through this communicate key messages, images and buying information to the web site visitor. Such sites can incorporate interactive activity and sounds. The second option is to use banner ads which can increase brand recognition and communicate / reinforce brand values as well as providing a link to the web site. Banner ads can be placed against reserved key words on search engines (entering the search keyword "car", for example might display a banner advert for the Avensis") or can be placed on media sites with more tightly defined niche audiences. Banner ads are relatively unsophisticated and do no more than provide exposure to a message. The banners can provide opportunities for interaction and provision of further information Additional messaging can be contained on the advertisers own web site. While some Internet advertising is fairly primitive compared with other media, many have good creative execution and are integrated fully with their off line campaigns. For maximum impact, adverts on the web should be researched and planned as carefully as on any other medium. When combined with a promotion, the proportion of people clicking on the page (the click through rate) may increase from 2% to 10%. The latter figure has been achieved by when combined with a discount offer or competition.

<Banner advertisements ads> A rectangular area of screen which promotes a brand and/or encourages the user to click on it and visit the relevant web site.

Sales promotion

The Internet provides marketers with an excellent channel through which to communicate sales promotions. Capital Radio in conjunction with Nestle launched a telephone response promotion targeted at children revising for their

GCSEs offering revision tips and a guaranteed answer within 24 hours to E mailed queries. They received 10,000 phone calls per week over the two weeks that the promotion ran. However on further investigation they discovered that they didnt answer 90,000 calls per week which proved to be an irritant to the caller and potentially detrimental to the brand. Capital put the information on the web and announced the new service on air. 3,500 people downloaded the revision tips and a further 1000 entered a competition which required filling in a lengthy data capture form. Sales promotions that allow users to accumulate some kind of reward (possibly financial) for each time they interact with a company on the Internet is one promotional strategy used to build longer term loyalty. Similarly the inclusion of gifts such as mugs and pens or other collectables can easily be incorporated onto a web site. Such examples demonstrate the power of the Internet to act as a channel for communicating sales promotion offers.

Public Relations
Public Relations activity on the web offers organisations scope for corporate communications, sponsorship, publicity and a direct vehicle for communicating press releases. The Internet provides scope for two way interaction, clear targeting of key opinion formers and journalists and the potential for communicating strong corporate brand messages. Several PR agencies are investigating the potential for organisations to further exploit the potential for electronic Public Relations.

The Internet can be used to facilitate traditional methods of public relations. It can also be used to expand the depth and breadth of PR.

Most press agencies now use the Internet as a primary source of information. Press releases can be sent by E-mail to agencies you are registered with and also made available on your web site.

With this new method of PR, a key difference is that a company can talk direct to the market via the corporate web site. Third party agencies and physical

media still have a role, because of their credibility as an independent source of information and their wider circulation. Agency information can be supplemented by more detailed and timely information direct from the corporate web site. Another difference with the new PR is that traditional weekly and monthly publishing deadlines disappear as new stories appear by the minute. This has the obvious benefit that you can make an immediate impact and be better aware of the changing marketing environment. The obvious problem of the new PR is that your competitors have these advantages too. So it is likely that there will be an increased need for defensive PR.

Direct marketing
Direct marketing is currently one of the fastest growing fields of marketing. The techniques it utilises can be spread across all the elements of the promotional mix. The following extract clearly identifies the purpose and scope of direct marketing. Direct marketing on the Internet offers significant potential for customisation of products and services and personalising a message. The utilisation of databases and the interactivity of the Internet enable organisations to engage in one to one dialogue. As indicated above, the real benefit of direct marketing is its potential to use data to develop relevant dialogue and relationships with consumers. The Internet is currently not fulfilling its potential in this area with users of the Internet, but we will look at some examples of companies exploiting the potential for relationship marketing activity.

Electronic commerce
Electronic commerce has become the standard term recognised for business transactions conducted on the Internet. It is a term that encompasses a range of business activities such as selling online, online bill payments, home shopping/banking and improving efficiency in dealings with suppliers and clients (Hoffman and Novak, 1996). Some authors such as Zwass(1998) extend the meaning of electronic commerce to incorporate all marketing communications. For clarity, in this book, a narrower definition is used : electronic commerce is used to refer to paid-for business transactions.

The adoption of Internet commerce is currently variable according to the suitability of a product for online sales. In some sectors, the Internet is fast becoming the primary medium for products sales. By the end of 1997, Cisco, a supplier of network infrastructure, had achieved daily Internet based sales of $7 million (39% of sales). The computer manufacturer Dell now sells $6 million of Personal Computers via its web site each day. Both of these companies expect over half of their revenue to be derived from the Internet before the millenium.

In other sectors, the Internet is also becoming a preferred method of purchase. The Microsoft Expedia site sells holidays and flights worth over a million dollars each day. Amazon, the largest Internet bookshop saw revenue grow by over 800% between 1996 and 1997 to a total of $239 million. Figure 1-5 indicates the variation in popularity of products purchased using the Internet. Taken across a number of sectors the impact of the Internet becomes significant;. Business-to-business transactions were estimated to reach $160 billion by the year 2000 in The Economist of May 1997.

Electronic commerce has implications for existing channels of distribution regarding the logistics involved in delivery of products and services, how products and services are ordered, taxed and paid for. For consumers, a significant benefit of online shopping is that it provides access to a global marketplace of online shopping sites.

Proportion of goods purchased online in Europe. Source KPMG. 1998.

A concern over security of transactions is one barrier which will need to be overcome before wider consumer use of electronic commerce. Organisations such as Mastercard and Visa are working with other partners to develop a Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) standard for securing payment card transactions over the Internet. These issues, which will govern the adoption of electronic commerce are investigated further in Chapter 12. In Chapters 14 and

15, examples are provided of how electronic commerce has been used in the business-to-business and business-to-consumer market.

Services marketing
The Internet provides both a communication and distribution channel for the provision of faster and more effective service delivery. Access to organisation resources and information, the interactive nature of the Internet and the linkage of Internet technology to other information technology hardware provide a wide range of opportunities for marketers to improve the service delivery process. An example of improved service delivery via the Internet is shown when the Royal Mail launched a web site which provides rapid access to information such as different types of postal services and a postal rates calculator where you can enter your packages weight and its destination to find out how much it will cost to send the package using each service. Users can request further information by entering their E mail and postal address. Legal and General was one of the first UK insurers to set up a web page site. Now it has added a package of on line financial products and services (Interplan) and plans an extranet for its representatives and agents. Account holders are able to access their accounts on the web site, make lump sum payments and increase/decrease monthly payments and withdraw any reserves. The company hopes to persuade more customers to link into Interplan to perform basic customer service such as notify changes of address. The potential to develop improved customer service online can provide customers with significant added value. Federal Express has developed a site that is not directly designed for revenue generation but rather for convenience and cost saving to its customers. The company provides a tracker service for every parcel it transports and this service has now been included on its web site (Figure 1-6). Customers can now communicate on line and identify exactly where their parcel is at any time. The service whilst being efficient has also substantially reduced the number of phone calls that Federal express received. Most organisations can introduce customer care lines and customer information facilities that can easily be placed on line. Cost savings, ease of access and immediacy of response are three potential benefits offered from improving online customer service.

Figure 6 Customer service Internet parcel tracking application from Federal Express

Summary
1. The growth in use of the Internet for marketing has been dramatic since the inception of world wide web browsers in the early 1990s. KPMG estimated in 1998 that the European electronic commerce market would be worth nearly $2,000 billion by 2001. 2. The Internet is used to develop existing markets through enabling an additional communications channel with potential customers. It can be used to develop new international markets with a reduced need for new sales offices and agents. Companies can also add new products using the Internet. 3. The Internet can support the full range of marketing functions and in doing so can help reduce costs, facilitate communication within and between organisations and improve customer service. 4. Interaction with customers, suppliers and distributors occurs across the Internet. If access is restricted to favoured third parties this is known as an

extranet. If Internet technologies are used to facilitate internal company communications this is known as an intranet a private company Internet. 5. Internet marketing involves a different demographic profile to the general population since it is largely restricted to computer users. The profile is skewed towards young, high-income males. Internet marketing also differs in that the customer is seeking information and it is possible to set-up interactive dialogues with customers that are tailored to the customers preferences. 6. It is important for marketers to understand how visitors are likely to become aware of their web-site. Online and offline promotion techniques can then be used to capture new visitors using these methods that include:

search engines directories banner adverts placed in online media links from other sites typing in a web address (URL)

7. Many companies do not possess a clearly defined Internet marketing strategy. It is important that the strategy is integrated with the marketing strategy and includes clearly defined objectives, scope, branding, promotion methods and legal/technical constraints. 8. Electronic commerce is the term used to describe transactions between a business and third parties such as customers, suppliers and distributors. Transactions can include paid for items or can be interpreted as the full range of transactions that occur as part of marketing communications. 9. The marketing benefits the Internet confers are advantageous both to the large corporation and the small-medium enterprise. These include:

a new medium for advertising and PR a new channel for distributing products opportunities for expansion into new markets new ways of enhancing customer service new ways of reducing costs by reducing the number of staff in order fulfilment

Case Study eBay Online shopping website

About eBay

eBay is The World's Online Marketplace, enabling trade on a local, national and international basis. With a diverse and passionate community of individuals and small businesses, eBay offers an online platform where millions of items are traded each day

Price

When you think about selling on e-Bay, one of the last things that usually come to mindis pricing strategies. After all, e-Bay is an auction site. You list your item and wait forcompetitive bidding to drive the price up. Unfortunately, its not that simple.Pricing the items you sell on e-Bay is an important part of the selling process, even on e-Bay. Many sellers dont give pricing too much consideration and their auctions usually show it. People are looking for bargains, especially on e-Bay. They will bid only on items wherethey see a value for the price they are willing to pay. Naturally sellers are concernedabout getting a fair price, too. Often, they have money invested in the item they are tryingto sell. They cant go below a certain price or they risk losing money.So, how do pricing strategies work on e-Bay? There are essentially three types of pricing you need to be concerned with: Starting bid Reserve price Buy-It-Now price Each of these methods has important factors to consider Benefits of eBay Malls and department stores are not the only ones reaping profits over wholesale and retail sales nowadays. While some of these stores have online versions where people can browse through their catalogs and make their purchases over the internet, there is one online shopping site that offers a whole range of items from multiple vendors. eBay is the one-stop-shop for millions of Americans doing their shopping online. One of the greatest benefits is the wealth of inventory it has on its pages. Pages after pages of listings of various items are available for the online shopper. It is almost guaranteed that whatever item you are looking for, it is available on here. Common items like clothing, furnishings and gift items are plentiful as well as odd ones like celebrity memorabilia and rare collectibles. There are unlimited products that you can choose from on. No need to go through

racks or shelves, all you have to do is to type in your desired item in the search box. Another benefit of shopping on eBay is the affordability and convenience of it all. Since it is an auction site, it allows you to purchase items listed on their pages for the amount that you are willing to spend for that particular item. If the closing price is way beyond your means, then someone else with a higher bid is more likely to end up with it. You are not forced to make the purchase nor derailed in sticking to your budget. As there is a huge amount of items on sale on eBay, there are also a lot of vendors selling their wares. You get to choose from which vendor you want to buy your item from. No more tiresome and time consuming rack combing or shop hopping in the mall. You can also choose to deal with the vendor that gives the best deal. It is important, though, that you check out the specifications of the product being offered to make sure that it is exactly what you are looking for. Also check for other fees and charges you may have to pay. It is a bummer to win a bid on an item only to find out that you will be charged horrendous fees for shipping and handling or that your item will not be shipped for quite some time for one reason or another. Make sure you are dealing with a reputable seller by checking out each seller's feedback. eBay is user-friendly. All you have to do to make a transaction on eBay is to go through a one-time registration process absolutely free of charge. The private registration page asks you for basic information like name, address and telephone number plus a number of user identity verification data such as desired user name, password, and a security question and its corresponding answer. An email confirmation will be sent to you with a link to confirm your membership. Once your membership is confirmed, you can make any number of bids for as many items you wish to buy. Shopping on eBay is convenient, budget-friendly and practical. For the best deals on the internet, try the ultimate online shopping site eBay.

About Google
1. Introduction
The web creates new challenges for information retrieval. The amount of information on the web is growing rapidly, as well as the number of new users inexperienced in the art of web research. People are likely to surf the web using its link graph, often starting with high quality human maintained indices such as Yahoo! or with search engines. Human maintained lists cover popular topics effectively but are subjective, expensive to build and maintain, slow to improve, and cannot cover all esoteric topics. Automated search engines that rely on keyword matching usually return too many low quality matches. To make matters worse, some advertisers attempt to gain peoples attention by taking measures meant to

mislead automated search engines. We have built a large-scale search engine which addresses many of the problems of existing systems. It makes especially heavy use of the additional structure present in hypertext to provide much higher quality search results. We chose our system name, Google, because it is a

common spelling of googol, or 10100 and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines.
1.1 Web Search Engines -- Scaling Up: 1994 2000

Search engine technology has had to scale dramatically to keep up with the growth of the web. In 1994, one of the first web search engines, the World Wide Web Worm (WWWW) [Mc Bryan 94] had an index of 110,000 web pages and web accessible documents. As of November, 1997, the top search engines claim to index from 2 million (WebCrawler) to 100 million web documents (from Search Engine Watch). It is foreseeable that by the year 2000, a comprehensive index of the Web will contain over a billion documents. At the same time, the number of queries search engines handle has grown incredibly too. In March and April 1994, the World Wide Web Worm received an average of about 1500 queries per day. In November 1997, Altavista claimed it handled roughly 20 million queries per day. With the increasing number of users on the web, and automated systems which query search engines, it is likely that top search engines will handle hundreds of millions of queries per day by the year 2000. The goal of our system is to address many of the problems, both in quality and scalability, introduced by scaling search engine technology to such extraordinary numbers. 1.2. Google: Scaling with the Web Creating a search engine which scales even to todays web presents many challenges. Fast crawling technology is needed to gather the web documents and keep them up to date. Storage space must be used efficiently to store indices and, optionally, the documents themselves. The indexing system must process hundreds of gigabytes of data efficiently. Queries must be handled quickly, at a rate of hundreds to thousands per second. These tasks are becoming increasingly difficult as the Web grows. However, hardware performance and cost have improved dramatically to partially offset the difficulty. There are, however, several notable exceptions to this progress such as disk seek time and operating system robustness. In designing Google, we have considered both the rate of growth of the Web and technological

changes. Google is designed to scale well to extremely large data sets. It makes efficient use of storage space to store the index. Its data structures are optimized for fast and efficient access (see section 4.2). Further, we expect that the cost to index and store text or HTML will eventually decline relative to the amount that will be available (see Appendix B). This will result in favorable scaling properties for centralized systems like Google.

About Facebook
Facebook is a social networking website, very popular among college students. It was originally developed for university students, faculty and staff, but has since expanded to include everyone, including high school, corporate and geographic communities. The name of the site is based on the paper facebooks that colleges give to incoming students, faculty, and staff depicting members of the campus community.

Facebook Encourages Writing On the Wall

Facebook, Inc., an Internet social networking site incorporating all that is good in individuality and the connection of a global society, stands out from other similar sites in its many innovative applications. One of which is "The Wall."

Facebook users are allowed to comment on each other's "walls," a space in your profile for friends to post greetings, thoughts, ideas, and general comments. Much like text messaging on cell phones, The Wall offers a place for people to connect without spending lots of time conversing. With the climbing popularity of video-posting sites like YouTube, the Facebook team lent their efforts towards keeping up with the rapidly changing electronic era and opened posting avenues by allowing members to record videos to post, attach links including the embedded video itself, send photos and fortunes (another application), etc. Keep in mind, you can only attach applications that you or the friend whose wall you are writing on has. One of the first updates Facebook made to The Wall was building a typing space into The Wall itself so members no longer needed to travel from one page to another to post a comment, something other sites still do. This change saves time and frustration for members with slower connections. Don't want The Wall? Simple! Users can choose to delete their wall or edit to whom it is visible to by going to the Profile section of the Privacy page. When a member posts on a friend's wall, that post may be made visible to people in his or his friends' networks through the Mini-Feed on the homepage. You can also see others' wall posts through the Wall-to-Wall application, which lets you to view wall posts between two people whose privacy settings normally allow you to see their walls. All information regarding The Wall can be found on the Facebook help page, which makes it all even easier and convenient. So forget what your mother said when you were a child because writing on walls has a whole new meaning.

History of Facebook

The site was founded as the facebook in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University with financial help from Eduardo Saverin. Within a few weeks, over half the Harvard undergraduate population had registered. By the end of February, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes had joined Zuckerberg to spread the website. Within two months, Facebook

expanded to the rest of the Ivy League and a few other schools. By December 2004, the number of registered users exceeded one million. As the website's popularity rose and advertising revenue grew, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz left Harvard to run Facebook fulltime, while Hughes remained at Harvard to work as the site's spokesperson. Zuckerberg and Moskovitz moved to Palo Alto in June 2004, established an office and hired a staff of eight, including Sean Parker, Matt Cohler, and James Pereira. Stories about Facebook became commonplace in online and print media. Simultaneously, several competitor sites appeared attempting to capture some of the limelight. While at Harvard, Zuckerberg's project competed with a student portal by Aaron Greenspan known as houseSYSTEM, whose Universal Face Book was launched in October, 2003, before Facebook existed. [6]. Greenspan would later fold houseSYSTEM into a new product, CommonRoom. In late 2004, the owners of the website ConnectU (Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss), another social networking website targeted towards college students, filed a lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that Zuckerberg had stolen source code intended for their website while in their employ [7][8]. Wikinews Wikinews has news related to this article: Facebook's funding In September 2004, Facebook received around $500,000 from PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel in an angel round. In May 2005, Facebook raised $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners [9] . In late August 2005, it was announced on the main website that the domain name facebook.com was acquired from Aboutface Corporation, and the website moved domains and dropped the "the" from the site name effective August 23, 2005. The purchase price for the domain name was $200,000 according to people familiar with this deal[citation needed]. Also included in the move was a site overhaul, making profile pages more "user-friendly", according to Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg has since added more universities to Facebook (with an emphasis on forgotten schools in Canada as well as in the United States), but unlike in the past, the new sc

About facebook

So too can social networking sites offer these same types of benefits. You connect with your friends already, why not stay in front of them in a business capacity? Use the powerful tools within networking sites to explain what you do to friends and family, to keep them abreast of the latest trends and technologies in your own industry. Facebook in particular offers great group features. Facebook allows you to create a group about whatever topic or topics you want. Most recently I've created the Web Design and Programming group and invited many classmates, friends, even teachers into the group where I hope to discuss problems and topics in web design or programming, offer help, build an online community for everyone. In creating such a group I have created value for the individuals that are apart of the group, I have connected with a number of like-minded, skilled, potential sales people, and finally it is a network of valuable talent, resources and skills that I can tap into later, perhaps as employees or referral sources. Harnessing the power of Web 2.0 doesn't necessarily mean you have to spend copious amounts of money on web ads. Instead, I've found tremendous value in molding the connection features offered by these social networking sites into my own business. Do you have a unique (guerilla) marketing technique that harnesses the power of Web 2.0 or uses a commonplace feature of a favorite website to drive sales and traffic? Zachary Katkin is the founder of Naples Web Design Firm, Unique ID Web Design. Zach can be contacted via the company's web site. You can read Zach Katkin's personal blog, theNapkin for more information on running and marketing a small business online