Sharing business ideas

ELLA HÄRKÖNEN
ASSIGNMENT: WEEK 8-10

1. Participating in marketing

I find it to be rather clever for the companies to include customers to marketing process as well. It gives the customers the feeling of ownership for the company and costs absolutely nothing for the company.

A Turku based restaurant, Shamrock Cafe had a competition "create your own pizza" a while back. Customers could share their ideas of what kind of a pizza would be their absolute dreamy one. The restaurant picked their favorites and then people could vote on Facebook that which pizza sounded the most delicious to them. The winner's pizza was on the menu for a while. So simple yet so efficient! Pizza is this one type of food that I bet everyone loves and because most of us like to think ourselves as little geniuses when it comes to food, Shamrock Cafe gave an opportunity to share ideas (and probably "steal" some of them on the way!) and making customers feel like the winners. Bravo!

2. Twitter and companies

Twitter as many other social media tools are indeed powerful tools for companies or private people. Twitter's speciality is that one can only use 140 characters and so by the tweets are rather short. These days when people don't have "time" (I mean seriously, it's all about time management!) to read longer posts, is Twitter really handy. Twitter is free, it is fast and it is easy!

I followed Ellen DeGeneres for two weeks in Twitter and she totally makes me crack! She posts funny photos and texts and so by makes herself seem super funny. She obviously promotes her own TV show and I think that she is doing good job with it. She normally sticks out of political issues, except for gay-rights hence she is gay herself. For a celebrity or TV persona, it is rather normal to stay "Switzerland" on political aspects in a way of not upsetting anyone.

Her speciality is to photoshop herself in funny photos and she never is scared to make fun out of herself.
I wanted to follow a celebrity instead of a company (I mean, technically she IS a company, but nevertheless) because I wanted to see more personal interaction online. She has a great balance between sharing personal information that is still not too personal. I really enjoy her show and it was fun to follow her for these weeks!

3. Games

In all honesty, I have never heard of Second Life before and had to google it. That is why it comes really hard to comment the opportunities the game has in business life! I have never played any virtual games (oh wait a second! Does Sims count?) so my area of specialty does not lie in here. Anyway after googleing a bit, I noticed that indeed some companies use it very efficiently (oh gosh, does this mean I should learn how to use it too??) and can hereby be a tool in business as well.