1. Connecting: William Foster and how I connect through the web

I like to blog and contribute to items I find of particular interest. I am currently looking for a marketing or pr internship and am about to be fresh out of college.

2. Follow, add, friend: williammfoster

Follow me on my blog at williammfoster, or simply google my name. I will friend you on Facebook or the like if I can verify who you are over the web at least.

3. Privacy, boundaries, and saftey: [The golden rule applies here]

Please don’t write any nasty comments on my blog, Facebook wall, etc. You won’t ever see me use vulgar language and I would expect you to do the same. Lets keep it classy people. Please be mindful that I am looking for job opportunities and something writen about me in an untrue or negative light might affect my career!

4. Signal to noise: [Some times enough is enough]

Please don’t be repetative on any comments about my blog or such. And please don’t update your status every five minutes, its not really necessary.

5. Personal data and sharing: [Play it close to the chest]

I’d like to connect more with people in the marketing and pr field, I’d like to keep my name pretty professional on the web.

6. My network needs and uses: [Basically blogs and Facebook]

Currently my only presence through social media is Facebook and my blog posts, but I do occasionally use Twitter if you ever wish to follow me or are someone of interest let me know and I’ll follow you!

In the RSS Feeds link you can see a list of different RSS’s that you can subscribe to and view at your liesure. These range from movie trailers, to Mac OS X downloads, to news, developers, and you can even customize your own RSS feed through iTunes to give you just what you want. In the seminar section, you have to have an account set up to use the main feature of the site, but you can search for seminars coming near you. I think this should be available to everyone though. In the user groups section you can link up with different groups that have one thing in common, Apple. You can learn to become a member or leader in your area and access group news.

Overall I would say that Apple has a very good on-line newsroom, although you have to access it though the site map, which can be difficult if you don’t know where to look (its a the bottom right of the main site). I do believe they give all the information that mainstream people are looking for, and even the techies. I think that the seminars section should be fully accessible to everyone and not have to go through an account process.

Apple has recently introduced a health and finess program for its employees, which is becoming more and more popular these days. It basically helps encourage a postitive and healthy lifestyle by providing incentives for its employees if they want to stay healthy like fitness plans, health education, and preventive care. Their website also boasts a generous holiday vacation time, but I doubt that’s really the case if you are working one of the lower level jobs. Aside from all those benefits, they offer discounts on Apple products, financial education, and stock purchase plans. Doesn’t sound too bad if you can get in at a position you like.

On a global level, Apple continues to work with the communities that their stores are apart of. They often do different special events to increase public awareness about issues in the area and even try to keep in contact with its consumers through the internet, mail, and phone.

On an much more micro-scale, Apple is very involved with its community at its headquarters in Cupertino, California. In 2000 Apple was asked by the Mayor of Cupertino, John Statton, to increase community involvement. The company encourages all its home-based employees to get involved and they provide fairs and festivals for the community as well. It has also been known to place oversized statues in the city for the enjoyment of the public, but they have been doing that since the 1990′s. You can learn more if you go to The Cupertino Courier site about Apple’s local community involvement.

Steve Jobs recognized this and after reading hundreds of e-mails he placed an apologetic letter to iPhone owners all over the Apple website, and even had a few press releases about it. The apology on the website explained that Apple was not blind to anger of their loyal customers and offered a $100 credit toward a future Apple purchase for anyone that bought the iPhone at its full $600 price tag as long as they didn’t use a rebate or other consideration when they purchased the phone.

Now Apple should have known better than to upset its loyal customers, but this news story appeared quickly and disappeared just as quickly. The hype probably lasted a month or two, so you can imagine the work their PR firm was doing for them at the time. But overall, I’d say they handled this crisis pretty well.

Apple does use the groundswell in today’s market.  One can visit the apple website http://www.apple.com/ to see many of the groundswell ideas, including blogs about Apple, their product, upcoming events and what product reviews from their customers. If you have iTunes you are able to download any of the many podcasts about Apple. You can even find them if you don’t have iTunes as long as you look in the right place (here is one such area that is linked to their main site http://www.appleuniversepodcast.com/).

Apple does many different viral videos and even has their commercials on-demand at their homesite so that people can view them. Many people ejoy watching the hip “apple computer” go up against the boring and confused “pc computer.” If you go to youtube and type up “apple products” http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=apple+products&search_type=&aq=f, you’ll get a list of videos of Apple’s numerous products, and even opening of new products out of the box, I don’t personally see why anyone would take a video of themselves opening the box of a new iPhone, but they have thousands of hits.

Apple doesn’t even need to do alot of the groundswell ideas because their customers do it for them. This link, http://www.maclife.com/?KNC-FN4667207278&gclid=CN-mmPKfh5cCFRRhnAodvWU__A is website developed consumers, maybe even started by the company that is completely dedicated to blogs about the company and you can find anything from blogs about the new iPhones to things as small as the headphones (not to mention the other numerous software and computers it produces). Apple is being mentioned everywhere on the web, and if you are reading a blog about technology or computers you’ll probably find a Apple mentioned at least once. If you go to one of my favorite sites http://digg.com/apple, you’ll find every thing you could ever want to know about apple and many examples of how they’re using the groundswell in today’s market. Apple is certainly benefiting from the groundswell.  It’s probably one of the biggest reason they are so big these days (even in today’s extremely crappy economic situation).
]]> http://williammfoster.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/how-apple-uses-the-groundswell/feed/ 0 williammfoster http://williammfoster.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/apples-top-challenges/ http://williammfoster.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/apples-top-challenges/#comments Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:57:04 +0000 williammfoster http://williammfoster.wordpress.com/?p=49 ]]> There are many challenges facing Apple today. The slump of the economy, the threat of Microsoft, new environmental requirements to name a few. Innovation would typically be named as a strength for most companies, and Apple is innovative in many different ways, but what happens when you run out of ideas or key top figures in your company aren’t keeping up with changing times? Even worse, what happens when your competitors start to exceed your own abilities to be innovative? The main point I’m trying to get across is that Apple has set a pretty high bar when it comes to innovation and since it is now known for that, it has to pump millions and millions of dollars into research and development to try to stay ahead of the pack and certainly there has to be a plateau at some point.

Distribution is also a challenge. Apple has certain criteria that must be met before a vendor is allowed to sell Apple products. This is like a double edged sword because in the one hand it provides the consumers with a reliable and up-to-standard delivery of its products, on the other it severely limits the amount of stores that can have different Apple products. So do you want ease of access or harder to reach reliability? Well guess what, you don’t get to decide, Apple does. Which leads me to my next challenge, Steve Jobs.

Don’t get me wrong Steve Jobs is an innovator, a motivator, and some would say a marketing genius, but not every body’s perfect. Jobs is the king and Apple is his kingdom, but after his near-death experience with pancreatic cancer, we became aware that the king can’t rule forever (although I’m sure he’d try). Another problem that I’ve been hearing about is that Jobs is a tyrannical boss and his employees wear out easily with him. It’s been said that Jobs has a too centralized form of leadership and that he plays many things very close to the chest. It seems to be working so far, but sometimes having too much control can be a bad thing.

On the topic of the economy and market share, yes we are in an economic slump right now and even the very large companies are feeling it in their pockets. Stock has been significantly down since July 2008, but over the past five years they have more than steadily increased to very high numbers. The challenge here is how to minimize the damage of the slump and get ready to go full throttle once the economy gets better. Market share is also difficult because they recently entered into the cell phone market and have to spend money to penetrate that deeper, and they will always have to compete with other competitors that produce computers.

Another large audience is the Apple employees and the community of any city that has an Apple corporate office or store or simply has a job selling Apple brand named products. I cannot find a current number of Apple employees, but it was over 18,000 as of 2007. That is a massive amount of people they keep in contact with, and not only them, but their families as well. Apple continually tries to keep in contact with communities, because they are not only the one who work for the company, they are also the consumers. Its important that Apple continues to work with the community to better serve the environment as well. As of recent Apple has really started to go more “green” as most companies are attempting to do the same. This is important because it keeps them in good standing and helps them compete.