GEICO Achievement Award 2010 Recipient

As one of the GEICO Achievement Award 2010 recipients, I visited the Buffalo GEICO branch last Friday (May 21st 2010) and received $1000 check! It is my great pleasure to receive such an honorable award, and the award is another motivation for me to further improve myself.

For more information about the GEICO Achievement Award, please visit the website, click here.

Samsung Refrigerator Wonder Commercial

What a smart product...smart engineers... that's why said there are only two things important in every industry; Marketing and Engineering!!

Social Media Revolution

How To Profit From Investment 'Losers'

Diversification and rebalancing are keys to long-term returns.(Written by Gregg S. Fisher, CFA, CFP, is president and chief investment officer of Gerstein Fisher)

Too often investors scrutinize their portfolio statements like tense parents reading a child’s report card. They glaze over the A's and B-pluses and, with furrowed brows, hone in on that errant C.

In investing focusing too narrowly on a problem area often misses the big-picture story. It may seem counterintuitive, but investments that have underperformed their benchmarks or other holdings can actually improve the total risk/return profile over the long haul. This is not a new phenomenon, but it is one that investors routinely ignore. It’s called the diversification effect. Remember diversification?

Diversification Gets a Bad Rap
In the wake of the wild volatility in financial markets over the past few years, many investors have come to view with a jaundiced eye the notion that there is safety in spreading your bets. This reaction is understandable, even if misplaced. True, diversification within equities, as shown in Table 1 below, does not appear to have helped investors much over the past three years.....

To see the full article, visit the webpage, http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/30/portfolio-diversification-personal-finance-asset-allocation.html.

Google Adwords Strategy 1

A. Clint Company: Rumour Nightclub(http://www.rumoursnightclub.com/)

B. Website Analysis:

- the website provides general information about the company such as its location and the cover prices

- it does not sell any product or service on the website, but provides an email service, by which its customers can get updated information about upcoming events and contests

- without Google Adwords, the website can be found with keywords/phrases such as "Niagara Falls Finest Nightlife", "Rumours Nightclub", and "Clifton Hill", which are included in the header and contents of the webpages.


C. Adwords strategy for the first week campaign

- We have focused on using “Phrase match keywords” to target potential customers who are interested in club parties in Niagara Falls by typing specific search phrases. We thought this would increase possibilities to attract cosumers to the company website.

- We avoided using the keywords that have already attracted people to the website without Google Adwords campaigns. This is because we wanted to find out more of attractive, but unique and specific keywords/phrases for the company to use for the future online promotion. We also wanted to discover effective advertising strategies that will generate as many potential customers as possible.

- For Impressions/Clicks/CTR, we wanted to limit our impressions and maximize the clicks to the website by running specific keywords and thereby increasing our CTR and Quality Score. In this way, we expected to attract as many potential customers as possible who are willing to visit the actual club.

- We set up the search location range as 130 miles around the club.


D. The first week performance.

- We have created 31 impressions and 2 clicks. From statistics, we found out that most of the impressions were generated on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday between 8pm and 3am.

- The performance shows that our keywords did not work well to bring potential customers to the website. We think that this is partly because we used too specific keywords/phrases along with the search location range limit. The search keywords/phrases and location range we used have significantly lowered the number of people that would visit the website.

- To improve our campaign performance, we will create two more campaigns, Email Campaign and Cheap Cover Party. We will run the ad for the Email Campaign only through the goole email site where potential customers who use the gmail account could see our campaign with their emails that include our keywords/phrases. The keywords/phrases are more like generic words (Broad Keywords) than the ones that we used for the first week. To prevent our campaign from generating too much impression due to the use of broad keywords, we set up the time limit so that our campaign will come up only on Thursay, Friday, and Saturday. We set up 100 miles as the search range limit for this campaign.

- For the Cheap Cover Party campaign, we made our exisitng keyword/phrase lists less specific and set up the different time zones for different days. For example, we prevented the campaign from being shown on Monday, Tuesday, and Sunday while it will come up every Wednesay between 12am and 4am, 11am and 2pm, and 6pm dnd 12am.

Google Online Marketing Challenge 2010

I am currently a captain of Team University at Buffalo in the Google Online Marketing Challenge 2010. My team is competing against over 10,000 students from 500 universities around the world in the challenge. There are six members including myself in the Team University at Buffalo, and Professor Alan Dick has been helping us as an advisory professor. My team was provided $200 worth Google AdWords money so that we can utilize the money to promote a local company by running Adwords campaigns on Google. Since February 2010, my team has developed strategic marketing plans including keyword lists, by which we have promoted the company to current and future customers on the online. There is no such a financial award for the challenge, but my team members and I have put our efforts and time in it because we value experience that we will gain and honor of representing our school in the world competition.

Target Case Competition Winner

The Target marketing competition, sponsored by the Target Corporation, is intended to help undergraduate students hone their analytical, problem-solving and teamwork skills by proposing solutions to a real-world business challenge.

I have participated in the with three other members, and it was held by the Target Corporation. The case of the competition was how to improve the Target’s merchandise so that it can remain competitive in the home industry. I was in charge of developing price and product strategies for our marketing proposal.

I did research for home products of Target’s competitors and the current market trend in the home industry. With hard work of each member and creative ideas based on solid research, my team won the competition and was awarded $3000. During the competition, I managed to further improve my knowledge and marketing skills gained through my education.

You will see my strong research and analytical skills will contribute to discovering hidden value in the market and providing invaluable information to the clients. Moreover, this internship will be a great opportunity for me to gain hands-on experience and become a future asset to the company.

20 to be honored by Alumni Association

The UB Alumni Association will honor a prominent local philanthropist and an internationally recognized journalist at the annual UB Alumni Association Achievement Awards ceremony, to be held at 6:30 p.m. April 9 in Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall, North Campus.

Attorney Gordon R. Gross, JD ’55, will receive the Samuel P. Capen Award, the UB Alumni Association’s highest honor, and CNN host Wolf Blitzer, BA ’70, will receive a Distinguished Alumni Award. They are among the 11 individuals who will be honored, along with a UB alumni group, students and volunteers.

President John B. Simpson and UB Alumni Association President Larry Zielinski, MBA ’77, BA ’75, will present the awards. A post-award reception will feature premium food stations, an open bar and entertainment in the Center for the Arts atrium.

A member of the SUNY Board of Trustees from 2001-08, Gross’s significant gifts to UB include a $1 million donation to establish the first endowed professorship in the Institute for Jewish Thought and Heritage.

“The university is the No. 1 economic engine in Western New York. Not only is it an important employer, but it spawns new businesses and attracts people to the region,” Gross said. “I’ve seen for quite some time that the university is the future of this community, and the most important thing we can do for the growth of the community is to help grow the university. It’s just that simple.”

Blitzer will receive a Distinguished Alumni Award, given in recognition of exceptional career accomplishments, community or university service, or research and scholarly activity. The host of “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer,” he received a SUNY honorary doctorate in humane letters in 1999, and in 2003 he endowed the UB David Blitzer Lecture Series in Jewish Studies in honor of his late father, David, a Jewish Polish refugee.

Four students will receive the J. Scott Fleming Scholarship, the only student-to-student award at UB. They are Olivia Cox, a junior nursing major and Acker Scholar; Marc Huberfeld, a senior majoring in business administration with concentrations in MIS and operations and supply chain management; Tae Hyun Moon, a senior majoring in business administration with a concentration in marketing; and Kathryn Przybyla, a junior communication major with a minor in geography of international business and world trade.

For More information, visit http://www.buffalo.edu/ubreporter/2010_03_24/alumni_awards