Nokia - Microsoft Partnership. Building the new Mobile EcoSystem.

What do you think about this concept? Is it going to be successful or not? Why?

In recent years it became obvious that the world leader in producing mobile phones Nokia need urgent change. For example, in 2009 the supply of Nokia cell phones in the world decreased by 7.8% and revenue of department of mobile devices and services declined by as much as 20.6%. The share of Symbian was decreasing in the market under pressure of competitors. In connection with this Nokia has started to negotiate with Google but recently announced the beginning of close collaboration with Microsoft.

Our opinion is that this collaboration is the right decision for both sides. Nokia will use Windows 7, a new smartphone operating system that has gained good reviews from critics. This will allow it to cut costs to maintain the agonizing Symbian. For Microsoft it is good because even though experts welcomed Windows 7 it still has a tiny share of the market and Nokia’s huge dealings with suppliers, resellers etc. all over the world will help to larger sales volume of operating system many times.

The problem is that Nokia's upcoming MeeGo operating system, which was expected to debut at the end of 2011, will also be sidelined. It turns out that Nokia will lose money invested in both its operating systems. Though Nokia said that Symbian will be simply turned to "franchise platform" and the company expects to sell over 100 million devices based on it in future.

Cooperation in the field of search engines looks a little bit dubious. Microsoft has repeatedly recognized the failure of Bing for PCs, which has even caused a conflict with Google recently. It is hoped that the new generation search engine and its adoption for smartphones will be much more successful.

It seems to us that a major disadvantage of partnership is the fact that it will be followed by layoffs. Nokia's chief executive Stephen Elop said that job losses all around the world will be inevitable. Of course, it will affect particularly Finland, where this giant company is based.
But in general we think that huge technical and scientific bases of both companies and potential large infusion of funds by Microsoft to Nokia will give a Finnish company a huge possibility to return lost world position.

Nokia - Microsoft Competitors

Market of mobile phones is very difficult market with very high level of competition. There are several numbers of big players; well known companies who are competing with each other. It is very hard competition and Nokia is in very center of it. From our point of view company is in very difficult situation. By several reasons Nokia starts losing competition, and if we try to think, who are these companies in the “other side”, how big and powerful are they, we can really imagine the real size of the Nokia’s troubles.

Two biggest competitors of Nokia are unbelievably huge, unbelievably strong, and unbelievably successful Google and Apple. If we were on the Nokia place we definitely will be afraid. They are biggest leading companies in the world and they are “one head” higher then Nokia. We think if Nokia deal somehow with this competition it will be a real miracle. From one hand, we really hope that Microsoft could try to become this miracle, but from the other hand, looking at facts, we can say that probably Nokia have already lost this competition, lose it couple years ago.

How does the new strategy change Nokia's position on the market?

First of all, we want to take a look at the mobile phones market. Phone producers go with certain mobile OS systems like Symbian, Android, Microsoft Mobile, Mircosoft Phone and iPhone. We want say anything about iPhone OS, since it is the different case when the phone as a piece of technical device goes with the OS built by the same company. Symbian is the same, goes just with Nokia phones. Android and Microsoft systems are implemented by several companies, like Samsung, HTC and some others. And it is clearly stated that Microsoft mobile systems selling lesser every year. On the other hand, Nokia loses its positions as well.

Working together, Microsoft and Nokia can bring the Microsoft Phone OS to different markets and price categories. Nokia can be the one and only "carrier" of the Microsoft Phone OS. And what is good, Nokia can make the system more popular, since the Nokia phones are still have that image of a good phone. So, by mixing a "good phone" and "a system with potential" there is a chance that both will have win-win situation. And for Nokia it can be a huge step towards getting its large market share back. At the same time, competitors are ready to pounce back with new phones, new system updates, etc. And it is possible to happen, that Nokia will lose even more of a market, than it did during last years.

Overall, the situation is explained in the following words:

"Nokia’s smartphone market share could fall from about 30% to 15% in the next year alone! If so, that brings the Microsoft deal into question. On paper, teaming up with the software magnate seems smart…

• Nokia has a poor operating system but vast scale
• Microsoft has a good operating system but no scale"

There are two possibilities, either the tandem drags both companies down or brings them up high.

To invest or not to invest?

The question about investing is really flexible one. It is so because we can’t really predict the growth or fall of the share market. But we can try to suggest it. Here we have a picture that shows the development of Nokia share during last three months. As we see from this graph the real growth of its shares since the beginning of the year. But since the start of February the was a real fall of its shares. It was so may be because of its refuse of working with old systems equipment and starting to work with Microsoft. As I think the question of investing money in this company has both sides. We can suggest that the shares of Nokia will rise later and will be better than ever. The Microsoft systems are highly recommended all over the world. So it will be a good investment because the sales will be enormous. Also as it will be something new from Nokia, lots of people will try their new product and it will also make profit for Nokia.

(click on the image to full-size)

But on the other hand the investment could be useless. With having only this graph and nothing more, I mean no information and other, we could suggest that the shares of Nokia will continue to fall. So the investment won’t be useful.

As for opinion of our group, some of us just don’t like using Windows Mobile made by Microsoft. It’s very slow and hard to work with. Also almost in every model you need to use stylus to touch the screen. So you can’t use your finger. But two of us are real fans of this system. They claim that it’s one of the best on the market and we should invest to them. All in all we finally decided to invest there. We think that working with Nokia and changing experience will provide them with highly technology models that will be used and loved all over the world.

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References
Investment U (http://goo.gl/MUC9b)
Yahoo! Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com)
BBC News (http://bbc.com)

Facebook Advertising Campaign

About the company

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For more than 35 years, BBS has been successfully manufacturing high-performance light alloy wheels for the world of motorsport and beyond. When Heinrich Baumgartner and Klaus Brand founded a small manufacturing plant for plastic body parts in Schiltach in 1970, nobody could have known just how globally successful BBS was going to become. However, success was quick to follow and the legend of BBS was born. Today, BBS, a Punch International NV company, is on the winning team at motorsports events the world over. When you look at a winning vehicle, you are looking at BBS wheels. This is why both track and road drivers choose BBS every time. The BBS success story is a global one. They use our more than 35 years of motorsport experience to manufacture our products worldwide and always to the same high standards. This enables them to surpass and not just meet all of the certification guidelines set by automobile manufactures and provides them with a firm basis on which them can build our future. Take a look for yourselves.

Facebook Campaign Plan

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Social media is a proven and effective business tool. We have chosen BBC.com web page and now we will design a plan for this company of using social media for its own purposes. To design it we should firstly take several steps to make our plan made.

Step 1.

As for every new campaign or plan it’s important to know what’s already going on and being said about our company. This could be an easy task because nowadays there are lots of different internet tools and searching engines that could help us. Also it will be useful for us to know about what our competitors and experts have achieved with their social media campaigns, about the successes and lose in this field. Knowledge of this question will help our company to decide what will help us to achieve success.

As for our company and its competitors they usually post latest news and information on its official web page. But not every person is familiar with it. So to gain more audience and to become first on the news market BBC.com need to start their social media campaign and start to post its news on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, My Space and others so that more people could get access to it.

Step 2.

Next step is designing a strategy. First of all on this stage we should set some business goals. For our company BBC.com it is gaining more audience and becoming leaders of its market. Also these goals will allow us to measure our success later.

Step 3.

Step three is choosing so called social “champion”. This simply means that we need to find out what social medias are the most popular. May be we can be able to choose even more than one or two web pages to post our campaign. For this reason we can choose social networks such as Facebook. We can simply create their page and put a responsibility on one of our employees to update it every time there is something new. Also we can use some search engines because lots of people visit it every day and all of them will see our news and posts.

Step 4.

This step is focused on searching engines. Our company should wake some partnership with the leading searching engines. If this will be made our news will be seen on their web pages and everyone could have a link to more detailed information concerning the question they need. For this purpose we can use Yahoo, Yandex, Mail.ru and others. May be we can even start using Google if we made them a profitable sentence or just as a test if this function will become popular.

Campaign Risks

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Advertisement and promotion in social medias is by far not the most risky way of doing it. Experts of marketing agency Razorfish say that 76% of respondents do not mind having Ads on Facebook, MySpace or other social medias and 60% of Americans regularly interact with commercial companies there. On the basis of data including mentioned above we can make a conclusion that as a whole infusion of funds in social medias can be very effective but there are still some risks.

First, in general companies are still intrigued with social networks, because previously they did not have such a tight interaction with customers. For them it is a challenge, because the openness of consumers in social networks has a downside: they say everything they think, and companies do not always like such reviews. Therefore, when the company is too straightforward to try push something, it often causes open critical reaction from consumers.

Therefore, the aim of BBC should be simply to attract attention, to get consumers to remember their ad, to convey information, to make them go to company’s site. Advertisements of the company should not be straightforward and persuasive.

Another usual failure is not having enough services for customers on companies’ pages. Users want not only to get the information but also to have a possibility to share their opinions about it, to talk with others. So if BBC.com is going to create a page on Facebook or other social medias it should have places for expressing minds.

The next feature is that users got used to individualization in the Internet. That is why it is better to make the page variable so each permanent user can sort news by categories, choosing the ones he likes more. All in all, what we were talking mostly about is a risk of lack of technological sophistication.

Reference - www.bbs.com

Concept10 - Google AdWords Campaign

Concept10 - From telephone association to the ocean of knowledge

concept10.fi

We decided to take a medium size company called Concept 10. It started as a telephone association in Mikkeli. But through the years this company expanded its operations to new locations and designed new communication skills and acquired new information.

Now this company operates in seven districts of South Savo region. This company offers data center operations, outsourcing services, network solutions and traditional operator services. Its history counts over 120 years of identifying communication needs.

Concept 10 offers to its customers broadband, TV services, voice and mobile telephony and also maintenance services. As for the companies and different businesses this company offers User support and outsourcing services, ICT consulting, communications and network solutions, office solutions, printing solutions, software services, equipment and also device maintenance.

Target Markets for the AdWords Campaign

Target market of this company should be South Savo region. This is the area where this company is situated so it should firstly strengthen its market positions in this area. Also its advertisments could be expanded to the nearest regions so that Concept 10 could enlarge its customers audience.

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Creating the Ad Text

We came up with the Ad Text for the campaign. You can see it below. In our opinion the Ad Text represents the main idea of the company and is catchy enough.

Selecting the KeyWords
We have chosen some KeyWords to attach to our campaign. The list is down here.

PS: Learning some Finnish would gradually help us with adding some words in Finnish :)

concept10
telephone association Mikkeli
Telefooniyhdistys
Communications Mikkeli
telecommunication Mikkeli
IT Mikkeli
ICT Mikkeli
MPY
network Mikeli
Mikkelin Puhelin
ICT Consulting
+358 30 670 3030
landline subscriptions
computer repairs Mikkeli
computer service Mikkeli
tietopalvelut Mikkeli



Creating the budget

Concept10 is a medium - size company, so we decided that it can spend up to 25EUR per day on AdWords campaign, which will sum up to 760EUR per month (30.4 days in a month). Further on, in case of campaign expansion, the daily amount could be increased.

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Tools & Methods to analyze the success of the campaign

There are quiet few way to analyze the perfomance of the Google AdWords campaign. We will present some of them.

• First Page Bid analysis shows how big should be Cost-Per-Click bid (CPC) in order for your add to be atop the competition to be shown on the top of the search results page, when search query exactly matches one of your keywords.

• Google Diagnostics helps to analyse perfomance of different marketing activities done. As well, it allows to calculate the Clickthrough rate (how many times people clicked on our Ads). As a part of Google Diagnostics, Conversion Tracking helps to see which keywords work and which ones don't. It helps to save money and maximaze campaign's perfomance.
  
  
• Return on investment calculation shows the ratio of your costs to your profits. Google Diagnostics helps with it as well, by providing different financial info of your campaign so it is easier to make all necessary calculations.