New post at http://t.co/6uEOA0Yz : New Book http://t.co/oEIQZwsd

After an interesting plumbing experience, it’s time to watch bios about Steve Jobs & Mark Zuckerburg.

SteepleWeb has been really busy. We have another developer on board – Scot with 1 “t” so we are less than a month away from finally being out of beta. We are actually having our SteepleWeb Summit in Chucktown next weekend to finish the new site, iron out a few things, and launch!

We’ve also been working with Plainfield North because they are hosting a road race as a fundraiser for their track team. I tried to get a quick WordPress theme, but couldn’t find anything I liked or could quickly adapt. I eventually just handed coded the site which was kinda fun since I haven’t done that in a long time. I tried keep it somewhat similar in theme to their team site at www.tigersxc.com. There are a few more changes that need to be made, but the site is up and running at www.runfastcat.com

As I was sitting in the airport waiting to go to Mexico with Amanda and my family, I was playing around on my phone and was looking at Harvard Business Review’s site and found their e-mail newsletters. There are several different newsletters to get, but I choose to get “the daily stat” which gives short, one-paragraph interesting stats. For example, people who are disagreeable earn more than those who are agreeable (about 7%), and Catholics also have higher earnings. I also signed up for a monthly marketing newsletter.

This last semester in marketing 654, we had to choose a company and do a marketing analysis on it. The project was supposed to be 40 pages. My group decided to analyze Netflix since they had taken a LOT of missteps the past few months. One challenge that we faced with this project was that the industry was constantly evolving. We would get pretty far on the paper and Netflix would decide to do/not to do something. And then a competitor like Blockbuster would do something which would have an impact on Netflix. The day the first part of the paper was due, Blockbuster changed its pricing and we had to change things up. Well, we drilled the first part and got some really positive feedback.

We then had to go back and decide on a strategy that Netflix could implement over the next year. We were a bit rushed since the semester was coming quickly to a close and we had a presentation to do as well. The focus we decided was to regain the 810k+ customers that Netflix lost. We were very narrow in our strategy and just focused on e-mail marketing. We, unfortunately, did not do anything with a broader rebranding strategy.

Overall, I was happy with the analysis our group did on Netflix and the industry, but was a bit disappointed with the strategy part. I am, however, really looking forward to taking another marketing class, but this semester I am only taking accounting (the marketing class I want to take is on the same day as the accounting class that I need to take).

Anyway, here our final analysis of Netflix (and yes, things have changed since we submitted it)

The dogs rustled me out of bed a bit before 7 this morning and I was surprised to see a dusting a snow. Instead of going back to bed after feeding them, I decided to brew up some coffee and sit down and work on a website. Derk’s is setting up a road race this spring for Plainfield North High School and SteepleWeb is doing the site. This is the first time in quite a while that I am coding a website from scratch, so I had to dust off a few cobwebs. Right now the site is about 4 hours of work away from being live, but it’s turning out to be pretty good. I’ve decided to use a jQuery slider to spruce it up, but it is giving me a few troubles. This might take a few more carafes of coffee to finish.