Graham's Blog

Final Guest Speaker – Fiona Hart

Fiona Hart was our final guest speaker. She worked for a company called PALM and she was in charge of the online store.

PALM is a company that specializes in personal digital assistants. They used to lead the market but have since fell behind some of the bigger companies like apple. Fiona gave us a brief history of PALM and talked about what they did and what they now do. To be honest I wasn’t very interested in this lecture. Not a very creative based lecture but you cant like them all I suppose.

Fiona then went on the talk about PALM’s online store, which involved a lot of facts and figures, very exciting stuff.

She then talked about what goes behind the scenes when you make an order online or on the phone, again very exciting stuff. She talked about the dangers of selling online and what they do to protect themselves against online frauds.

Another thing that is import when running an online store is generating online traffic. A common way of getting potential customers to the store is by search engine marketing. There are two branches of this.

• Search engine optimization  -  SEO
• Search engine advertising (pay-per-click)  SEA

SEO  is all about making sure your website appears when something related is searched in a search engine while SEA is actual adverts with in the search results. These advertisements would be very expensive as they will be seen by a large number of people.

She then talked about advertising in social-media sites. There are mixed views about advertising on these sites as some people feel that they are invading their personal space while there is the argument that the majority of internet users are part of some sort of social-media site therefore the advert will reach more people. I personally am not a fan of adverts in social-media sites.

Over all I did not enjoy this lecture. I found it hard hard to find interest in some of the things she was talking about as I did not find it very relevant.