With winter time in full force (some places more than other!) people are hitting the slopes for fun in the sun and the snow. Skiing, snowboarding, sledding and or course, the proverbial snow ball fights are all activities that winter lovers delight in. A day on the mountain, much less a week on the slopes, can be expensive. Credit cards, payday loans, and savings accounts can be tapped in an effort to enjoy a much anticipated Winter Wonderland.Planning a winter vacation can be an arduous task, especially when figuring out the total cost of the vacation. It’s important to have some kind of system to follow in your planning process to make sure every aspect of your vacation has been addressed. Here are a few tips to help you through the planning process:* Make a budget for your entire trip, not just certain parts. Factor in transportation costs, lodging, ski school and equipment rental (if needed), lift tickets, and of course, meals and snacks.* Choose a ski resort. Take into consideration the skill level of those in your family making sure the slopes you are skiing or snowboarding on are not too difficult or perhaps not challenging enough. You can find trail maps online at the resort’s website which indicate different aspects of the ski runs. Also, consider off-slope activities for your group: shopping, restaurants and other extra-curricular activities. Do you need a resort that is kid friendly or would you rather have one that is more adult oriented.* Choose a ski/snowboarding school if necessary. Find out how much lessons costs and what they include: equipment rentals, lift tickets, and even lunch. Many schools offer special programs to meet the needs, ages, and skill levels of those in your group.* Plan your trip. Pick a few of your favorite resorts and then choose one. Decide on the dates you are going to take your vacation and then book your hotel, condo or rental home. Make sure you have the appropriate clothing, equipment or rental reservations, and transportation arrangements. If you are driving your own vehicle check the snow forecast and buy chains for your car should there be a possibility of needing them.When all of the preparations have been made, consider how much spending money you will take with you. This can often be a breaking point for many vacation goers as it is often more expensive once you are at your destination. Extra’s such as tourist activities, meals out at restaurants, last minute clothing purchases, car break-downs and an unfortunate (but possible) trip to the hospital with a broken arm, can put you way over your initial budget.Taking out a payday loan to finance your vacation may be a possibility if you know that you can pay it back once you return home from your vacation. The problems therein lie when you have already taken out a loan to purchase ski equipment, put a deposit down on that pristine condo at the base of the lift, or to buy that “must have” snowboarding outfit that you saw in the most recent magazine.Taking out multiple payday loans can cause a snowball effect that your finances may not be able to handle. Although that much needed and desired vacation may be something you have been looking forward to for a long time, is it worth getting yourself into payday loan debt?Consider scaling back on something; opt for a smaller condo or less fancy hotel, commit to cooking your own meals if you have the option or perhaps choose less expensive dining options, and spend only a portion of your time on the slopes in order to save on expensive lift tickets. There’s much fun and excitement to be had in the mountains that doesn’t necessarily cost a lot of money. If you decide to take out a payday loan to compensate for a lack of extra cash, make sure your finances allow for paying it back right away. The last thing you want is to bring home debt as your vacation souvenir!
Social Media Strategy: How Barack Obama Used Multiple Touch Points to Create a Brand
Barack Obama used multiple “touch points” and social media platforms to create a brand that was a key ingredient to winning the Presidency in 2008. His brand strategy is a case study for marketers to study in creating brand in a New Media Age. President Obama’s branding strategy is something that is a distinct paradigm change from previous social media strategy and branding. It is basic strategy for a company to integrate their websites with social media platforms. What President Obama did that is different is that he created a web site, MyBO.com that functioned as a mini-facebook, a mini-social platform. He broke new ground in the use of social media in branding. Private companies should study Barack’s strategy to understand how to create a world-class brand virtually overnight. In our era this is important for a marketer because there are many, many products. For a product to be chosen from the many, it has to have a strong brand. How does a startup, which is what Barack’s campaign was, create a strong brand when the startup has limitations in capital? Social Media has created a new age. Social Media has changed how modern marketing is done—but a marketer needs a strategy to succeed and that strategy revolves around the strategic use of multiple “touch points”.At this point I think some important introductory comments have to be made. President Obama is a lightning rod. As in all politicians there are many people who like him and there are many who don’t. This article is not a political statement, one way or the other, for President Obama. This article is about social media branding strategy. Irregardless of where you stand in the political spectrum, even Barack’s greatest detractors say his social media strategy was a classic use of social media to create a brand.When I talk about creating “brand”, please don’t interpret this as a cynical statement of our political system and our way of electing presidents. Marketers should study political campaigns because they are classic studies in the creation of world class brands. In each political cycle, a large group of candidates emerges originally. Only one can be elected. A candidate must quickly distinguish themselves from the rest of the political field. The American people are not stupid. American elections are an example of the wisdom of crowds. To be elected a candidate must show that he is different from the rest of the candidates, and if elected can do a much better job than the others in the field. To win the American Presidency, a candidate must be an expert in creating brand awareness, creating a value proposition, and brand positioning. Winning the Presidency is not unlike creating a new product, and creating the brand for that product to be successful in the marketplace. This is why studying Barack Obama’s social media strategy is important. Barack Obama is analogous to a small startup creating a product, but having significant limitations in name recognition and capital.In old media, a startup couldn’t afford a large advertising campaign to create brand. Social Media has changed that. Social Media has created a “Perfect Storm”. To create a brand, a marketer has to have scale and presence. A lot of people have to know about your product, and a marketer has to be able to engage those large amounts of people at the precise moment that a purchasing decision is going to be made. Social Media allows a marketer to do just that. Perhaps ¼ of the world’s population belongs to a social media sight, and most of the major social media platforms are integrated. From those sights, a marketer can observe what a consumer does during their day. This tracking allows a marketer to target the individual consumers that are interested in the marketer’s product. A marketer can now target an individual at the precise time that a purchase is going to made.Barack Obama was one of the first significant marketers to understand the tremendous communication capabilities, database management, and tracking abilities that a social media platform affords a marketer. Barack Obama understood that he could engage large amounts of people at once over many “touch points”. When his campaign first began, Barack had no name recognition and no money. Hilary Clinton had both. Barack understood the forces that social media platforms unleash to a marketer. He realized, far better than anyone else, that his limitations were minor. Barack realized that social media platforms gave him the tool that he needed to create a major brand almost overnight. Before the Obama campaign, social networks were seen as just that—a social network. Someplace you came to hang out with your friends, share pictures, and just basically enjoy yourself. To a limited extent the Howard Dean campaign used social networks to raise money in 2004, but not at the scale that Barack Obama did.Barack’s campaign was not a haphazard affair. His social media campaign had goals, plans, and objectives. Barack realized that personal engagement was going to be critical. He created a web site that had the scale that was going to be needed. Barack took advantage of some major structural changes in the modern marketplace. Modern people no longer trust advertising. People trust their friends. In a new media age, a product is branded and purchased when two “friends” have a conversation, and a recommendation is made. To be successful a modern brand must be a “friend” to the consumer.Two sources best explain the world that modern marketers must function in. The June 2009 McKinsey Quarterly talks about The Consumer Decision Journey. The December, 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review talks about “Branding in the Digital Age”. In both cases, in a New Media Age, consumers no longer develop brand awareness through one experience, such as a major advertising campaign. Rather, a brand is created after many and varied experiences between brand and consumer. In a new media age, a brand takes on almost human characteristics. In human relationships, the more experiences we have with an individual the more trust we have for that individual. We choose are friends for their brand. That brand is based on trust. We can depend on our friends. We know a lot of people, but we trust our friends. In a group of people, we seek our “friends”, from a wide group of people, because we can trust them. We realize that our friends are imperfect—there might be “better” people around than our friends—but we seek our friends because we trust them.How does this trust develop? Trust is developed over a period of time through a series of experiences. This same principle applies in branding products. We develop friends through many “touch points”. Consumers seek out products through texts, video, blogs, podcasts from a social platform. This is how a brand is created—through a social media platform that creates many and varied touch points. Barack understood this.A key element is in his campaign was to create a website that was actually a mini-social platform. Initially, a supporter or a seeker would go to MyBO and a profile would be created. Then, just as on Facebook, you made a decision on just what you wanted to do. The sight was there for you to help. It allowed supporters to access the information that was needed create meetups, to have fund raisers. It had a database of people to call on behalf of Obama. The sight allowed people to what they wanted to do. There was a method to the madness. Through the sight, the campaign could track the people who were strong supporters. This information allowed the campaign to discretely get volunteers to do more committed things. The more committed volunteers held fund raisers at their house, to call friends, to go door to door. An important function of MyBo was to link people who knew each other outside of the campaign to connect, such as is done on Facebook. For instance, if a strong supporter worked at a particular company, the campaign had the names of other people who also worked at that same company who were undecided or leaning toward Barack. The supporter could then go to their coworkers and talk about Barack around the water cooler in a discrete manner. Friends having conversation with their friends to recommend a product (Barack). This is how Barack’s brand was created. This is how products are branded in social media. Barack was able to brand himself as a “friend” in comparison to the other candidates—who were just “candidates”.As the campaign progressed, supporters started making their own texts, videos, shooting their own pictures, making their own podcasts, and sending them to their friends, through the different social media platforms. Barack’s website (a social media platform) had these numbers:• The site attracted 1.5 million members who organized themselves into 35,000 separate activist groups, each of which could be called INSTANTLY from the campaign headquarters to be given specific tasks in drumming up support.• On election day, a MILLION calls were made. There were maps to the polls. Supporters were identified. Rides were arranged. Before the election, absentee ballots were delivered. During the campaign, million new supporters were registered online.• 150, 000 separate meetings were used to mobilize volunteers• Supporters placed their own campaign videos on YouTube. This is significant. People made these videos. The videos were placed on a sight that is one of the most popular on the Internet. YouTube viewership rivals major cable and home TV networks. This added media exposure was estimated at $47 million that the campaign did not have to pay.• $600 million was raised from 3 million peopleThere is a critical fact to observe in Barack’s brand building. The Obama campaign gave the “brand” over to supporters. This is an interesting fact to observe about Barack’s branding strategy. Barack’s branding strategy was organized and managed. There was adult supervision—but much of his branding was done by individual supporters. This is analogous to the Ford Fiesta Movement that Ford Motor Company used in marketing their Ford Fiesta. To create a strong brand in the new media era the brand has to be given over to supporters to develop among their “friends”.The hallmark of social media branding is the development of trust. This trust allows a brand to handle the unforeseen. There are no perfect people running for the Presidency—just as there are no perfect brands. Because of his brand building strategy and the trust that Barack developed, he was able to whether storms that happen in every campaign. People believe in their friends, and trust them, even when bad things are found out about them.In the campaign of 2004, the campaigns of Dean and Kerry were derailed when stories began to appear about their personal backgrounds. Barack was able to handle bad events in his campaign. Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rescko, bad quotes from Michelle, would have been enough to sink a lot of campaigns. Barack was able to weather these events because he had built up a lot trust among voters. To many people, Barack was a “friend” and could be trusted. In new media, because trust is developed among “friends”, when bad things happen to your brand, customers still buy the brand.Barack Obama created a brand through creating a social platform on his website and by engaging supporters at many touchpoints.Dean [email protected]
Non-boundary Governance of Entrepreneurship Education within Higher Education
Introduction
The focus of entrepreneurship and innovation education and research at institutions of higher education ipso facto implies a wish to enhance the quality of graduate and post-graduate business venturing prospects as well as business know-how in the normally pre-entrepreneurial stage. This should happen within a sense-making framework that integrates the research and education agenda for graduate entrepreneurship. Further, an entrepreneurship and innovation education and research approach should be followed that guide the content of the competitive landscape in which the prospective entrepreneur will function and not lag behind and thereby looses its relevance.
Of particular importance to entrepreneurial education lies the ability of institutions of higher education to shift and circulate information and technologies across faculties despite different academic disciplines, professional codes, and academic language that act as academic venture boundaries. These boundaries frustrate the need to integrate entrepreneurship education throughout a higher education institution, thus inhibiting the smooth functioning of entrepreneurial education. Thus, a need exists to overcome these barriers by amalgamating the various faculties socially across faculties whereby entrepreneurial educators could play “bridging roles” by acting as “boundary spanners” between faculties and forming close cohesive networks through the whole institution. This will enable educators in entrepreneurial higher education to link otherwise unconnected faculties to facilitate the development of unique knowledge and access to special knowledge and opportunities. This create an advantage over the traditional structural design where educators were only part of a specific faculty cohesive group.
In the new economy, technology and knowledge production on which it is based, have become an intrinsic part of the economy. As a result, it may be envisaged that education and research in institutions of higher education will need to support the whole technology development process, which also include the process of innovation. In this regard, it may be more appropriate to develop education and research policies that addresses the whole technology-innovation chain instead of merely the research-development chain, as the research-innovation chain involves taking ideas, turning them into technologies and taking these, through research and development, out of the laboratory and proving them in real-world situations.
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to propose an educational governance framework for entrepreneurship and innovation at institutions of higher education to foster the upgrading of entrepreneurial competencies in students whilst preserving the traditional academic competencies of students and the provision of unique entrepreneurial opportunities to students to perform entrepreneurial tasks.
Non-boundary governance
Firstly, with regards to the governance of entrepreneurship education at higher education institutions it is proposed that it should be managed by an “inter-faculty-inter-industry committee” (boundary-spanning leadership is provided) in order to achieve a greater measure of integration (common building blocks is created) in terms of generic entrepreneurial skills requirements that cross over academic disciplines, whilst simultaneously making provision for the unique disciplinary requirements and needs of specific disciplines. This implies a shift away from the traditional independent faculty approach (functional myopia) which lacks commonly shared interests that is adopted by most universities and substituting it for a new re-configured structure able to create entrepreneurial value through a holistic, yet focussed approach (integrated birds eye view) among various faculties. This largely represents the antithesis of the traditional academic governance approach followed at the majority of institutions of higher education. However, it is considered necessary, as it is able to strike out higher potential for entrepreneurship and innovation directions through the whole academic supply chain. In essence a virtual horizontal department – operating on the basis of value chains – is created, without necessarily increasing the staff operational cost to the institution. Creating a virtual horizontal department will ensure that all employees (lecturing staff) interpret the market signals better, and ensure that customer and entrepreneurial concerns become known to all faculties, regardless of their function in the university leading to a better customer focus. By establishing an inter-faculty-inter-industry committee, opportunity is created for healthy and critical curriculum content debate (knowledge interaction), whilst module developers become better informed on borderline subjects and aspects. Even more essential is the protection that will be provided to ensure that the disciplinary, inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary entrepreneurship field of study is not vulnerable to the “tactic of isolation” by claiming academic ownership in one faculty.
Secondly, entrepreneurship and innovation cannot flourish within institutional isolation. Cross-fertilisation of national and international academic and industry business networks is required not only to build leading edge relevant curriculum content, but also to keep up to date with the dynamics in the field. In this regard it would be important to create entrepreneurial knowledge champions in each of the faculties, whilst still operating under the academic guidance of an Entrepreneurial Centre of Excellence that could coordinate all activities and ensure proper co-operation between faculties. In essence, the Entrepreneurial Centre of Excellence’s focus is to orchestrate the entrepreneurial functions in all the faculties. This will further ensure that the “big divide” in entrepreneurial education between faculties is largely eliminated. With regard to its functions within the institution the Entrepreneurial Centre of Excellence’s role could be to:
·Establish an operating and repertoire-building entrepreneurship and innovation education framework and technique approach applying to real-time methodologies;
·Facilitate new entrepreneurial and innovation horizons for the institution through the diffusion of new information, the establishment of dialogue processes, and the exploration of new required dynamic capabilities;
·Build entrepreneurial talent for intellectual entrepreneurship leadership; and
·Establish bonding entrepreneurial networks that form the nucleus of the core of the university’s entrepreneurial value system through web-connectivity, conferences and seminars, mobilising critical mass of people for innovation and the management of Memorandums of Understanding.
Conclusion
This paper emphasised the need to create governance mechanisms that could properly address the disciplinary, interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary nature of entrepreneurial education in higher education institutions. It proposed the establishment of a joint-responsibility structure able to span the entrepreneurial holes in institutions of higher education whilst receiving guidance from a centrally Centre of Excellence that could coordinate all entrepreneurial education and ensure cooperation by all academic faculties. Implementation of these proposals could be done at minimum cost to the institution.