** Next Meeting **

*** Monday 6/18 at 9:00 PM ET on Franklin Live ***

We will be going over our presentation as a group. This was we can fine tune it before Wednesday!

We need to be on time b/c another group is using Franklin Live at 10:00 PM ET.

Website Revision 2

http://freud.franklin.edu/lane12/Peddlers.Rev2.swf

I've added some content to the website to discuss at the meeting today.

Left to do:
-Add images of bike
-Need Rodney's portion
-Any changes the team feels necessary.

Website Design

I've created a preliminary website. I'm still working on adding content, but I want to at least give everyone a feel for what I've got so far. This also serves as a promise that I AM working on it. Sorry I've been so quiet lately.

http://freud.franklin.edu/lane12/Peddlers.lzx.lzr=swf7.swf

Now that most of the foundation is down, I hope to add content from everyones' emails tomorrow (Saturday)

Marketing

Hi Team!

I wanted to post my portion to the blog as well~

Thank you for choosing Peddlers Inc. for your new bike needs. Peddlers bikes are located in major sporting goods stores. We also do monthly campaigns on QVC and the Home Shopping Network. On the 1st and 15th of every month QVC and the Home Shopping Network feature a thirty minute segment featuring several of our bikes especially the Bike & Go. We offer flex payment plans that includes shipping and handling. When you choose to pay for your bike using our installment plan, we'll include shipping and handling. Why wait to get your bike when you can buy now and pay later.

As a company we have been successful by providing the best in customer service. We have been rated #1 in quality and customer service by J.D. Power and Associates for two straight years. Our marketing mostly comes by word of mouth. Consumers are happy with our bikes especially the Bike & Go so they tell others about our bikes. Marketing also consists of:

• Advertising on college radio
• Print ads in newspapers
• Brochures placed in apartment complexes rental offices
• Student centers at college campuses
• Ads spreads in sporting good magazines.

I hope that's ok. We can add or delete stuff.

** Meeting Sunday 6/17 at 10:00 AM ET **

Hopefully we can all get together and work on our presentation. Maybe we could do a dry-run so we can see if we need to make any adjustments.

Target Market

Here is what I put together... I'm not sure if all of it should go on the website, or just some parts.

Intro Info
This bike was developed as an easy alternative to fuel-powered vehicles. The bike is lightweight and folds easily into a small package. Users of the bike can easily fold it and take it to their classroom, workplace or into their homes with almost no effort. Because of this easy portability and storage, bike owners do not have to worry about locking it up, or finding a place to lock it up. Especially in high-population and crime areas.

This bike could easily be used as a primary mode of transportation in high population metropolitan areas like Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, and Los Angeles.

Bicycle Target
Our target demographic for this bicycle is the 18-30 year old crowd. This demographic is made up of two distinct groups. (1) Young adults who have recently graduated from college and have entered the work place in entry-level positions. This group is the younger side of the Generation X. (2) Young adults who have just graduated from high school and are entering college. These adults need a low-cost and low-maintenance mode of transportation. Many of this group's members come from the older side of Generation Y.

Misc. Idea -- Possible Advertisement link
Do you have your own website or blog? We're interested in advertising on it!! Click here to email us about your website. If we feel that you website is a good place for us to advertise we can set your visitors up with free shipping when they buy our bike and and in for helping us out we'll pay you $5!

It's a pretty good deal all the way around!

Let me know what you guys think.

More Pics

I found some great pictures and descriptions of the green bike (bike 3) at the creators website.

Locust Bike

Wanted to add this, so I could keep up with the URL in case it becomes the bike we go with.

Presentation Outline

The following is a presentation outline that we came up with during our meeting yesterday. We each also chose the topic we wanted to do and made some tentative assignments for Andrew and Rodney.

I think that everyone who has created their Blogger account can make changes as needed.

• Company and Product Overview - Angela
• Talk about the company: how many employees, how long in business, location, etc..
• Also a brief description about bike itself, including the cost

• Bike Features - Rodney?
• Could include specs
• Why ride the bike instead of drive a car
• cost of bike vs. cost of driving

• Target Market - Mike
• Could be covered in the "about us" section of the website
  
• Explain who our target market is
• Include demographics

• Marketing (advertising) - Lateesha
• Could be covered in the "about us" section of the website
  
• Talk about different marketing mediums we will use (QVC, infomercials, newspapers, bulletin boards, etc...)
• Flex payment plans
• Different ad options

• Marketing (website) - Andrew?
• Create website
• Talk about components in the site

So far this is a preliminary outline. I've also tried to arrange it in an order that makes sense for the presentation, but we really haven't gone over that as a group. Please make comments or make changes to your portion of the presentation as needed.

Meeting Suggestions

Here are some of the times we've discussed for future meetings. Please comment...

Wednesday, June 13th
Meet to go over content for presentation. What time would work for everyone? Does 9 PM ET sound good?

Saturday, June 16th / Sunday, June 17th
We thought we might be able to meet and check out the website. I don't know what the time line to complete that might be. We could also use this meeting to do a rehearsal of the presentation.

Project Status 6/7/2007

Project Consultation
We did our project consultation on Wednesday this week. Everything seemed to go well. Professor Ramsey thinks that we have a creative and humorous project plan. She really seemed to like the way it was put together. She just suggested that we add some more detail into the contents of our presentation and how we intend to delegate the tasks.

Team Blog
Last week I set up our team blog as a method for us to collaborate. The URL is http://franklinpeddlers.blogspot.com/. If you’re reading this, you’re looking at it! I also sent out some invitations for you guys to sign up to become contributors for the blog. Lateesha and Rodney have already accepted and I have made them admins for the blog so they too can create posts. I resent invitations to Angela and Andrew. Let me know if you guys don't get them.

The Bicycle
Last week I posted a couple of bike pictures to the blog. Lateesha commented that she likes Bike 3. I do as well. Should we choose this as the bike we intend to use for our project? Go ahead and create a post if any of you would rather use a different one. Bike 3 is good because it doesn’t have any brand association. It also looks pretty cool and might be something that might attract our target demographic, 18-30 year olds.

Team Meeting
Angela, Lateesha and I all met in Franklin Live tonight (Thursday, June 7^th). We discussed our project plan and presentation. Lateesha plans to update our project plan to reflect some of the decisions we made tonight. She’ll email it out to everyone after she updates it.

Presentation
Our presentation date is on Wednesday, June 20^th at 9:15 PM ET. We talked about some topics for our presentation and created an outline for it (I’ll post that tomorrow, 6/8). We’ve divided it into five parts and each picked the part we wanted to work on. We also tentatively made assignments for Andrew and Rodney. I’ll create a separate post for the outline with the assignments. Let me know if you guys have any other ideas, comments, or want to change any of the assignments.

Since Andrew volunteered, we thought our presentation format would be a website. We can totally skip the Power Point! (That’s so 90’s anyway!) It looks like one of us could share an application in Franklin Live, like Internet Explorer and all the attendees can see it. We tested that tonight. So we were thinking we could just put together a website to market our product and incorporate each part of the outline into the website. Then each person will talk about their portion while it is displayed during the presentation. If we each do 3-4 minutes that should get give us enough time.

Would it be possible for each of us to get information on their portion of the presentation together by Wednesday, June 13^th? Maybe we could meet on Wednesday and talk everything over. Then Andrew could begin work on the website. We probably don’t need to come up with 3-4 minutes of content for the website, just enough to have something up there.

Rehearsal
We also thought it might be a good idea to rehearse our presentation. Maybe we could meet in Franklin Live the weekend before or the week of our presentation. We could do a dry-run and time ourselves. This way we’ll be familiar with the technology and be able to make any adjustments to our presentation.

Looks Great

Everything looks great Mike. Thanks for the invite.

Bicycle Pics

I found some pretty cool bicycle pics on the web. Maybe we could use one of them as the bike we're marketing. What do you guys think?

Check out these links:
- Bike 1 - Looks cool
- Bike 2 - I think this one may be a kids bike.
- Bike 3 - Really cool, might be a good one

Project Status 6/3/2007

Hi Team,

Most of us met this morning in Franklin's chat room and talked about a few things related to our group.

Team Collaboration Tool
We decided on doing a Blog for team collaboration. I have set up a blog on Blogger's website. The URL is: http://franklinpeddlers.blogspot.com/. We can make everyone in the group an author so anyone can post a new topic or respond to a previous one. I'm just not sure if you need a blogger account or if any email address will work. So I'll send everyone an "author invitation" to their Franklin email address. If that doesn't work you can all sign up for a blogger account and email it to me, then I'll add you.

Project Consultation
We also signed up to do our Project Consultation (assignment 4-1) on Wednesday 6/6 at 9:15 PM ET. The consultation is in Franklin Live. We will be going over our Project Plan with Professor Ramsey. Maybe she'll be able to give us a few pointers! ;)

Project Plan
We have decided to go with Lateesha's project plan with some modifications. She will be taking some points from all of our plans and adding them to hers. Then later today she'll email it out to everyone. Each of us will have to email her back to let her know it is OK and then she'll submit it to Professor Ramsey.

I'll also post this on our Blog with a Project Status label.

Thanks,
Mike.

Team Peddlers Blog!

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to our new Blog. This Blog might let us exchange ideas and keep track of our assignment easily. I know that anyone with an account can comment on an article. But I also think that we could assign others to post once they have an account.

I'll check into that and make another post.

-Mike-