Moms have always been known to have their own little share of trying out small businesses and entrepreneurial opportunities and it looks like Microsoft has discovered this glitch and will be aiding them through guess what? The Microsoft Xbox 360.
The form of presentation was made possible all thanks to House Party which is adopting a similar approach that Tupperware has been doing. So if you think that the Xbox 360 is plainly for gaming, you are now looking at a whole new dimension as far as use for these addicting game consoles is concerned.
The idea behind these parties is simple - a product endorsement coming from a person you know and trust in a pressure free environment (nothing is actually being sold at these gatherings) will go a lot further towards making a sale than any amount of commercial advertising. The company behind this revival is the aptly named House Party, a viral marketing firm that specializes in linking enthusiastic consumers or “brand advocates” with interested brands.
For the household, perhaps one Xbox 360 is not enough anymore. Buying another one for business means does seem reasonable. Would you buy a new Xbox for the sake of viral marketing? Why not!
It seems that AIG has gotten of the hook but as far as taking pride in commercials that they let out to support their business venture, they may want to redo them, especially when it comes to their tagline. For sure, they need to work doubly hard to try and get back the loyalty of their market (including their current clients) for them to recover the dent that this has done to their image.
The commercials are cute but as far as believing that they are still reliable and on whether people would still invest in insurance premiums or other related investments, a lot of questions remain in the air for AIG even if they were loaned $85 billion by the US Federal Reserve.
In an earlier post on this blog we discussed different strategies for making your business energy efficient as a way of cutting down on costs and in doing so helping your company stay afloat during the economic crisis that is currently unfolding. However, just as energy can be wasted, so too can technological infrastructure.
Most of the technicians that you meet will purposely build redundancies into key parts of a network in order to ensure that a failure at one key point within a network will not affect the whole network in a way that can not be reversed. However, technicians by their very nature are trained to be on the safe side when they are setting up these networks because being on the safe side means a higher customer satisfaction level at the end of the day.
If you hire a technician to reduce redundancy within your network infrastructure however, they will most certainly do it. This is not recommended for most companies and especially not for companies that rely heavily on electronic data, but it is something to consider if you are desperate. Desperate times call for desperate measures, but these measures only become desperate if you actually experience a technological failure of some kind. It is a real life example of the ends justifying the means.
One of the only industries that have been doing well with the current economic crisis is the electronics industry. They have slashed prices to many of their products and are still getting orders pouring in everyday from companies that are interested in abandoning a lot of their physical infrastructure and making the move to virtual real estate in the form of websites and servers.
This is a good idea and one that you might consider for your own business to help get through the current economic rough patch. If you have physical buildings under your control, not only do you have to pay for the maintenance of that property, but you also have to pay for the amenities inside it as well as the taxes on the property that you own. Switching to electronic holdings reduces the maintenance costs and virtually eliminates everything else, allowing you to really save some money when all is said and done.
Switching to electronic infrastructures over physical ones in areas like retail and management might seem like a less than ideal situation and with the majority of the world still based on last generation’s technology it probably is less than ideal. However, in times of economic crisis nobody can afford to pass up on money-saving ideas, especially if those ideas will allow you for the most part to maintain your business as it currently is, just in a different form.
Moms have always been known to have their own little share of trying out small businesses and entrepreneurial opportunities and it looks like Microsoft has discovered this glitch and will be aiding them through guess what? The Microsoft Xbox 360. 
