Sarah's Nursing Business

After committing to adapting to artificial intelligence (AI), you can take it one step further and begin to adopt AI . Before you move on to adopt, you must first be regularly engaging in AI, staying informed of it and how it directly affects you. Make adapting a habit first and make it an active process and part of moving on to adopt. AI is a major key to innovation and adopting AI is part of the process. So so not turn off any of the steps as you trudge through them. Continually be adapting, adopting, and becoming adept at AI. You have to adopt AI because it is inevitable that you will need to engage in it as machines and robots become more and more common place. Jobs will be dictated by the emerging AI and it is important for the future and employment that we stay knowledgeable and competent in AI and all of its changes and possibilities. It is definitely not going away, so mastering it is the only option. AI is so prevalent on social media platforms, Amazon, mobile devices and so o...

All of the talk about how artificial intelligence (AI) affects us on a day to day basis along with how it will impact jobs got me thinking, how is AI affecting nursing? I found an article that made many good points with some great information. First I think it is important to point out that AI has been around and developing for some time. AI is transforming the world around us at a rapid pace. The United States issues an executive order to accelerate AI research and development, so it must be extremely important to stay ahead of other countries. Nurses use information that is generated from smart algorithms that are driven by AI everyday. When doing patient assessments and inputting information, the charting system utilizes data to calculate scores for acuity, fall risk, and many other measures. Many of these scores impact the way patient's are cared for and have the ability to affect patient outcomes. SWAT teams are able to utilize the generated information from the data to ident...

As a founder, be prepared to feel alone on the journey to the top. While there may be many people that are with you and on your side through it all, they will have a difficult time understanding how you really feel throughout the process. Countless others will not even understand what you are doing or why you are doing it. Adapt is the word you need to remember in moving from the development of the product to actually marketing the developed product. The process is unpredictable and it is important to be able come up with solutions along the way. Curve balls that you have never seen before and never knew existed will begin to show up and you need to be able to "roll with the punches" so to speak. You will need a lot of support and the right people with you along the way. You can never truly know that you have the right people until situations arise where you need to solve a problem and devise a solution. In those moments you will see where the shortfalls are and how you need ...

In order to become a guerrilla marketer you must have a plan and commit to that plan. Easy enough right? Not really. You must first know that you have a plan in place that is worthy of commitment. The successful plan comes down to having the right marketing strategies in place. Knowing how to position yourself to fulfill a need within the marketplace is essential. In order to have good positioning you must have a strong core story. A good core story to your company will be personalized and powerful. Before planning your marketing strategy you should identify what business you are in, what your goal is, the benefit of your offering, your companies competitive advantages, and your biggest fears. Having a good grasp on all of the answers to these questions will help you to devise a successful marketing strategy and plan.  Identifying your target market or audience is also essential. Know what your customers want and need and how your marketing plan will be tailored to reach them and ...

 In Surfing the Tsunami he refers to three things we can do with artificial intelligence, adapt, adopt, or adept. In taking a closer look at AI, knowing how to begin is important because it can all seem very overwhelming when you know nothing and are just getting started. The first step is to adapt to AI. to adapt is to learn more about it or pay attention to what is happening or involves AI. This is more or so a 'wait and see' attitude or action to see where AI is headed and the beginning of taking steps to being involved in AI.  Being a self-starter and ready to just start dong something new is definitely a positive attribute to have when tackling the world of AI, but it is not essential. It is okay to take time to learn about things and develop other necessary skills along the way that will assist with AI. Learning to code for instance, even though not essential, can be helpful in increasing understanding of AI. Coding can also help you to go from novice to expert in AI, e...

Helen Yu, author of Ascend Your Start-up , did an interview for my marketing class and it was both interesting and informative. It was nice to be able to put a face to the book. Now in reading her book, I feel like I am hearing it from her and I have a better connection with the author. She highlighted a lot of important aspects of marketing and entrepreneurship that I found to mitigate a lot of my fears and questions surrounding business start-ups.  Some of the things that lead her to entrepreneurship were curiosity, failure, rejection, and learning agility. She confirmed for me my own thoughts that using some of your 'downfalls' can be beneficial in leading you into a business. Learning from the rejection and the failures can be great teachers. Being able to dive into and learn new things serves you well in a business start-up.  She was an accountant and financial analyst and then learned coding. Being multifaceted in many different areas can bring a lot of benefits to busin...

Ascend Your Start-up No one is ever sure 100 percent of the time. There will be times that you want to abandon the product development altogether. There will be some days that you make no progress while other days the funds will dry up and you will wonder where your customers will come from. On the very worst days you will desire to work for someone else so all the business responsibilities fall on them. Let go of perfection. It is not about being a perfectionist who is flawless. You need to listen to others and learn from their ideas and feedback. You are trying to create the perfect product. To create the perfect product your should focus your efforts on creating a minimally viable product (MVP).  MVPs have a basic set of features. These basic features capture their intended audience and make the product a unique option for them. The goal of an MVP is to bring it to market as quickly as possible. There is a decreased amount of testing that has to be completed on an MVP and this d...

Ninety percent of being a successful guerrilla marketer is learning and living by the sixteen secrets of guerrilla marketing. Unless you are able to put these sixteen secrets into practice you are not truly a guerrilla marketer. These sixteen practices can take a small business and build it into a large one, but it is essential that all sixteen are implemented. So what are they? Commitment. You must be committed to your marketing program. Once you establish a solid marketing plan you must launch it and then stick to it. In order to realize its success, you can not abort the plan, you must stay committed to it and give it time. Having commitment to a mediocre plan is much better than having the most brilliant plan without any commitment. It could take a little time, or a long time, but it will work if you stay committed. Some of the best companies were grown over time because of commitment to their marketing plan.  Investment. Marketing and advertising should be acknowledged as con...

Surfing the Tsunami emphasizes the need to take artificial intelligence (AI) seriously. AI is not something that you should just read about and put behind you; rather, you should dive into resources and spend both time and money continually seeking out new information about AI. Taking action to ensure that you have a solid understanding and knowledge base and acting on this information is extremely important. The time is now to take action. People tend to view information in one of three ways, as a pessimist, optimist, or realist. The best way to think about AI is from a realist perspective. It is also important to take the time to view the information from another's perspective. Additionally, it is important to dig deeper for data so that you can inform yourself and then use the data to challenge the perspectives of those around you. Using data is always stronger and more convincing than ideas or opinions. Having the right and an adequate amount of data is useful for informing an...

In a recent interview from a current student at benedictine who is also working on her MBA. She offered a very good perspective on working in the real world of marketing. She works for a company that is a leader in IT certifications. She also offered some insight into the job market and related skills.  She is a major driver behind the brand of her company and listed four things that she is currently responsible for: generating leads, nurturing, converting, and repeating the cycle. She states that leads are generated with email addresses that are gained as a results of blog posts, quizzes and giveaways. this information feels very familiar as everyone now requires an email address to obtain information from their sites, or to send 'final results' after you take a quiz. I would say the majority of my inbox is full of emails from companies who have required me to provide it in order to gain access to their content in one way or another.  They also use that email information to n...

Surfing the Tsunami  presents interesting information about self driving vehicles and the way computers learn and process. A fully automated self driving car has been in the works for a while. These self driving test cars are full of sensors and record image after image to learn and process everything that is going on around them. As the cars make mistakes, they improve the system with those mistakes and help prevent them from occurring again int he future. Most places do not allow fully automated self driving cars and still require by law that there is a human at the wheel. In order for AI to work and actually accomplish tasks, there has to be both hardware and software in place. It is impossible to have one without the other if you want something to function properly. The hardware is a series of connected circuits and the software is already preloaded or downloadable by updates through the internet most often, utilizing a computer or device. Software used to be on floppy discs, i...

Ascend Your Start-Up In order to push your business even father than you ever imagined, you may have to sacrifice time and money at the beginning. People may not understand what your dream and goals are, but having a clear vision of your goals and keeping everything in perspective and at the forefront, as well as knowing exactly what you want to accomplish, will help you get there. It does not matter that other people understand you as long as you know where you are going and have a set plan for how to get there.  One of the most important and fundamental things when starting up a business, is always keeping sight of your "why." Why do you want what you want? How can you better plan for and understand what your why is? Having a very clear understanding of why you are trying to launch a new business will help guide every aspect of your planning and keep you motivated to continue on when there are bumps in the road. Another important aspect of planning is branding. It is import...

Guerrilla Marketing is rarely used by the big companies. Smaller businesses/entrepreneurs can capitalize with the use of guerrilla marketing by utilizing tried and true weapons to gain and maintain customers. With consistent use of guerrilla marketing principles a small business has the potential to grow into a much larger business that will have the added tasks that come with managing a much larger team. As the responsibilities expand a lot of the principles will fall by the wayside, but it is important to not let them get away. It is important that a larger business hires the best people that can continue with guerrilla marketing principles to continue to grow the company. Proper marketing is the difference between a successful, growing company and a company that is just surviving. There are seven ways to know if your marketing is ineffective: 1. Sales are driven mostly by price; 2. Customers cannot distinguish my products and services from competitors; 3. I use discounted sales gimm...

Prior to taking this marketing class, I had never even heard of Google Ads. It felt very overwhelming. The provided video was very helpful for walking through the process of signing up and creating a campaign.  For this marketing class we are expected to come up with and run an ad campaign. We are expected to  pay for ads and create a Google domain if we would also like to do that. I will be diving into the creation of a Google domain next, but I was able to create an ad campaign already.  Without knowing what you want to make your campaign about, I could see how it would be hard to sign up for Google Ads generically. I had an idea in mind that kind of 'fell in my lap' so that is what I used to create my new ad campaign. I look forward to sharing some more about my ad campaign on the blog as this class moves forward. Stay tuned.....

Talking about artificial intelligence (AI) in my marketing class this week started me on a path of thinking about my first memories of AI and my own experiences. In my home growing up we did not have a computer or dial-up internet, in fact my parents still to this day do not have a home computer or internet, so my first experiences with technology and computers didn't come until just before college.  I think the first real memory I have of AI was in 2011 on an episode of Jeopardy. On this episode a computer named Watson, that was created by IBM, went up against two of the smartest competitors in the game and was able to win. Watson is a computer system that is able to understand and interact in natural language, but it was never the intention of the creators for him to process like a human brain. He has over 100 algorithms that analyze the question in different ways in order to come up with an answer, hopefully the right one.  Speaking of algorithms, my next experience was w...

Surfing the Tsunami starts off by making some very interesting and pertinent points about artificial intelligence (AI). In a world where people are becoming even more skeptical and believe that they are being manipulated at every turn, it is increasingly possible that they are being "followed." Every click on Facebook to a new add or every google search helps the computer learn a little bit more about who you are and what your preferences are, so they can set up marketing preferences with ads that will be even more personalized and enticing. As AI becomes more common place and increasingly intelligent, it is important that people begin to learn about what it is and possibly even become involved in AI to some extent. Kelsey, the author, refers to the journey that one can pick as three options: adapt, adopt, adept.      Adapt - considered a 'good' AI option where the person stays informed and aware of AI to follow it and        s ee what is happening....

Understanding that Guerrilla Marketing is an ongoing process is essential to being an effective marketer. There is no beginning, middle, and end to Guerrilla marketing. Rather, there is a beginning and middle without an ending point, because the marketing is ever evolving and ongoing. If one is effectively marketing there will be no end.  When focusing on marketing strategies it is important that those strategies are not only tailored to reeling in new customers, but also to serving the needs and continuing to captivate current customers. Existing customers deserve consistent follow-up. Over half of the marketing time should be spent on existing customers. Overall, good marketing is about helping the customer, new or existing, achieve their goals. Marketing at its core is an art form. Being imaginative and presenting an experience, by showing rather than telling customers, will meet their needs much more effectively. The bottom line in marketing is that you are running a business ...