Marketing plan for a new technology and telecommunications website www mobilereview vn

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TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC MỞ TP.HCM

UNIVERSITÉ LIBRE DE BRUXELLES

HO CHI MINH CITY OPEN UNIVERSITY

SOLVAY BRUSSELS SCHOOL

MBMM4

HỒ TRẦN MINH QUANG

MARKETING PLAN FOR A NEW TECHNOLOGY AND
TELECOMMUNICATIONS WEBSITE
WWW.MOBILEREVIEW.VN
MASTER PROJECT
MASTER IN BUSINESS & MARKETING MANAGEMENT

Tutor’s name: NGUYỄN VĂN SƠN

Ho Chi Minh City
(2010)


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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to express my profound gratitude and great appreciation to my advisor

Dr. Nguyen Van Son for his valuable guidance, advice and encouragement throughout
the research study.
Special thanks are extended to my colleagues at Thuy Kim Minh Joint Stock Company
for taking interest and giving valuable suggestions to improve the content of this study
as well as providing me the materials needed for the research.
Taking this opportunity, I would also like to thank all lecturers, mentors, HCMC Open
University staffs and my classmates for their assistance and co-operation during my
two-year’s time at the MBMM program of Solvay Brussels School.
I remain indebted to my family, friends for their valuable encouragement and
unceasing supports in my academic pursuits.


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MASTER PROJECT IN BUSINESS & MARKETING MANAGEMENT
Tutor

: Dr. NGUYỄN VĂN SƠN

Researcher

: HỒ TRẦN MINH QUANG

Title of Project

: Marketing Plan for a New Technology and
Telecommunications Website - www.mobilereview.vn –

Program of Study : MASTER IN BUSINESS & MARKETING MANAGEMENT

TUTOR’S COMMENTS
1. The project embraces high practicality. The objectives of the research are welldefined. The organization is logically performed.
2. The researcher employs a suitable and appropriate research methodology. The
results present some new perspectives which are, to some extent, scientifically
useful. With suitable environment situation analyses, the author has introduced
a number of solutions that are highly comprehensive and feasible.
3. Nevertheless, the project has shown some inevitable limitations: the analyses
are more qualitative. Little quantitative data have been demonstrated.
4. In general, the research successfully meets the requirements (of both content
and form) for a project of Master in Business and Marketing Management.

I hereby propose candidate Ho Tran Minh Quang to defend for his dissertation in front
of Board of Examiners for Master dissertation of Vietnam - Belgium Master Program
HCMC, 9th of December, 2010
TUTOR

DR. NGUYỄN VĂN SƠN


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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ABBREVIATIONS

MEANING

ICT

Information and Communications Technology

IT

Information Technology

NRI

Networked Readiness Index

PR

Public Relations

RSS

Really Simple Syndication

VNPT

Vietnam Post and Telecommunications Group


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LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

FIGURES
Figure 2.1: Top 10 Asian Countries with high Internet user in 2009
Figure 2.2: Mobile Review Magazine - 1st Edition in January 2009 and 2nd Edition in
February 2009

Figure 2.3: Mobile Review Magazine – 8th and 9th Editions in May 2009
Figure 2.4: Mobilereview.vn interface – Main page
Figure 2.5: Design and IT Department structure after rearrangement
Figure 2.6: Content Department structure after rearrangement
Figure 2.7: Structure of Article Posting at Mobilereview.vn
Figure 2.8: Average Daily Page Visits Chart of mobilereview.vn from Nov 2009 to
June 2010
Figure 3.1: Average Daily Page Visits Target on mobilereview.vn in 2011
Figure 4.1: Graphic Design and IT Department structure after enhancement
Figure 4.2: Content Department structure after enhancement
Figure 4.3: Structure of Consultancy Section

TABLES
Table 2.1: Internet Users in Vietnam from May 2003 to May 2010
Table 2.2: List of web traffic rank in Vietnam


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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page ............................................................................................................ i
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................ ii
Tutor’s comments ............................................................................................... iii
List of Abbreviations .......................................................................................... iv
List of Figures and Tables .................................................................................. v
Table of Contents ............................................................................................... vi

INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................ 1
Executive Summary............................................................................................ 1
Vision ................................................................................................................. 2

Scope and Limitation .......................................................................................... 2
Structure of Project ............................................................................................. 3

1

METHODOLOGY ........................................................................................... 4
Situation Analysis ............................................................................................... 4
Planning .............................................................................................................. 5

2

SITUATION ANALYSIS ................................................................................ 7
2.1 Climate Analysis .......................................................................................... 7
2.2 Company Analysis ........................................................................................ 9
2.3 Human Resources Analysis .......................................................................... 13
2.4 Competitors Analysis ................................................................................... 16
2.5 Visitors Analysis .......................................................................................... 18
2.6 SWOT Summary .......................................................................................... 20

3

MARKETING OBJECTIVES ........................................................................ 23


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4

PLANNING ....................................................................................................... 24
4.1 Internal Improvement ................................................................................... 24

4.2 E-Marketing Plans ........................................................................................ 27
4.3 Public Relations Strategies ........................................................................... 29

5

CONTROL ........................................................................................................ 31

6

CONCLUSION ................................................................................................. 32

APPENDIX ....................................................................................................... 33


1

INTRODUCTION

Executive Summary
In recent years, the number of computers use as well as the number of
Internet access in Vietnam has been increasing dramatically. More and more
businesses have their own websites to bring their products, services or information
to internet users. E-marketing is gradually being exploited and applied in the
business environment.
Besides, after the trade embargo was lifted in 1994, Vietnam economy has
been incredibly developing. As the non-stop growth of the economy, the technology
and telecommunications booming has also played an important role in our society.
The fact is that number of people who own telecommunications and digital
gadgets has been increasing rapidly. Most of the urban citizens want to approach
modern technologies which help improving their living condition. Nevertheless, in

Vietnam high-tech market, information of products seems to be untrustworthy no
matter where they come from. Therefore, the needs of gadgets review and technical
consultancy in Vietnam are especially higher than ever.
Understanding the problem of lacking trustworthy information from
consumers, on November of

2009, our website www.mobilereview.vn was

established. The website mobilereview.vn which belongs to Thuy Kim Minh Joint
Stock Company was a website that provide visitors with news, reviews, previews
and other information related to Vietnam and international telecommunications and
digital gadgets industry.
After 7 months, mobilereview.vn did not achieve the results as its owner
wishes. The number of visitors was extremely limited and the daily page visits was


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not as high as our expectation . With this bad situation, we decided to set up a
precise marketing plan for www.mobilereview.vn .

Vision
Our vision is to make mobilereview.vn become the most popular digital
gadgets review and consultancy website in Vietnam, where visitors can find any
information they need about telecommunications market and digital gadget products
in the most convenient way.

Scope and Limitation
To maintain the website mobilereview.vn, we organized our personnel with 4
departments:

_ Graphic Design and IT Department
_ Content Department
_ Sales Department
_ Personnel Department
After 7 months running the website, we find out that number of daily page
visits of the website is not as high as our expectation. This matter was put under
discussion and the final solution was that our website must be renovated and a
detailed marketing plan must be set up to gain as much visitors as possible to
increase our page visits.
For those reasons, our project is a combination of situation research and
analysis, website improvement, e-marketing plans and public relations strategies.
Nevertheless, sales activities is out of the scope of this project.


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Structure of Project
The structure of the project is divided into six parts, focusing on six specific
contents as follows:
1. Methodology
2. Situation Analysis
3. Marketing Strategy
4. Planning
5. Control
6. Conclusion


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1. METHODOLOGY

The project methodology primarily concentrates on evaluating the situation
of

www.mobilereview.vn,

combines

with

research

and

analyses

on

telecommunications and digital gadgets industry to build a specific marketing plan.
SITUATION ANALYSIS:
In this first section of the project, we try to reach to specific information of
each factor which puts very important impacts on our marketing planning process.
There are 5 parts on which we need to highly focus:
+ Climate Analysis :
This important factor shows us a whole view of Vietnam business
environment and gives us an opportunity to understand the rapid growth of the
economy. Moreover, in this section, some statistical figures from the domestic
market were used to help us analyzing the Vietnam telecommunications
development recently.
+ Company Analysis
Overall review of our company situation throughout its operation is

necessary. Some specific data information about mobilereview.vn are also used to
generally evaluate the website status. All these analyses give us a chance to
examine all the advantages and problems on which the company has occurred.
+ Human Resources Analysis
In this part, the personnel situation is evaluated to see how important it
means to the website. Besides, several benefits and problems which occurred when
taking the full advantage of the human resources are also considered.


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+ Competitors Analysis
We also do a general research on our main competitors of mobilereview.vn
to find out their strengths, weaknesses and market positions. Forms and
characteristics of each type of these websites are used as referential data for
analyzing the competitors situation.
+ Visitors Analysis
This is an important part of the analysis process. In this part, we will use the
qualitative analysis method to find out the real problems of our mobile review
website. First, we assume some hypotheses about the problems of the low page
visits status of our website. Then, we use some questionnaire designing techniques
to create a survey which help us understanding the visitors’ needs for information
from both global and domestic telecommunications market.
+ SWOT Summary
After all the analyzing process are completely done, we use SWOT
Summary - a strategic planning method - to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses,
Opportunities and Threats of both internal and external factors, which involved in
our marketing plan project. This part helps us summarizing and classifying all data
which were collected in the previous analyzing processes. SWOT Summary is very
important in the project because the subsequent planning decisions should be

almost derived from SWOT.

PLANNING:
Understanding the situation of our website through its operation and
collecting enough essential information data related to our project, we start to
develop a precise marketing plan for mobilereview.vn based on the objectives
which we had defined.


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In this Planning session, we separate the process into three parts: Internal
Improvement, E-Marketing Plans and Public Relations Strategies
+ Internal Improvement:
In this part of the marketing planning process, we try to improve the human
resources to fulfill the objectives of mobilereview.vn. Besides, facilities
enhancement will also be a very important matter for the website’s renovation.
Moreover,

website’s interface and contents will be reorganized to match the

visitors’ demands.
+ E-Marketing Plans:
E-Marketing plans of mobilereview.vn were defined based on the Concept
of Web 2.0 which give us a chance to approach some modern activities of web
improvement such as using links and banners, supporting RSS (Really Simple
Syndication), exploiting social network, …etc
+ Public Relations Strategies:
Besides the E-Marketing, public relations strategies were also planned to
fulfill the project. Some tools and techniques which related to PR (public relations)

were applied to give the most powerful impact on our planning process.


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2. SITUATION ANALYSIS
2.1 Climate analysis
With the incredible rise of the economic growth rate, especially after the US
Government decided to lift the embargo towards Vietnam in 1994, the living
standard has also been improved and the demands of people become higher. This
was the time for the telecommunications and technology took their role and play an
important part in the society.
According to the General Statistics Office, the latest numbers show that
Vietnam has 157.8 million subscribers, including more than 140 million mobile
subscribers, by the end of July 2010 (46.3 percent higher from the previous year).
Vietnam Post and Telecommunications Group (VNPT), with two mobile
networks named Mobifone and Vinaphone, accounted for 82.8 million subscribers,
including 11.6 million fixed subscribers and 71.2 million mobile subscribers. Other
networks including Viettel, S-Fone, EVN Telecom, Beeline and Vietnamobile had
over 61 million subscribers.
According to statistics, the number of mobile subscribers in Vietnam is
nearly double the country’s population but the experts think that only 50 percent of
the population uses mobile services. However, these numbers also bring a very
bright prospect of the telecommunications and digital gadgets industry in Vietnam.
Moreover, according to The World Economic Forum’s Networked Readiness
Index (NRI) 2009–2010, Vietnam ranked 54th with the score 3.84 amongst 133
countries (70th with the score 3.79 in 2008-2009). Especially, Vietnam rank first
amongst 24 Low-Income countries in the world. NRI measures the propensity for
countries to exploit the opportunities offered by information and communications
technology. It is published annually. The NRI is a composite of three components:

the environment for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) offered by


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a given country or community, the readiness of the community’s key stakeholders
(individuals, businesses, and governments) to use ICT, and finally the usage of ICT
amongst these stakeholders. - Wikipedia Besides, the fast growth of the internet has created a very good environment
for economy development in Vietnam. According to the Internet World Statistic,
from 2000 to May 2010, the internet users in Vietnam has increased incredibly from
200.000 users to 24.269.083 users (12,034.5% increase). Moreover, Vietnam is now
on the Top Ten Countries in Asia which have high number of internet users (rank
7th in 2009). That’s a significant sign for any firm to jump on the e-business
industry nowadays.

Figure 2.1: Top 10 Asian Countries with high Internet user in 2009
(Source: www.internetworldstats.com/stats3.htm)


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On May of

Internet Users

Users per Capita (%)

2003

1.709.478

2.14

2004

4.311.336

5.29

2005

7.184.875

8.71

2006

12.911.637

15.53

2007

16.176.973

19.46

2008

19.774.809

23.50

2009

21.430.463

24.87

2010

24.269.083

28.29

Table 2.1:

Internet Users in Vietnam from May 2003 to May 2010

(Source: www.thongkeinternet.vn)

2.2 Company Analysis
Thuy Kim Minh Joint Stock Company works on communication, advertising
and publishing industry. Understanding the fast increase of the mobile phones
market and catching the new trend of telecommunications industry, in January
2009, Thuy Kim Minh published a monthly magazine named “Mobile Review”
(Trải Nghiệm Di Động) which mainly focus on providing information on both
international and domestic telecommunications market.
After the first edition which was published on 10th of January 2009, we
received many positive reactions from our readers and the turnover was as high as

our expectation. Besides, our sales team’s efficient activities which had been set up
5 months before January 2009 gave us very good opportunities to do business
directly with other telecommunications and mobile phones firms who want to put
monthly advertising on our new magazine. Moreover, with a well-prepared
manpower and data resources, we had driving force to give a decision that our
Mobile Review Magazine should be bimonthly instead of monthly. Therefore, from


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February 2009, Mobile Review Magazine has been published with 2 editions a
month.

Figure 2.2: Mobile Review Magazine - 1st Edition in January 2009 and 2nd
Edition in February 2009

Figure 2.3: Mobile Review Magazine – 8th and 9th Editions in May 2009


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With the goal of the magazine is to bring updated news and information of
the telecommunications and digital gadgets market to the readers, we mainly focus
on our content department with the high priority. From 1 editors, 4 permanent
reporters and 4 part-time reporters in the beginning, after 4 months, we developed
the manpower of this department to 1 editors, 5 permanent reporters and 6 parttime reporters. With this professional qualification personnel who were carefully
trained from the beginning, the Mobile Review Magazine could almost keep pace
with the rapid growth of the telecommunications market on both international and
domestic field.
Besides, the Layout and Graphic design is also an important department of

our human resources. There were 3 designers and one head-designer in this
department. These 4 employees handled all the works related to design and layout.
However, all photo shootings for the magazine’s cover page were undertaken by our
third-party studio before transferring the end-products to our design team.
Although Mobile Review Magazine had been well-prepared at the beginning
of its operation, with the particular characteristic of a biweekly paper-based
magazine, updated news and detailed consultancy are somehow limited. Daily news
of the telecommunications market could not be brought out promptly and a very
important demand of the consumers - gadgets consultancy - could hardly be
satisfied by our paper-based magazine. Moreover, with the huge expansion of the
internet in Vietnam, we started to think of a more convenient way to reach to our
readers who always thirst for the trustworthy and updated information from the
telecommunications and digital gadgets market – a new online Mobile Review
Magazine –
For that reason, our website www.mobilereview.vn was created. It was
designed and developed by BaoSo Software company on September of 2009. On
November of 2009, the website www.mobilereview.vn was officially launched. Our
vision was that in the next 2 years, we could make mobilereview.vn becoming one


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of the most popular online magazine in the telecommunications and digital gadgets
industry.

Figure 2.4: Mobilereview.vn interface – Main page
Mobilereview.vn contained two main functions which were News and
Mobile Phone Review. In the News section, we separate it into 3 sub-sections:
_ Mobile Phones news
_ Other Digital Gadgets news

_ Telecommunications Market news


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All these 3 sub-sections were daily updated to give to our visitors a whole
view of the international and domestic market. 60% of the articles in those 3 subsections were compiled from foreign sources such as CNET, GSM ARENA,
PHONE ARENA, ENGADGET, GIZMODO etc… The other 40% were the news
from Vietnam telecommunications market such as updating price, promotion, new
phone launching events, etc
In Mobile Phones Review section, we tried our best to publish 4 review
articles a week. Most of these review articles were compiled and revised from
CNET, GSM ARENA and PHONE ARENA, which were very famous mobile
phone review sources on the internet.
We thought that with updated news and detailed mobile phone review
articles, we were about to catch the visitors’ demands and our website could attract
more and more visitors. However, without a precise marketing plan at the start, after
7 months running the website, some problems occurred. Daily page visits was not
increasing as much as our expectation. With that unexpected result, on May 2010,
the company decided to do something to improve the page’s situation and a specific
marketing plan for mobilereview.vn was brought out.

2.3 Human Resources analysis
Human Resources plays a very important role on the success of our
company. When Thuy Kim Minh decided to launch www.mobilereview.vn, the
existing personnel was practically unable to fulfill the objectives of both paper
based magazine and the online magazine. The rearrangement of manpower and
new staffs recruitment were put into priority.
First of all, the Graphic Design department which contains 1 head-designer
and 3 designers needs to be expanded. One Web Administrator and one Graphic

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Designer were hired to strengthen the ability of this department. Therefore, the
department changed its name into Graphic Design and IT Department which handle
all the works from both Mobile Review Magazine and Mobilereview.vn. However,
those 4 designers and the new web administrator were rearranged to share the works
between the paper-based magazine and the website. Our former head-designer
would be responsible for both magazine and the website. One Designers moved
from the magazine business to the website business and the Web Administrator’s
duty was entirely on the mobilereview.vn .

Figure 2.5:

Graphic Design and IT Department structure after rearrangement

About the Content Department, there had been 1 editors, 5 permanent
reporters and 6 part-time reporters before the website mobilereview.vn operated.
When we ran our website on November 2009, we decided to recruit 1 more
permanent reporter and 2 part-time reporters to ensure both paper-based and online
magazine could work smoothly.
Same as Graphic Design and IT Department, the personnel rearrangement
were also in progress. The editor then covered up all the contents being posted on
both magazine and the website. 2 permanent reporters and 5 part-time reporters


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officially moved to the mobilereview.vn team for fully handling the website’s

content.

Figure 2.6:

Content Department structure after rearrangement

Due to the full capacity of qualified personnel and a reasonable re-organizing
progress, Mobile Review Magazine and the website mobilereview.vn were both in
good situation. Our magazine was still published twice a month without any major
problems. Especially, with the close coordination between all related personnel, the
website mobilereview.vn had a quite impressive start.

Figure 2.7:

Structure of Article Posting at Mobilereview.vn


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2.4 Competitors analysis
Follow the incredible growth of the Vietnam telecommunications and the
huge expansion of the mobile phone market in the first decade of the 21st century,
many websites which related to this field were founded.
At the very first moment of the internet development in Vietnam, most of
those websites were created by some mobile phone retailers who want to use their
website as an effective way to make their brand getting closer to the consumers. The
most typical example for this kind of website was www.muabandtdd.com which
belongs to Mai Nguyen Mobile Company. Besides, the Vietnamese version
websites from some mobile phone multinationals

such as Nokia, Samsung,

Motorola etc.. also played an important role on the product’s information providing
industry.
Later, with the development of the internet speed, some online shopping
webpage such as www.raovatdtdd.com, www.batda.com were launched and made
some impacts on the market at that time. In 2004, www.5giay.vn, a new online
shopping website based on the community e-forum format was launched and gave a
huge effect on the telecommunications and digital gadgets market at that time.
Now, at the time of telecommunications booming and the better network
infrastructure in Vietnam, many online newspaper about telecommunications and
digital gadgets were launched such as www.sohoa.net, www.pcworld.com.vn,
www.mobilenet.vn

etc…

All

these

new

websites

have

made

the

telecommunications and digital gadgets market more and more competitive.
We can separate all these competitors into 4 type of websites which all
related to the telecommunications and digital gadgets field: Online shopping
websites, E-Forum websites, Online Magazine websites and websites from Mobile
Phones Multinationals.


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Table 2.2:

List of traffic web rank in Vietnam (Source: www.alexa.com)

a. Online Shopping website: Examples of this type of website are
www.5giay.vn and www.raovatdtdd.com . These websites are the places where
sellers and consumers meet and do their selling and purchasing activities. It creates
a very convenient online environment for people who want to sell or buy digital
gadgets. However, the weakness of this type of website is that the website can not
guarantee the secure transactions because the online payment method is not popular
in Vietnam. Besides, consumers could hardly find the necessary and trustworthy
information from these kind of websites.
b. E-Forum website:

www.vozforums.com,

www.tinhte.vn and

www.vnphoto.net are the examples. These websites were built based on the e-forum
format and their strength is providing a lot of information about the products, user’s
instruction, technical issues, gadgets review etc… However, the main disadvantage

of those competitors is that they are not popular for all people. Those websites ask


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for more than amateur consumers and most of the members of them were people
who have good knowledge about digital gadgets.
c. Websites from Mobile Phones Multinationals: The advantage of these
websites is brilliant interface which can easily attract consumers or visitors.
However, too much exaggerative and commercial information of the products
make these competitors become more untrustworthy to the visitors. They can go to
these websites as a reference but not the important source of information in which
they can trust.
d. Online Magazine website: examples of this type of websites are
www.sohoa.net, www.pcworld.com.vn, www.mobilenet.vn etc…This type of online
magazine gives visitors very rich information about the market, new products,
products’ price, products’ specification, promotion event etc…However, with
unaesthetic and simple interface, these websites find it difficult to attract visitors.
Moreover, ambiguous and unspecific information from those websites can not
Satisfy visitors whose demands are trustworthy, precise and promptly information.

2.5 Visitors analysis
Visitors play an very important role on the existence of a website, especially
an information providing website like mobilereview.vn . To evaluate the
attractiveness of our website to the visitors, we use the average daily page visits as
the main criteria. At the end of November 2009, after more than 3 weeks launching
the page, the situation were remarkable. The average of 385 page visits per day on
the first month gave us a considerable encouragement. In the next three months, the
average daily page visits increase regularly from 580 on December 2009 to 824 on
February 2010. However, In the next 4 months, the increase from 880 average daily

page visits on March 2010 to 1015 average daily page visits on June 2010 was not