Online Marketing

Online Marketing

Online marketing refers to a set of powerful tools and methodologies used for promoting products and services through the Internet. Online marketing includes a wider range of marketing elements than traditional business marketing due to the extra channels and marketing mechanisms available on the Internet. Online marketing is also known as Internet marketing, Web marketing, digital marketing and search engine marketing (SEM).

 Types of Online Marketing

1.      Content marketing
2.        Social media marketing
3.         Search engine marketing
4.      Email marketing

1.      Online marketing can deliver benefits such as:

• Growth in potential
• Reduced expenses
• Elegant communications
• Better control
• Improved customer service
• Competitive advantage

The broad online marketing spectrum varies according to business requirements. Effective online marketing programs leverage consumer data and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Online marketing connects organizations with qualified potential customers and takes business development to a much higher level than traditional marketing/advertising. Online marketing synergistically combines the Internet's creative and technical tools, including design, development, sales and advertising, while focusing on the following primary business models: 

• E-commerce
• Lead-based websites
• Affiliate marketing
• Local search

Online marketing has several advantages, including:

·    Low costs: Large audiences are reachable at a fraction of traditional advertising budgets,   allowing businesses to create appealing consumer ads.

·      Flexibility and convenience: Consumers may research and purchase products and services at their leisure.

·        Analytics: Efficient statistical results are facilitated without extra costs.

·      Multiple options: Advertising tools include pay-per-click advertising, email marketing and local search integration (like Google Maps).

·      Demographic targeting: Consumers can be demographically targeted much more effectively in an online rather than an offline process.

The main limitation of online marketing is where goods are being sold, the lack of tangibility means that consumers are unable to try out, or try on items they might wish to purchase. Generous return policies are the main way to circumvent such buyer apprehension.
Online marketing has outsold traditional advertising in recent years and continues to be a high-growth industry.

(Source – Techopedia)

Learning Analytics

Learning is a product of interaction. Depending on the epistemology underlying the learning design, learners might interact with instructors and tutors, with content and/or with other people.

Many educators expend enormous amounts of effort to designing their learning to maximize the value of those interactions. Regardless of the approach taken, a series of questions consistently arises: How effective is the course? Is it meeting the needs of the students? How can the needs of learners be better supported? What interactions are effective? How can they be further improved?

Traditional approaches to answering these questions have involved student evaluation, the analysis of grades and attrition rates, and instructor perceptions most often gathered at the end of a course. Consequently the evaluation and analysis of learning has suffered from: a limited quantity of data busy students and instructors are willing to share at the end of a course; the limited quality of this self-reported, retrospective data; and a significant delay (normally at least one semester) between the events being reported and the implementation of an intervention. As an increasingly large number of educational resources move online, however, an unprecedented amount of data surrounding these interactions is becoming available. This is particularly true with respect to distance education in which a much higher proportion of interactions are computer-mediated. For example, the amount of time reading content online can be easily captured by an LMS/CMS. When, why and with whom learners are connecting is also logged in discussion forums and social networking sites.

Recently, interest in how this data can be used to improve teaching and learning has also seen unprecedented growth and the emergence of the field of learning analytics. In other fields, analytics tools already enable the statistical evaluation of rich data sources and the identification of patterns within the data.

Learning analytics is an emerging field in which sophisticated analytic tools are used to improve learning and education. It draws from, and is closely tied to, a series of other fields of study including business intelligence, web analytics, academic analytics, educational data mining, and action analytics.

Moreover, learning analytics is focused on building systems able to adjust content, levels of support and other personalized services by capturing, reporting, processing and acting on data on an ongoing basis in a way that minimizes the time delay between the capture and use of data. Thus, in contrast to current evaluation processes which use the results from one semester to inform improvements in the next, learning analytics seeks to combine historical and current user data to predict what services specific users may find useful now.

Thus, the study and advancement of learning analytics involves:

(1) the development of new processes and tools aimed at improving learning and teaching for individual students and instructors, and (2) the integration of these tools and processes into the practice of teaching and learning.

(By-Tanya Elias in Learning Analytics: The Definitions, the Processes, and the Potential )

Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing

The fairly new concept of Cloud Computing has hit the world of business with a ‘BANG’, and is being adopted, not only by Small and Medium sized Businesses but also by Large Enterprises. This is rapid shift towards this emerging technology is due to its ability to cut down IT costs by many folds, and the allowance it gives to enterprises to focus their energies and resources to their core business. In this article, I will attempt to explain, briefly and without the use of a lot of technical terms, what cloud computing is, and how it is helping businesses do what they are created to do.

The ‘CLOUD’ in Cloud Computing

If you have an email account like Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo-mail etc., then you are already using cloud services being offered to you by your email service provider. The Cloud is a collection of all the servers and IT infrastructure being utilized by your email service provider to manage your email account and store its content. Since you do not have any physical evidence of your email being managed and handled, yet it seems to be happening, we say that it is happening somewhere in the Cloud. The Cloud of servers, functioning in in large datacenters, you may never know where. The benefit of having an email account with these service providers is that it is completely free for you, the user. There is no physical equipment, apart from a laptop, desktop or mobile device that you need to have, along with an internet connection, to access your email.

Adding ‘COMPUTING’ to the Cloud

Like with email providers, Cloud Computing service providers also maintain their own servers and complete IT infrastructures residing at various datacenters through which they are able to offer Cloud Computingsolutions to their customers. UNLIKE email providers, however, Cloud Computing service providers rent out not just email capabilities, but entire virtual desktops and servers, software, data storage capabilities, data security, disaster recovery and management solutions and a whole bunch of other stuff, which the user may access from any place, at any time, using any desktop, laptop or mobile device, along with an internet connection.

Cloud Computing Possibilities

Imagine being able to access your own desktop, and all the data stored thereon, while sitting at a train station or an airport. Imagine hundreds of your employees having access to their own personalized desktops and all the information that they require, from anywhere, without actually ever owning a single physical machine. Imagine giving access to software to all your employees, without ever worrying about maintain a record of the number of licenses you have available. Imagine utilizing all of these services for a nominal monthly charge, and being able to add or reduce their number as and when required. Imagine being rid of the increasingly high costs of maintaining a complete IT infrastructure, along with skilled IT labor to manage the infrastructure, forever. These are a few of the many possibilities of utilizing Cloud Computing services. Cloud Computing providers host these services on their own IT infrastructure, which is maintained by their team of highly skilled IT professionals and rent them out to you, relieving you of the HUGE IT costs and headaches. In a nutshell, due to the reason mentioned above, it is the opinion of this writer, that Cloud Computing is THE complete IT solution, and the way to the future for any enterprise, regardless of its size, scale and nature of business.

(SOURCE www.dincloud.com)

WEB AND SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS

 

Within the greater definition of media analytics, some specific forms of this kind of service are becoming prevalent. One of these is Web analytics, where those evaluating a web media piece look at its specific effect on a target audience through quantifiable data like original views, location of ISP addresses, and much more. Web analytics may also look at the results of embedded items like Google ad words.

Web analytics consultants, for example, focus on how to improve or upgrade an existing website or other Internet initiative. This can include creating new online forms or applications, installing shopping carts, or otherwise customizing a site to provide for personal data entry. Other elements include tracking customer events and automating some of the market research that helps business leaders chart a future course for a company.

Web analytics consulting companies often rely on specific developer skill sets for using traditional computer programming languages to work on client websites. Developers may work on creating a whole new customer interface on a webpage from scratch. They may also be involved in designing add-ons where new programming language enhances what an existing webpage can do. Programming knowledge and familiarity with common web interfaces is critical for this kind of work.

Another new part of the field of media analytics is called social media analytics. Social media is a term for very recent innovations in the online and wireless world, including sites like MySpace and Facebook, as well as alternative communication methods such as Twitter, generally enabled by smart phone wireless technologies. Companies are exploring the marketing opportunities of these platforms with social media analytics that focus on how new media can help promote a company or product or sell goods or services to a consumer audience.

Social media consulting and analytics services will often focus more on how a message is deployed within a target audience. Lots of media relies on pre-existing programmed technology. Consultants and social media analytics tend to look at how these free-form technologies can be customized and used by a business for profit through better consumer outreach.

Hadoop - An Analytical Tool

What is Hadoop?

I often came across this term while attending the Business Analytics classes and especially when we talk about Big Data. So I have collected some information about Hadoop from internet. First of all what is Hadoop?Hadoop is a free, Java-based programming framework that supports the processing of large data sets in a distributed computing environment. It is part of the Apache project sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation.( by Margaret Rouse )

                                       

This yellow elephant image, is the copyrighted icon which depicts Hadoop and it is also interesting to know that Hadoop was the name of the founder’s (Doug Cutting’s) son’s toy elephant.
As it is rightly said that need is the mother of invention. Hadoop was invented out of a need to process big data, because the amount of generated data was continuing to increase rapidly. As the Web and other sources generated more and more information, it was becoming a challenging job to index the content, so Google created MapReduce in 2004, then Yahoo! created Hadoop as a way to implement the MapReduce function. Hadoop is now an open-source Apache implementation project.

When Mike Olson (Cloudera CEO ) was asked he told that the Hadoop platform was designed to solve problems where you have a lot of data — perhaps a mixture of complex and structured data — and it doesn’t fit nicely into tables. It’s for situations where you want to run analytics that are deep and computationally extensive, like clustering and targeting. Hadoop applies to a bunch of markets. In finance, if you want to do accurate portfolio evaluation and risk analysis, you can build sophisticated models that are hard to jam into a database engine. But Hadoop can handle it. In online retail, if you want to deliver better search answers to your customers so they’re more likely to buy the thing you show them, that sort of problem is well addressed by this platform. 

Quantitative v/s Qualitative data

Quantitative data :Quantitative data can be defined as the data which gives the information in some quantitative form or in measurable form. We can write the quantitative data in the form of numbers (example your height, weight, age etc.) and can apply various mathematical and statistical formulas on it which can help in business decision making at various levels.This type of data is closed-ended and is generally easy to analyse. It is important to note that Quantitative data can be discrete or continuous.

Qualitative data :On the other hand Qualitative data can be defined as the data which gives the information in the form of some descriptions in a language rather than in numbers. This type of data can be observed but cannot be measured (example – color, taste, appearance etc.) but it can also help in taking business decisions under various circumstances.This type of data is open-ended and is more difficult for analysis. It is interesting to know that different analysts can draw different conclusions from the same qualitative data.

Drawbacks and Importance :Quantitative data can provide information about large size of population but does not provide in depth knowledge about a particular entity, so it is backed or supported by qualitative data. Where qualitative data can provide information about a particular thing or issue but is criticized for its unreliability, so it is supported by quantitative data. That is why both qualitative and quantitative type of data is used in any research. 

SCIENCE WHICH WE DON'T KNOW

SCIENCE – A REALITY ?

Einstein and Newton always scared us by their scientific laws and discoveries. Perhaps Dr. Jackaul (a character in Shaktimaan) is the only scientist we enjoyed so much. Dr. Jackaul as a scientist had created so many things and creatures (like Plastica) to destroy our favourite superhero Shaktimaan. But nevertheless we will never forget his contribution in the field of Science.

But have you ever thought that what is Science? You might be thinking that what a silly question I am asking to you people. We know that “Science is a field in which we find the truths, realities and the unsolved mysteries of the Universe.” This is what I was also thinking before I came to know another interesting view point about the definition of Science(mentioned in The Goal-By E.M. Goldratt)."Science for the vast majority of respectable scientists is not about finding the secrets of nature or even about truths. Science is simply the method we use to try and postulate a minimum set of assumptions that can explain, through a straightforward logical derivation, the existence of many phenomena of nature.”

In simple words it is a field in which we make some assumptions to explain the existence of various natural phenomena. Goldratt in his book gives an example:-

• The Law of Conservation of Energy of physics is not truth. It is just an assumption that is valid in explaining a tremendous amount of natural phenomena. On the other hand, it can be disproved by just a single phenomenon, which cannot be explained by this assumption. This disproving does not detract from the validity of the assumption. It just highlights the need or even the existence of another assumption that is more valid. This is the case with the assumption of the conservation of energy which was replaced by Einstein's more global-more valid postulation of the conservation of energy and mass. But it is true that Einstein's assumption is not true to the same extent that the previous one was not "true".

      We can understand this from another example also:-

• Earth’s Magnetic Field due to which everything comes down when we throw it up in the sky. Although none of us has seen that magnet but we still agree with it. This is just because this assumption is valid in explaining the occurrence of a natural phenomenon.

Both these examples present a different view point. What we will call this in management terms, is it Out of Box Thinking? Or Common Sense? I don’t know, but I personally think that most of the things that we tagged as “Out of Box Thinking” are nothing but a matter of “Common Sense” which as a matter of fact is not so common.

I hope this will change your perception about Science and you will also start thinking from this view point.