Infographic Resume

I have created my infographic resume.

You can find it here:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2EvqD_BfBNgOUxvTS1QT2VGMG8/edit

I decided to incorporate my experience, education, certifications, and technical skills into this infographic resume. I used Microsoft Publisher to create the infographic resume. I wanted my resume to be easy to understand and highlight certain criteria. Hope you enjoy and let me know any changes that can be made to improve it!

Monetizing Social Media

I think that monetizing Social Media is the only way to be able to capture the network effect, while still having a profitable business. Social Media such as Facebook needs to be used by many users to make other people want to use it. If Facebook was not free, the adoption rate would be much less than it currently is. You would not want to pay to try Facebook when you did not even know if you liked it or not. By using the advertising revenue model, Facebook captures revenue based directly on the number of the users on their website. It is a good revenue model to be able to monetize this form of social media, without requiring the users to a premium for their service. I am more comfortable with seeing advertisements on my Facebook page rather than having to pay for the use of the website.

In terms of monetizing Social Media for the social media owners, I think that there are other routes instead of advertising. One of the routes could be a freemium/premium account system where users can pay a premium to access additional features and no advertisements, but other uses can use the free service while still having advertisements. This could be done so that people have the option to remove advertisements from their viewing.


Monetizing Social media can also be done by being able to create person profiles to have ultimate recommendations for them. This seems to have privacy concerns, but most social media websites are already collecting enormous amounts of data on each user. If they can sell this data, it may be worthwhile to continue collecting the data.

Another important aspect that we need to consider is how can people and businesses monetize social media? Apart from advertisements on their websites, another important way to monetize social media is to build strong relationships with clients and users. Creating fan pages can be a useful way to stay in touch with fans and help to lead to purchase sin the future. This is directly relevant to creating brand awareness and customer loyalty. These are very important aspects for a business to remain healthy. The business can end up increasing traffic and sales by using social media effectively, which therefore would monetize social media. This would definitely be worthwhile since you are investing little time and effort in social media to greatly increase the brand loyalty and awareness.

Audience engagement is key when using social media as a means of transferring new product information. The audience should be greatly enthused about the products that you have to offer so that you can have better sales and promotions. Some of the ways to increase audience engagement is to provide content specific to the audience you are targeting. With the correct content, the audience is more engaged and eager to learn more about the products in the future. You can also try to engage the audience with different promotions that are targeted for that company. I think that audience engagement would be worthwhile also since you would have a loyal following of customers.

Another great way to attract people to your business is to build applications or apps for users to use. This allows them to be able to easily go to your Facebook page or blog to learn more about the business. It does cost money to build these apps, but it is a worthwhile investment if you can retrieve additional customers.

Monetizing Social Media seems to be the next big thing in terms of the online world. There have been many different phases of the Internet, and social media seems to be here to stay. It is very important for companies to be able to monetize social media, and for social media to earn the revenue it needs.

Balanced Scorecards

Balanced Scorecards are a very important way for businesses to understand how they are doing at different processes and procedures. As we learned in class, companies need to create scorecards that can measure their performance.

Southwest Airlines was one of the primary examples that we discussed in class. They had a very useful balanced scorecard where they had separate functions that they rated and wanted to see performance on.

A balanced scorecard is built to align a businesses activities with the vision of the company. It allows the company to determine how they are doing and gives them an idea on how to fix problem areas. Here is an example of a balanced dashboard:

Source: http://www.balancedscorecard.org/Portals/0/images/balancedscorecard.jpg

The above figure shows four different perspectives including financial, customer, learning and growth, and internal business processes. Each has a specific focus and is rated on different criteria. The company needs to determine how to rate the specific process.

To learn more about balanced scorecards, visit the following link:

http://www.balancedscorecard.org/BSCResources/AbouttheBalancedScorecard/tabid/55/Default.aspx

GOMC Presentations

This week we had our Google Online Marketing Challenge presentations. It was very interesting to be able to watch all the presentations from various groups. Different groups were using various techniques and strategies throughout the campaign that showed me that there were multiple ways to use the Google 250$ for the campaigns.

One of the most interesting ideas that I had not thought about before was that certain clicks can be worth more than others. For example, the Honey Badgers team had good results with total conversions, but it was very impressive that two of their clicks made the clients very happy. One of the clicks helped the organization by setting up an interview with a today show. This click was worth way more than the total Google campaign cost for the client.

Another thing that I learned from the judges was that it was very important to have a slide that clearly states what the pre campaign goals were vs the post campaign results. I think this is a good practice to have in any presentation since it lets the audience know exactly what happened during the campaign. Several of the teams had slides like these and I think it could have helped our presentation.

The judges also illustrated that it was very important to know what the client wants from the campaign. It is not important to only know about the CTR, CPC, and other Google Adwords metrics, but it is important to understand how these metrics help the organization.

Return on Investment seemed to be a very integral part in determining if the Adwords campaign should be used in the future. For profit companies was much easier to determine the ROI since they know exactly how much they earn per sale. The non profits need to do more estimating to have a better understanding of the return on investment.

The GOMC was a very useful exercise that helped improve many skills including project management, client interaction, and new tools. Google Adwords and Google Analytics were useful tools to learn to understand more about online marketing.

OBIEE

Oracle Business Intelligence  Enterprise Edition is a very important part for most organizations to generate business intelligence from their data. I have had hands on experience with SQL server and Oracle and I have noticed that most small to mid size companies use SQL Server whereas larger companies push for Oracle or Teradata. Oracle is a very scalabe and robust database management system that can be the back end for many large applications, such as SAP.

Some of the benefits of OBIEE include:

1. Comprehensive BI functionality built on a unified infrastructure- This reduces cost and increases productivity
2. Powerful User experience - OBIEE has a task oriented navigation framework
3. Unified business model
4. Hot-pluggable - integrate with all popular ETL tools, databases, and applications
5. Best-in class scalability, reliability, and performance

 Source: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/enterprise-edition-066546.html

Oracle's analytics are one of the most important parts of OBIEE. It allows users to quickly analyze data if the correct data warehouse is created. Dashboards and reports are viewed on a web browser rather than an application. This is a unique advantage that OBIEE has over some of its competitors. I have used Oracle 11g and this version has the ability to pivot on the browser. Pivoting on the browser is an awesome feature that should not be overlooked. Many users have asked for this feature for many years but it has not been a plausible solution due to the overhead, but Oracle has been able to create a strong infrastructure to make it possible.

Source: http://obieeblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/011209-1851-obieeonwind81.png

 

Source: http://www.oramoss.com/images/blogposts/ORCL_to_TEST_AllWorking.jpg 

These are some sample images of the websites for Oracle OBIEE. University of Arizona recently upgraded from Oracle 10g to 11g.

Dimensional Modeling is an important part when attempting to create business intelligence out of pure data. In order to understand dimensional modeling, we first need to differentiate the difference between OLAP and OLTP. OLAP is online analytical processing, and is used for analysis. OLAP needs to have more historical information so that you can understand trends and prior data. OLTP is online transaction processing where you record information and insert it into databases. OLTP has a lot of data manipulation in terms of updating, inserting, and deleting rows in databases. On the other hand OLAP only needs read access to the data since there is not manipulation in OLAP.

Below is an image to describe the difference visually:

Source: http://datawarehouse4u.info/OLTP-vs-OLAP.html

Another key difference that this article mentions is that OLTP has a more normalized database structure, whereas OLAP will have less normalized relations. This brings us to dimensional modeling with various types of schema.

Star Schema requires fact tables and dimension tables. A dimension can categorize data so that users can interact with the data warehouse in different ways. Dimensions are typically small with not too many rows. A fact table is created by having measures or numberic facts that want to be analyzed, and multiple foreign keys to connect to the various dimensions. Fact tables will continue growing and can be very large, which will make processing time longer.

Source: http://oracle-online-help.blogspot.com/2006/11/star-vs-snowflake-schema.html

Snowflake schema is a more complex version of a Star schema where the dimensions are more normalized. Fact tables connect to the dimensions similarly to star schema, but then they can also connect to dimensions through dimensions, which can be defined through various relationships.

Source: http://datawarehouse4u.info/OLTP-vs-OLAP.html

Data warehouses can use a hybrid approach of star and snowflake schema if they want to normalize only certain dimensions. This can be beneficial so that the structure is not too complex, but allows the user to do the necessary analysis.

As illustrated, dimensional modeling is an important part of data warehousing and the schema defines the structure. Analysis is much better with a correct data warehouse instead of using the database structures to perform similar analysis. I have been using SQL Server 2005/2008 to develop data warehouses and specific cubes. I am currently looking into SQL 2012 to see the additional features and functionality that it offers. 

This week in Business Intelligence we had an introduction to understanding the necessary steps to get to dashboards, reports, and various analytics. Cleaning the data is a very time consuming component of data warehousing, but you need to have clean data in order to have useful analysis. Giving bad recommendations due to bad data will not be useful.

We were tasked with using Ataqamma to perform data profiling. However, there are many tools out there, such as Informatica's data profiling tool. More information can be found here:

http://www.informatica.com/us/data-profiling/

The slogan that they use is: "Increase Confidence in Your Enterprise Data with Informatica Data Profiling Solutions"

Data profiling is when you try to understand the data in various tables or sources to have a better understanding of the data characteristics. Some of the primary findings that I had were the different formats that people enter when there are no constraints, and null values. These problems need to be addressed for the future inputs, and corrected immediately for the past inputs before proceeding with the business intelligence motive.

Extract, transform, and load is an important part that takes source data, makes the necessary transformations and adjustments, and loads it to a database. Here is a general picture:

ETL is a very important part to ensure that you can do the proper analysis. Once the data has been loaded, we can use different ways of analyzing the data. The key findings are found in the analysis stage, but this is a minor time requirement in the overall process. Analyzing dirty data will lead to incorrect decisions, and may be worse than any business intelligence at all.