Your own Web Analytics

More and more internet users nowadays have taken the Internet as a means to express themselves verbally, thus, more and more users take the time to read about those comments. From a person looking at the situation in a two-dimensional aspect, this does not necessarily do damage or strengthen brand image, but, for a person who thinks outside the box, it does. From posts in networking sites such as Facebook, twitter or multiply to blogs such as these, each one is valuable data for companies to exploit. Now, according to yahoo, even job interviews and screenings include the web (social networking sites) as a means to know their applicants. If you take into consideration what was mentioned previously, if one person can be criticized from what is spotted in their sites, what people say about them, etc., what more from those companies/establishments that are so big they stand out like sore thumbs in the internet? Web Analytics will be the means for companies to harvest those articles and blogs about them and either do damage control or strengthen it.

Just to refresh our memories, Web Analytics as defined by Wikipedia is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. Saying that Web Analytics is useful is an understatement if you look at it 5-10 years from now. Some free Web Analytics tools include Google Analytics and Clicky. Google Analytics is the most popular free web analytics tool being that, according to users of Google Analytics, its easy to use and easy to install. Universities such as De La Salle University-Manila may find this useful being that in the US, Web Analytics, according to David Aponovich in his article in PRWeb, is a key investment by universities and colleges. Primarily because in the US, nearly half their applicants apply online, thus resulting to an awareness of more budget allocation for online marketing. It also states in the article that those Universities that have minimal budget may turn to free web analytics tools such as the ever so popular, Google Analytics. But, just because it's the most popular that doesn't mean it's the right choice. There are a lot of factors to consider when integrating Web Analytics to the system, especially to universities. First of all, Philippines as a country is not as submerged to the web as the US. Internet access is cheap but not everyone is computer literate. De La Salle University caters to a more, with lack of a subtler word, "privileged" group of individuals, thus marking down the list to the minority of the population of the Philippines. But that doesn't mean that De La Salle University should not invest in Web Analytics, I believe they should, as those who get ahead in the competition, have a better chance to stay ahead. Innovation is the key to success and web analytics is the next step to maintaining a competitive edge.

Still, a good first step is what's required for all things to fall into place. Just because of an awakening, that doesn't mean that we should rush into whichever direction. Planning is the best first step to make things possible. As mentioned awhile ago, the mentality should not be "It's popular, therefore, it's the right choice." but also, it neither should be "It's the most expensive tool money can buy, therefore, it IS the right choice!". What the main thought should be "What are the company's strengths and weaknesses and which tool will allow the company to capitalize on its strengths and minimize its weaknesses." Next, is knowing the compatibility of the web analytics tool to the company's system. This will ensure not only efficiency, but also less costs in implementation. In this step, departments involved with web exposure should know the system and tools as well as know the other departments involved.

Now, with web analytics tools in place, De La Salle University now not only know about their people (students, alumni, faculty), but also those who aspire to be part of De La Salle University. This meaning, those who search the web about De La Salle University, those who post blogs about the university, those who check the websites and run through what the website has to offer, all these information are available with the use of web analytics tools. These web analytics tools can now help with the decision making process of De La Salle University based on the information gathered. This alone shows how beneficial web analytics tools are. Now, I'm not qualified or knowledgeable enough to hand out a recommendation to which a university as prestigious as De La Salle University, but all I can say is that web analytics tools are the next big thing for De La Salle University which they should seriously consider, if not, start on preparing on for their benefit.

Submitted to Mr. Ramon Duremdes Jr for our DATAMIN class
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Your online reputation - important or not?

What is it to you if people talk about your site in the internet? Should you really care if they say negative or positive things about your brand? Should you even take the time to consider if what is in your site, the content, be as detailed for transparency or just a basic structure for background for the reader? Personally, I question that myself. I really don't understand why people take the time in front of a laptop or PC taking hours and asking the people around them "What do you think about this?". But then, it hit me, maybe I'm just stuck in the Stone Age era thinking about the whole idea in a 2D manner. Just like that line in transformers, there's more to it than meets the eye. Brand reputation is just as much important, or even more important, than being visible to the public. It actually goes hand in hand. Put it this way, your brand is visible to the public, they know it's there, they have seen the site and actually liked the display images, they just don't mind your brand- what then is your output? Nada. Zilch. Zero. How about looking at it in the other direction, you have all the brand reputation you can ever imagine, the big time of all the brands, and yet the public doesn't know you exist online, what now is to become of you? Maybe your only clientele would be the people who are stuck in the Stone Age era just like me. And thinking about it, business/ your brand should be visible and reputable in all areas, period.

It's scary to realize that anyone can just write about you online or post pictures about your company online any day of the week and there's a 50/50 chance its going to be something you like or, to put it simply, your worst nightmare. Aside from the, communication via word-of-mouth is influenced 53% of the time from work related purchases. And as far as monitoring is concerned, only 20% of established corporations have a formal process for monitoring what is written or posted about them. For those applying to companies, 78% of executive recruiters routinely use search engines to learn more about the candidates while 35% of them eliminate candidates based from what they have found. Basically, what ever information available in the internet could be useful or harmful depending on who is on the bar stool. What matters more is it becomes more "truthful" when it is posted by someone who shares the same or similar interest, same profession or holds similar political beliefs. It is obvious that when an opinion speaks to you in a manner that agrees with your stand, your bias suddenly appears and your behavior is now strongly influenced by that opinion. Which then again is a double-edged sword that could be good or bad for the company with the product.

Like what I said at the start, reputation and being visible goes hand-in-hand. A company cannot ignore the other or they will pay the consequences. As of today, what others only hear about can now be personally accessed through the net. And what is more visible is more vulnerable to criticism. Just like movie stars compared to an average Joe like you and me. They get the spotlight, yet they gain from it and suffer from it as their life is placed under a microscope and dissected. Now, in context of companies under the microscope and vulnerable to public criticism, the only way to avoid negative feedback is to "show what you are doing, reveal your processes, acknowledge your mistakes, and participate fully in conversation that concerns you." Of course those are not my words, it's through a reading, but it states exactly what should be done.

Social media is another field that calls for your attention. This involves blogs, photo sharing, video sharing and forums. Why do you need to pay attention to this? The answer is exactly the same as what was mentioned before, opinions that influence the behavior of the consumer. Your neighbor might be the most influential person in forums about your product and your clueless about it. Those rumors that you consider JUST rumors might just alter your course from success to failure, and it all begins from your favorite media tools and forums.

Your reputation is the key to your existence as a company, an asset as important to the company as to your other assets. Just like what Abraham Lincoln said- "Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.". Reputation is not about what the company thinks, but what others think about the company. If no one knows you exist, then you have no reputation. If you are not subject to criticism, just you wait. And if you are under criticism, find a solution and build from it.

For our datamin class under Mr. Ramon Duremdes Jr.
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Competing with the help of data mining

Ever tried making decisions and wonder if they were the right ones? Ever tried going to business knowing exactly what will happen after a month or so? Obviously not. The instinct of a businessman can only help him so much, and from there, another question arises, "What now?". That has been the dilemma of most businessmen for quite some time. Business itself relies on current data and clientele to maintain a number of employees and equipment to handle, but that's just the surface of it all. Businessmen have to translate that data and be able to think at least two steps ahead to maintain and expand clientele being that there are certain variables which cannot be foreseen and trends that cannot be spotted right away. Corporations, schools, and other income generating businesses operating under strict competition environments must have that edge in order to stay competitive as well as flourish in the process. This is where data mining comes in.

Data mining, is defined by the article as the extraction of hidden predictive information from large databases. It is helpful in so many aspects especially business decisions. Data mining uses data stored from data warehouses and databases and with the use of data mining algorithms businesses are given special capabilities namely automated prediction of trends and behaviors, a handy tool in business especially when the scope of the business is service oriented, and automated discovery of previously unforeseen patterns which are very important as it will help boost product purchase( in sales) or usage (service). Although, without a powerful computer to analyze data takes so long to handle even by the best statisticians, that is why a prerequisite of data mining aside from mass collected data and data mining algorithms is a powerful computer. But even with visible patterns, there will also be the fact that not most of them are to be used as well as most of them has a low probability of coming into play. This, is resolved by the statistics involved in data mining. Statistics or statistical techniques as explained by the article are not data mining although it is very helpful in solving problems concerning data mining. With data mining, businesses can make informed decisions and take calculated risks.

Models, a very helpful tool in analyzing mass amounts of stored data in your data warehouse, are generated and sampled onto the computers. Models generally generate answers for your questions. And from broad questions, you can get to answer more in-depth questions answered and your once unknown territory, you will be able to do selective targeting. After making a model, data mining tools are used. Commonly used tools in data mining are the following: artificial neutral networks, decision trees, genetic algorithms, nearest neighborhood method and rule induction. As stated by the article, the classical techniques are statistics, neighborhoods and clustering while the next generation techniques are the trees, networks and rules.

Relation of data mining and the data stored in the data warehouse require a relational database system. This will help in faster acquisition of desired data. On-line analytical processing or OLAP as defined in the article refers to array-oriented database applications that allow users to view, navigate through, manipulate, and analyze multidimensional databases. OLAP is more effective method of analysis compared to the usual decision support systems.

Data mining is a really effective technology in which gives long and short term benefits, it is actually a trend in which all large scale companies should follow, especially now that dependency to technology is becoming more and more a factor to society. Still, even if it is a tool for success, there are still factors to consider as data mining is still dependent factors in which it derives its success from: a large, well-integrated data warehouse and a well-defined understanding of the business process within which data mining is to be applied. When these factors are resolved, customer relations are improved and thus resulting to success for the business.

Techniques also fall in the same arena, data mining techniques such as histograms, rules, linear regression, clustering and so on cannot be used over and over again to solve a problem. Each problem can and most probably will be different from each other that is why, as stated in the article, techniques to be used are mostly based on trial and error. A constantly changing world means a company can only desire but not be able to formulate the perfect model for them. Some of these techniques are being taught to us right now in school. Methods like linear regression, linear relationship between the dependent and independent variable, which have applications (ex: QM for windows) that help understand the basic insight and know-how to manipulate and have a general knowledge on how linear regression works. Clustering which helps analyze competition properly and knowing the niche and competition in that niche. Although we may not know the total concept, the important thing is grasping the basic idea of it especially because we are future businessmen ourselves.

Concluding it all, data mining does have a lot of positive feedback, but there is also the element of surprise, an unpredictable turn of events (example given in the article: internet) as the world is, and will always be, continuously changing. Relying on technology does have a lot of benefits, but ingenuity of the human mind and entrepreneurial "gut feeling" should not be ignored.

submitted to Mr. Ramon Duremdes for our DATAMIN class.
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Use of IT to your advantage : Higher Education

Concerning the blogpost,i decided that the summary be phrases that are self explanatory from each of the 3 articles that summarizes its content. Here are some of the few phrases from the articles that i feel are important to remember:

Disruptive Innovations

• organizations customarily develop mind-sets and processes that revolve around doing what they already know. Once that pattern becomes established, managers have great difficulty justifying to others or even themselves the need to turn their processes upside down to respond to a barely emergent market change. By the time the threat is apparent, however, it’s usually too late; upstart companies have seized a substantial lead.

• the first thing is to look at disruptive technology as a growth opportunity and not as a threat.

• a disruptive technology enables a larger population of less skilled people to do things that historically only an expert could do.

• The disruptive technology almost always takes root in a very undemanding application, and the established market leaders almost always try to cram the disruption into the established application. In so doing, they spend enormous amounts of money and fail.

• find customers who would be delighted to have even a crappy product because it helps them do what they’re already trying to do better

Competing On Analytics

• 3 key attributes among analytics competitors

-widespread use of modeling and optimization
-an enterprise approach
-senior executive advocates

• sources of strength of organizations
  

>analytics competitors must choose where to direct resource-intensive efforts.
>the right culture
>the right people
>the right technology

Business Intelligence

• BI now encompasses the use of data to derive insight and gain a competitive advantage.

• BI tools must help all users detect patterns and changes in those patterns in the easiest, most intuitive and timely way.

• Business intelligence solutions with rapid response times enable information workers to interact with their systems in an iterative manner to enable the right decisions at the right time.

• The demand for BI solutions to be embedded within business processes and interact directly with operational systems is increasing. Businesses can then react quickly to important events and identify the cause and effect relationships that are key to long term success. more closely to business processes can support strategy Additionally, business intelligence solutions that are tied and utilize enabling technologies much more effectively.

• By integrating real-time decision making with mission critical business processes, companies can ensure that they are serious contenders within the innovation-driven world of the 21st century.

I posted these lines from those articles because it is applicable to the industry of higher education. Being that people have biases when it comes to higher education, all the more do these schools have to take advantage of innovations, business intelligence and analytics. Philippines has a high annual college graduate rate and yet there are only four major schools that really stand out,namely: De La Salle, Ateneo de Manila, UP and UST.

As mentioned from the link on disruptive innovations., most businesses that are successful have a tendency to relax and eventually, it will come to a point that they are toppled by the ones that they considered as a threat. Innovations considered as a threat might be the opportunity the school is looking for. As the interviewee was trying to point out, even the simplest innovations make a big difference in the market as it creates new opportunities and markets. Also, the idea that investments = instant revenues is not always true. With his example on Kodak, the large investments to add new applications to an existing one did not necessarily proved to be profitable as hoped for. same way this could be applied to systems in universities. a university may have the monetary advantage over the others but that doesnt really mean that they can invest on a particular aspect and expect greater revenues and returns on investment. It all boils down to how universities adapt to change and use change as their means to further themselves. Take for example, online degrees that UP offers so that those who are working students may still have the opportunity to earn and study at the same time. some universities took that in mind and UP took action. When it comes to analytics and business intelligence, the universities must take action on how well they use their data to their advantage. they can go as much as do background checks on their students as to know which ones are likely to stay and those who might be gone the next term. Also, they not only look towards their clients but towards the structure of their university as well. Yes its the clients/students that generate revenues but its the people inside, the culture they promote and the continuity and movement due to technology is a big factor to consider as well. Business intelligence then comes into play as a major contributor to decision making being that business intelligence tools helps rationalize and provide solutions quickly at the right moment. This is applicable to universities especially during enrollment periods and unpredictable events such as the dreadful ahn1n1 virus that suspended classes until june15 (17?). Business intelligence helps those universities to be able to take action and provide solutions which probably will have short term effects on the university but may be the key to long term success.

In my opinion, business intelligence, analytics and disruptive innovation does play a very big role in modern day business. It is a trend in which every business should follow. especially now that networking and information is, as how i interpret it, the backbone of the business world today. Yes, it has definitely MANY advantages. It would be unwise not to follow the trend as it provides companies a relatively high percentage success rates. One of those advantages will be that the company bridges the gap between client and server. the company knows more about their clients and in turn knows how to satisfy their clients thus providing them great feedbacks and high probability of retention of clients. Although, we must also see, that relying on business intelligence and competitive analytics might have a few drawbacks. Companies become more and more dependent to it. The more data out there, the more companies have to spend to keep up. And, for me, dependency is always a sign of instability even though it may not seem to be, at some point in time it will be.

:the blog post is part of our class activities in data mining
Prof. Ramon Duremdes Jr.
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datamin

something about myself?
-my name is reuben mesa. im 21yrs old and 4th year here in DLSC. im addicted to climbing even though i wont reach the competitive level of climbing and i have many sidelines when it comes to work. some of my sidelines include being a partner of a company acting as a subdistributor of drinks ( alchoholic beverages) in the south area and teaching wall climbing.
something about my studies?
-i graduated HS, batch 2004 in OB Montessori Center Inc. Las Pinas. I entered DLSU-Taft enrolling as a ECM-BMG student. After 2yrs, i transferred to DLSU-Canlubang as a BSBA-M student. Now, as a 4th year student, im currently taking up 5 of my remaining 7 academic subjects.
something about my school?
-la salle is a school known to be one of the best in the Philippines. Im lucky to be studying in la salle, proud but not too ardent about it like some of the radicals out there. its ok to be passionate and all, its just too much sometimes.
something about datamining class
-nothing much to say really. im still a bit clueless on what its all about. from what i understand,its like predicting what will happen next by understanding the data now...or something like that..maybe next lesson i'll get it.



mon learning
dlsc