TV is the giant megaphone- Isaac Weber (VP of strategy at MarketShare) of their marketing budget in these mediums of advertising. But according to a latest study by MarketShare a market analytics company,” TV advertisements has remained the most effective medium of advertisements.” According to the study, the premium digital video delivered higher average returns than short-form video content from non-premium publishers. TV is the only medium which maintains its effectiveness over five years while other media are declined by more than 10%. TV marketers can optimize their spending by leveraging data sources. To know more about the study, follow this link: http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/why-tv-still-most-effective-advertising-medium-165247

Data, guided by technology, always provides precision to a marketer’s intuition. While technologists favour conservative decision-making on the basis of comparative testing, marketers prefer taking risks and walking the extra mile. Now-a-days, as a company's profitability depends on its digital marketing capability, to a large extent, customer data and analytics, mostly decides a company’s success rate. On the other hand, technologists also facilitate in isolating the redundant tools and programmes in the system, thereby cleaning the system and reducing unnecessary expenditure. The right marketing technology makes the decision-making process less complicated thus proving once more, the importance of the relationship between marketing and technology.
Read more at: http://www.cio.com/article/2933479/marketing/how-to-strike-a-balance-between-marketing-and-tech.html

Sigmaway uses data analytics technologies to deliver business insights from your marketing data. Contact us at contact@gosigmaway.com for a demo.

In Gary Hamel's book, The Future of Management, “Self Management” was described innovative efforts to enable employees to define their own jobs and shape their work at companies

Self Management is not a new concept in management, but not a widely used concept. It has been there since long. Many big companies like Taco Bell, Google, Whole Foods Market, W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc., etc have applied this concept and yielded great results like:

• Increase in productivity
• Motivation of employees

“Making Innovation Everyone’s Job” has been the motto of this concept. This concept has now again come into picture with Zappos, trying to apply it in its organization culture. Resistance is there, but will Zappos get the same results like Taco Bell did or will it not be able to sustain this concept in its organization for long- this only time will tell.

But, after being brought into spotlight again, this concept surely reminds managers a different way of managing things, that was thought to be lost in oblivion.

To know more about this concept and its benefits, please read the following article by Professor James Heskett at HBS Working Knowledge:

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7531.html

Social media is the key to this digital world. It is the easiest means to connect with stakeholders, market your brand and build relationship with customers. Also, as the time progresses, the social media trends, innovations and challenges are also progressing. Each new day brings new opportunities. So, being updated of the current trends helps businesses to respond dynamically.

Brittney Ervin has made a list of 10 current social media stats that businesses today need to know, in her article at business2community.com. Some of them are:

• Instagram’s Per-Follower Brand Engagement Rate is 4.21%, Higher than Any Other Social Network
• Tweets with Images Receive 150% more Re-Tweets
• 53% of Americans Who Follow Brands in Social Are More Loyal to Those Brands
• 37% of Twitter Users Are Under the Age of 30
• Google+ Has Over 300 Million Active Monthly Users

To know more such trends and understand how to make use of them, please visit the following link:

http://www.business2community.com/social-media/10-social-media-stats-you-might-not-know-but-should-01245250

Even in this multichannel world, customers still prefer to call in and hence voice channel is critical to a business. These days’ businesses are coming to a standstill when it comes to listening to conversations that flow through their voice channel as they are stuck on sampling and high cost manual monitoring. A recent survey showed that it is important to link online marketing to offline sales.
Mining for the truths and hidden meanings from these conversations is crucial. Previously automatic data mining of the voice channel was unattainable. But now with conversation analysis it is possible. Being in the century of customers, the ability for the company representatives to understand the customer, be empathic and deliver fast solution is essential.
Thanks to conversational analysis or text mining, it is now possible to extract data from conversations, to automate and process this data in real-time and at scale. Thus listening to and analyzing conversations helps the representatives to build better relationships and in turn provide customers with the experience they expect.
Sigmaway provides text mining solutions for businesses. Contact us at contact@gosigmaway.com for a proof of concept.
Read more at: http://smartdatacollective.com/calljourney/304151/are-you-listening-your-conversations

Fascinating, the first word that comes to the mind. Drones and big data are bonding pretty well these days and can be a successful recipe for innovations. 

Jonathan Buckley, senior vice president of marketing at Qubole, gives us a glimpse of this promising combo but not without the challenges. 

Agriculture, disaster relief and anti-poaching are some area where the combination has worked wonders. Needless to say more such wonders are in pipeline. But, yes there is a ‘butt’ of challenges attached here. The data gathered by drones is immense, it will require real time big data analytics and ad-hoc analysis to improve. But, one can feel optimistic about the future.

Have a look at  http://smartdatacollective.com/jonathanbuckley/316611/growing-relationship-between-drones-and-big-data

Don't ignore your supply chain risks if you love your profits, that's the advice Keith Peterson, president and CEO of Halo, is giving in his article. He talks about:

• Various supply chain risks
• The department they affect
• Its financial impacts
• Finally! Solution. 

Solution to all the problems these days is in analytics. Right software and analytics programme will increase your profit generating abilities to multiple folds. Intrigued? Follow the link at:http://smartdatacollective.com/keith-peterson/322401/solving-supply-chain-risks-infographic

Internet of Things (IoT) helps in transfer of data over a network without human interaction and this is one of the major sources of Big Data. Tom Davenport, independent senior advisor to Deloitte Analytics agrees that even though the concept of IoT implies that the most important feature of sensors is their connectedness but in order to analyze the data generated and use it for efficient action, analytics is required. This has been referred as the “Analytics of Thing” by him. Compiling data from devices and comparing them across time for achieving best results is one of the principal advantages. Utilizing data to optimize processes, identifying maintenance problems, diagnose anomalies and identifying reason for variations are other things that can be included in the Analytics of Things. Davenport suggests that companies that have to work with fast paced data and have relatively less experience with sensor analytics should invest in The Analytics of Things. Read more at: http://www.tibco.com/blog/2015/05/20/moving-from-the-internet-of-things-to-the-analytics-of-things/

Data analysis conventionally involves a series of process of collecting data from several sources and then analyzing them after some time. Normally these data come with a expiry time i.e. there is a specific short time by which these data needs to be analyzed, processed and utilized. With development in IT world we can no longer wait for data to be collected and then analyzed and processed. The need of the moment is to shift the Big Data nearer to the data source. Thus the value obtained from the data is more important than the way it is collected. Read more at: http://www.tibco.com/blog/2015/04/14/data-analytics-how-to-be-advanced-pervasive-and-invisible/

The success mantra for a perfect digital strategy is to deliver the right message (RM) to right person (RP) at the right time (RT). But we are often overwhelmed by popular trends and forget to look beyond them. Here is an inventory of strategies one can follow to find an optimal solution (might not be the trendiest one). Avinash Kaushik (author) in his blog Occam’s Razor talks about the 5 myths of digital marketing and analytic:

• Programmatic Platforms are a panacea.
• A data first strategy is a winning formula.
• All we need is Facebook, forget our websites.
• The web is dead. Mobile web is dead. Apps are the past present and future.
• Cookies! Cookies are all we need.

For more insight into this piece don’t hesitate to follow http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-marketing-analytics-deadly-myths-de-mythified/

At Paris Air Show 2015, Bombardier plans to bring its CSeries jetliner that carries Pratt & Whitney’s Geared Turbo Fan (GTF) engine which uses great swathes of data. But data created by industrial equipment such as jet engines, gas turbines and MRI machines has more potential business value on a size-adjusted basis which makes it valuable than other types of big data being generated from the social web, consumer Internet and other sources. Finally, the Internet of Things is helping manufacturers manage their Pay by Hour engagement models and long term maintenance contracts at lower costs. With rapid advancements in the Internet of Things in aircrafts combined with data analytics, it’s truly exciting to work in the aerospace industry. Read more about this interesting article at:  http://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/7319-analytics-and-the-internet-of-things-in-aerospace

The big data has penetrated into healthcare. But merely collecting the patient records and keeping them in the form of electronic health records (EHR) is not enough. It starts with using programming software languages like R to sort through the huge database. R is an open source programing software used for statistical computation and data mining. In this case, R can be used to interpret the EHR for different purposes like side effects associate with a particular drug among a typical set of patients with similar records and could also help identify what causes the side effect. R can be customized according to the needs of the patient and the physician and thus can be helpful in providing personalized healthcare .Also, since R is open source software, it involves no cost and a large amount of documentation is available to learn the language. Read more at:http://www.healthcareitnews.com/blog/radical-potential-open-source-programming-healthcare 

In the healthcare industry, big data and business intelligence work as complements which have helped the industry to achieve a remarkable growth. In today’s world data collection has its own advantages but we need instruments to refine them and make sense out of them. Herein lies the importance of clinical and business intelligence. More and more organizations are resorting to business analytics. It helps to make better clinical decisions and organizations stand to benefit from it in the transition from a fee based industry to a value-based one. Organizations have targeted their focus on population health and are implementing C&BI solutions accordingly. These help in deciding on the best strategy for the industry as the care models are undergoing a change. Read more at: http://www.dataversity.net/infographic-business-intelligence-in-healthcare/

Data mining sounds like a monotonous activity on a pile of information, requiring little oversight. It is however, in the words of Professor Uwe Aickelin, University of Nottingham, "A discipline that blurs the lines between artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and other cutting-edge disciplines to unearth the golden nuggets that lurk within data." He explains how data mining is the effort to extract valuable information from unstructured or 'messy' data. Statistics fails to recognize patterns and it is here where Evolutionary Computation and Machine Learning is required. Industries have begun to understand the need to make sense of the large amounts of data out there and Data Mining is more important than ever now. Read more at: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/05/why-data-mining-is-so-important/

Since 19th century, Artificial Intelligence always made everyone very curious but only recently we started to see its applications. Even now its applications are very narrowly limited to natural language processing and image processing. Some people are scared that AI may one day replace humans in many industries and cause unemployment. Let's see what two pioneers in the industry of AI think. Read more at: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537941/emtech-digital-where-is-ai-taking-us/

Self-learning machines need data to learn. So one possible way to get the data that is being generated from all the devices being used across the world is IoT-Internet of Things. Devices communicate with each other and are interconnected through various networks. This could help advance many fields especially medical field. But a standard protocol has to be developed for devices to communicate with each other. It was proposed that the protocol should take care of safety of humans, security of IT infrastructure.

To read more, follow: http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/analysis/2410409/big-data-and-iot-powered-self-learning-machines-wont-take-over-the-world

Content marketers are delving more into analytics to give interesting insights about their past content. With some careful analysis of this content they are able to come up with new content to meet the needs of their customers. This exercise of tracking the past performance data is important for the content marketers in many ways. Even without analytics, most rigorous analysis and tracking of the data can give information about what to do next. The usage of analytics is giving better pay offs and is the new trend among Content marketers. With the new technologies emerging the usage of analytics tools is expected to make valuable recommendations to help identify the right strategies. 

Read more at: http://www.acrolinx.com/blog/predictive-analytics-content-marketers/

 A key role for HR administrators is talent management. When counselors have the HR support, it enables them to work effectively with clients and find the support they need themselves. Often challenges like staffing, talent management and employee relation are encountered by organizations. HR decision relates to employee welfare and engagement. Now-a-days, organizations include payroll costs, benefits administration, HR administration, talent management and time and preference. Although at midsize companies, many HR leaders cannot identify these areas and when midsize companies start to identify them, it will enable their workforce to achieve broader company goals.  Read more at:                                                 http://blog.adp.com/2015/05/07/the-real-human-impact-of-human-capital-management/

While, IoT revolution is taking place all over the world, there are still some points that need to be taken into consideration to increase its use. One such point is its use in South East Asia.

Recently, Asia M2M IoT Business Platform 2015 conference was conducted in Bangkok, which focused on this issue. Although mobile technology adoption rate is very high in this subcontinent, people’s response to other new technologies is not that much. They are hesitant towards new technology.

Dana Blouin, Researcher at SIIT, who had attended this conference as a speaker, has listed down key themes discussed there. They are:

• Erratic Adoption
• Use What Customers Know
• The Value of the Smartphone

These points need to be kept in mind to make IoT, a more common phenomenon.

To know more, please read the following article at cmswire.com:

http://www.cmswire.com/internet-of-things/how-to-put-the-iot-in-the-hands-of-your-customers/

Need a big data solution for your project? The 3 V's of big data will bail you out. In an article by Paul Holland (Consultant), he talks about the 3 V dimensions of big data initially discussed in 2001 by META group (now Gartner) analyst Laney Douglas in a research report. Fourteen years hence, big data challenges and opportunities have acquired 8 V dimensions. The author exclusively focuses on the 3 V's:

• Volume
• Velocity
• Variety 

Volume talks about zettabytes of data generated every second. For example, if we look at airplanes they generate 2.5 billion terabytes of data every year. Velocity is about the speed with which data moves around. Unlike earlier times, data is created in real time or near real time. Variety is basically the different types of data. Gone are the days when data used to fit neatly in tables. Today 80% of world data is unstructured (text, images, videos, voice etc.). Read more at:http://makingdatameaningful.com/2015/05/26/characteristics-of-big-data-part-one/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=characteristics-of-big-data-part-one