FUNDAMENTAL AND BASIC DIGITAL MARKETING ‘To–Do’s FOR SMEs

First of all, just to make something clear I am not a digital marketing wizard.But rather I have been founders of few organizations and had to do the digital marketing myself, as I didn’t have enough fund to have a digital marketer.

To put a disclaimer my suggestions may not be the best by the book, but they are the ones which worked best for me, are affordable and are easy to do.

So here they go, these in the order of which I implemented for my organization –

1) Have a Facebook page:

I know many people will rather have a website first, and that is not wrong by any means. The advantage of a Facebook page is-it is free, whereas for the website you will need a domain which will cost you some money. Having a Facebook page will let you have some form of internet presence as a starter. You can share the page with your friends and acquaintances and get your idea or product validated.It will be a bonus if you can get some kind of Facebook page ad going, which you subscribe to with a reasonable amount.

2) Have a twitter account:

Whatever holds true for Facebook also holds true for twitter. Why we need both twitter and Facebook? Because there is a lot of social media users who are exclusive to either Facebook or twitter.

3) Create a website:

A website is a World Wide Web footprint every business and organization needs. It tells the visitor who you are and what you do.A good website goes a long way in creating trust and understanding among visitors.The domain should be representative of the organization.It lets one have a single point of entry for all social media platforms.

4) Register your website with Google and enable Google Analytics:

Register your website with Google to be crawled by Google bots thus enabling it for Google ranking. I think no one will dispute the importance of a website to show up in Google ranking.You can do some basic SEO, but do not spend too much effort or resources for SEO now. Then go ahead and set up your Google analytics. The basic version of Google analytics is a free product and can be extremely useful to analyze your visitor's demography and website performance.

5) Google Ad words and PPC:

It’s said – ‘Google’s’ 2nd page is the best place to hide a dead body.' And it’s not so easy to get to Google’s first page, especially if you have chosen a popular keyword. Well researched keywords and strategic Pay Per Click campaign can give one some good inorganic reach until he/she gets their website's organic ranking higher

Prediction of EURO 2016 using just a spreadsheet and some publicly available data

The following analysis is an exercise I performed to predict the outcome of EURO 2016 .My resources were just a spreadsheet and some publicly available data.

Some of the hypothesis taken for this prediction are:

1. Players playing in bigger clubs(club ratings as per UEFA) will perform better in Europe.
2. Best players in European countries play in European club.
3. The strength of the 23-member squad will better determine a nation's performance rather than just starting 11.
4. Every position be it goal-keeping, defense, midfield or striker matters equally to the success of a nation.

Factors not taken into consideration:

1. Form of the player
2. Team work
3. Confidence of an individual player
4. Home advantage
5. Injury
6. Credibility of the manager

Steps followed in the analysis:

Step 1: 23 squad members list of each country is collected -- their names and the clubs they play for.

Step 2: List of 400 clubs across Europe was collected and their standings as per UEFA.

For my final analysis I only considered top 100 clubs from the list of 400 clubs with the hypothesis that a player can only make an impact if he plays among the top 100 clubs in Europe. I divided the 100 clubs in 10 segments of 10 clubs each. Then I rated each club with the top segment getting 10 points and the bottom getting 1 respectively. Then I looked up all the players in each nation and rated them based on their club ratings. The result is a cumulative rating for each country. Then going to the fixtures I concluded on the results with the assumption that a nation with higher rating will progress through the tournament whereas a nation with a lower rating will not.

Prediction :

Quarter Final teams:Ukraine,Spain,England,Belgium,Germany,Italy,France,Russia

Semi Final teams:Spain,Belgium,Germany,France

Final:Spain,Germany

Champion:Spain

Runner-up:Germany

The analysis may seem simplistic, but one of the main objective of the exercise is to encourage readers to start doing analysis on simple use cases and realize beyond the smoke screen of data science jargon that its not that complicated.Once an analyst completes a use case like this, he experiences a complete analytics life cycle.But what will generally change for a detailed analysis will be -- the volume of data and the numbers of factors to be considered..

Learnings that we may receive from this exercise can be -

Searching for the right data : The use case and the hypothesis tells us what data to search, gather or ask the business for.Lots of time in my career I have seen analysts being handed some data and asked to find something interesting.That should not be the case.It should be the business use case driving the analysis.

Data preparation: You must have heard the 80-20 rule,where 80 % time is spent preparing the data and 20 % time doing the actual analysis.My data was web links so I had to scrape it, massage it and clean it to get it in a shape that can be used for analysis.

Feasibility of the variables to consider : The complexity and the accuracy of the algorithms mostly depend on the suitability of the algorithm for the use case, the extent of variables considered and the size of the data analyzed. Looking at the timeline and resources in hand one should decide how extensively one wants to go about it.

Consideration of hypothesis : Hypothesis considered should be clearly mentioned as part of the analysis.The result of the analysis will prove or disprove our hypothesis.

BI on Cloud - Service overview and types of vendors

BI on Cloud - Services overview

BI on Cloud - Types of Vendors

EMI – The dream killer – an Indian software engineer's perspective.

'Well,I had a dream' – The words you will often hear from souls STUCK in IT suffering from mid-career crisis. 'But what happened,why didn't you follow it,DELL did,JOBS did,GATES did,our own BANSALS did,you may ask.''Well you see,abroad its easier financially, and I had EMIs to pay'.Then who is to blame – the poor souls who have to leave their hometown,and come and settle down in the unknown land,and has to start everything from scratch ? EMI is a reality for them. Although there are few chosen ones who gets to travel the fairyland(read 'US','Europe') and can save enough money to pay the devil's due in advance but for others there is no way out. So the EMI killed their dreams – Dreams to start their business,to set up that start up,to make that travel. But can you blame them ? I won't. Anyways they get blamed enough everyday by the traffic police, corporation, maids, autowallas for not learning the local language anyways.:).