SigmaWay Blog

With increasing use of smart phones in today's life, most of the viewers are using smart phones for research and buying online. This is the biggest opportunity to the companies. Mobile is not just an e-commerce channel, but it can be used for building relationship with your customers. Brian Rigney (CEO at Zmags) in his article “Maximize Marketing Reach: A Glance at the Customer Is All You Get” at marketingland.com, discussed about four simple steps to deliver rich and creative campaigns at the right place and says, “52 percent of Web traffic to retail websites globally currently comes via smartphones and tablet devices.”  Steps are:
• Think for omni-channel and use holistic approach.
• Develop sites, offers and experiences in different ways to serve different channels.
• Create, adjust and preview the sites.
• Tap the knowledge base to understand what works for your organization.
To know more about these steps, follow this link: http://marketingland.com/reach-glance-get-often-small-window-130011

Big data, legacy data, operational data and streaming data - these are all impacting the ever-increasing volumes, velocity and variety of data. - Deepak Belur (In4Group). Data and analytics have become essential to formulate critical business decisions. The big data storage technology is capable of analyzing massive amounts of data. But, analyzing a big data rarely gives you a full picture. To analyze full picture, a company need to analyze “unstructured data” which is present in mainframe servers. This data can be analyzed by using performance analytics. Enterprises need to combine relational and non-relational data, open system and mainframe, to retrieve the combined information via a simple, single query or request. And they need agile data architecture. Timeliness, accuracy, usability and accessibility of data are critical factors in the successful decision making process. Read more at: http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=143791

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.

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

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 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/

Each human is unique in his own ways. For treatments to be effective, it can't be based on what the averages are. "Biotech has progressed to the point where we're actually able to edit or code DNA …," said Andi Karaboutis, Executive VP of Biogen, who was detected with Greaves disease a decade ago and undergoing iodine ablation treatment. The doctors then did some stratification to the normal range to suit her body needs and within three weeks she was back to normal. "Internet of me", the combination of computing power and health research, can lead to treatments being personalized improving the healthcare benefits. Read more at: : http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/executive-insights-and-innovation/the-internet-of-me-is-getting-real-in-healthcare/d/d-id/1320348?

Micro lending is a way through which micro finance institutions (MFIs) provide micro credit to support entrepreneurship in rural areas. According to a Wall Street Journal report, experts have come up with ways that would make micro lending more effective. Instead of providing loans solely for investment purposes, MFIs could also lend for personal expenses if the borrower has the ability to pay back the loan with interest. Also, lenders should employ research to measure the success of the financial programs, making sure that the client not only returns the debt but does so while making a profit and not by selling his assets. Another way to make micro lending effective is to take up a holistic perspective. Quoting Iskenderian “Micro lending will be more effective if there are other safety-net and asset-building products in place—like insurance, savings and pensions—so that families can be secure and repay that loan.” Last but not the least is to make use technology for money transfer and big data analysis of mobile phone usage thereby easing out the whole process and saving time. Read more at: http://online.wsj.com/ad/article/mlf-5-ideas-to-make-microlending-more-effective

Digital media publishers have taken their time to incorporate big data tools into their businesses. There have been marked improvements in clarity on use cases for big data and toolsets have also grown accordingly. Big data helps in the content creation side catering to the readers and the advertisers. Keeping the target audience in mind,big data tools optimizes decisions and effectively monetizes generated traffic. Relying on editorial expertise and sound journalistic judgements are fast becoming things of the past. However web analytics softwares like Google analytics, Webtrends also help in tracking content consumption patterns.To know more, please follow:

http://www.dataversity.net/big-data-tools-for-publishers/

In a saturated market, even the powerful brands have a hard time achieving growth targets. Big companies can do so by entering into new categories, which would increase the brand strength across markets. An established brand name would endorse itself in the new market. A classic example is National Geographic Society's shift from magazines to television channels, expeditions, and retail stores that sells books, clothes, and travel gear. The first step to go about brand extension is to look out for the categories that can be entered into, the target markets. The next step is to define how well your brand would fit into those markets, which would require assessing a new market like a start-up would. The third step is to design a prototype and test it against failures. Finally, prepare your response to the competitor's reactions; make sure the organization in ready to go. Successful brand innovation would harness the potential of the brand, all the while serving consumers better and bigger. Read more at :http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/incumbents_as_attackers_brand-driven_innovation

Most companies don’t get rid of the currently unused data, with the expectation it may be required to forecast trends in the future. This data becomes ‘dark’ data when the company completely forgets its existence and it becomes difficult to locate it and interpret it or interact with it. However, this ‘dark’ data can be restored or ‘lightened’ up by the following steps:
1. Data filtration, that can isolate the required information in the means of filtering the data feeds, to prevent the accumulation of excess unnecessary data, but is only useful when the data center manager can identify the data, expected to be valued in the present or future times.
2. In case of any future requirement, it is always better to export the data (instead of deleting it) to a cloud-based storage system, from where it is possible to import the data into the company’s data system, whenever required.
3. It is important to properly define, data withholding policies in order to facilitate data center management.

Read more at:http://www.techrepublic.com/article/clear-out-dark-data-to-make-room-for-useful-big-data/

With increasing complexity in the sales environment, improvement in growth and retention of customers is required. Prescriptive guidance can provide answers to these. It is predicted that implementation of analytics tools and strategies will increase. So, B2B companies will reinforce a position for Chief Growth Office (CGO) who will require analytics tools to implement their ideas.
Thus, a step towards Prescriptive analysis and effective implementation plan will help B2B companies to improve their financial performance.
To know more about prescriptive analytics, follow the article written by Javier Aldrete (senior director of product management at Zilliant) at: http://www.inddist.com/articles/2015/05/rise-prescriptive-analytics-b2b-environment

Providing good customer service is a challenge for most businesses and the trends are ever changing. Customers embark on an online journey whenever they buy something. The customer data - a string of emails, conversations across the web and social channels, leave a large digital footprint. Measuring and analyzing this information can help brands narrow down their marketing efforts and investments. Irrespective of the nature of the website, sentiment analysis is crucial. It can tell you whether your customers are frustrated, indifferent, or impressed and suggest measures to that accord. Monitoring customer engagement, referral traffic and time spent on pages can help in understanding the buyers’ journey. Thanks to Big Data, we can work based on intelligence rather than guesswork. Read more at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnewman/2015/06/09/big-data-and-the-buyers-journey-measuring-the-invisible/