E-book Evolution - Using Social Media to promotion book

The Youtube clip is about a young writer, Amanda Hocking who tried to find a way to publish her books. The traditional publishers rejected to publish her books. However, she finally realized the power of social media in this world today. Self-publishing is her last choice which bring to her a huge success. She also use twitter, facebook and her blog to introduce and promote her own books. Her books are selling online on Amazon and Barnes & Nobles.  And now, she sold around 450,000 copies of e-books.
Without the help of social media, Amanda would not be as successful as today.

Let check the clip to know more about how Amanda apply social media in non-traditional way:



http://www.lanikee.com/marketing/finding-success-nontraditional-marketing-methods/

My Info Graphic Resume

The link below leads to my Info Graphic Resume.

I used Photoshop to create the page. In the page, there is logo of facebook, twitter and Linkedin. At the moment  it is just a picture. However, I want to learn how to make it into buttons which can link to actual pages.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/41450045/Ha%20Lam%2C%20Info%20graphic%20Resume.jpg

Please give me some feedback to improve my Graphic Resume.

Thanks

Some more about visualization network

Article: How New Community Tools Will Democratize Data Analytics for the Good of Society
http://mashable.com/2011/04/05/community-analytics/

------------
Some more other article:

Information about Bin Laden's death was quickly spread out in twitter. Keith Urbahn was one of the first one posted the news about Bin Laden's death. And within 1 minutes, more than 80 people re-posted Urbahn's tweet. The number then increased to 300 in a minute later.
Doing some analysis, people realized that Urbahn was not really the very 1st person who posted the information. But he is the most trusted person due to some connection with Pentagon which he wrote in his profile. 

Beside Gephi, there are many free software which helps to visualize some specific social network. 
      + R
      + Flickvision uses for Flick
      + walk2web lets you start by entering a URL, and then allows you visually browse web sites that are linked from it.
     + Fidg’t is a desktop application that aims to let you visualize your network and its predisposition for different types of things like music and photos.


Source: 
http://mashable.com/2007/05/15/16-awesome-data-visualization-tools/
http://mashable.com/2011/05/07/bin-laden-visualization/

Wikipedia Edits During the Middle-East Protests

This is video Clip about Wikipedia Edits During the Middle East Protests in the beginning of this year. It is similar to the Egypt clip which we watched during class time




Also, I found this website which contains a lot of clips about Gephi. We can easily learn how to use Gephi from here. There is also instruction how to create Dynamic one.

Check it out:
http://www.veengle.com/s/gephi.html

Gephi and network analysis tools

Today information and data is extremely important for every businesses. The more information businesses have, the more advantages they can get compare to the industry. Technology and internet are creating an open source for everyone. People can get many useful data from all kind of social sources, such as: twitter, facebook, blog, youtube,....etc. So, how can businesses generate those small pieces of information into a useful one??

There are many free software which can turn those pieces of data into colorful pictures and graphs. Gephi is one of the popular tools to analyse network information. Gephi is an open source which is very dynamic network visualization. It can deal with a large network with more than 20,000 nodes. The network can be colored, put to different clusters which have something in common,...etc.. From that, user can analyze and understand the network. It is the very cool tool. Check out this link below to understand more about Gephi.

http://upmc.academia.edu/SebastienHeymann/Papers/256583/Gephi_An_Open_Source_Software_for_Exploring_and_Manipulating_Networks

Google Adword post report

We are wrapping up Google Adwords project. Reviewing the Pre-Campaign report, I realize how many things I learned during the campaign. Now, I understand and know how to use the Adword metrics: CPC, CTR, Impression,....etc...  It is not easy to run an advertising campaign in a dynamic environment like Google. I need to have a clear strategy, and have to continuously monitor the campaign. At the end of my team campaign, we totally got 4 conversions (3 from brokerage and 1 from wholesale) which are very good result for B-2-B campaign.

Businesses today have a lot more tools to achieve their profit goal because information is more open and people are sharing more about themselves thru the internet. So the most important point is how to analysis those data and turn it into strategies. I am still amaze how powerful Google Analytics and Google Adwords are. They are simple tools but help business to understand their own visitors and customers.

Next week we will move on to the next project "Social Networking." Hope I can learn many from it.

Information Network

The article "KM and the social network" illustrates Social-network analysis which is a tool in Information Network. This tool will help business to analysis problems which may happen inside the organization as well as supply chain relationship.

http://www.ikmagazine.com/xq/asp/sid.0/articleid.F79B4E31-7854-4B6A-9202-164FB18672D3/eTitle.KM_and_the_social_network/qx/display.htm

The article gives example how information network should be used in business.

In the diagram below, the big nodes illustrate for executive team and the smaller nodes are staffs who report to the executive team.
The dark color nodes in the center represents the tight relationship and many interactions among the high level staff in company. The area A, B and C has Key Connectors in each group but they seems less interactions among nodes. Some nodes only have one way connections. The L and S areas are not leveraging learning from one set of accounts to another. Generally, the executive team in the center is the one who draw the other groups in company together.

The picture below shows what will happen if we remove the Executive team out of the network. The relationship seems falling apart.

So, we can have conclusion that company is having a relationship problem. People do not interact with each others. And Groups do not connect with other groups.

QR Code in Business Card

Now we can quickly and accurately have all information of our partners in our phone...  Cool!

Let watch the clip:

Business Model - Cost per Share in Facebook

Before the lecture on Wednesday last week, I always wonder why some websites, such as Youtube, facebook, Wikipedia, ect., let me use free. How can they make profit? Many questions about how online business can be profitable. But now, I have satisfied answers.

The link is an article about online business model: http://venturedig.com/tech/monetizing-social-networks-the-four-dominant-business-models-and-how-you-should-implement-them-in-2010/

One of the ways which facebook can make money is Cost per Share (CPS). It bases on number of people share the links on their news feed. CPS is higher than CPC because people who share the link, are most likely loyalty customers/visitors. This method is also a good way for business to spread the company's name. Because friends of the loyalty customers will believe the link is useful and harmless. However, the CPS can only work with well-known company's ads.

QR Code Vs NFC??

NFC stands for Near Field Communication. It is new technology which is being used in some European and Asian countries. Basically, users wave their phone (which has technology inside) in front of NFC symbol. All information will appear on their phone. NFC has wide applications. They can be used to connect phone to phone, or phone to TV or computer, or even phone to a car. It can be your car's key. On the other hand, QR Code has limited characters. It is mostly used for advertising.

I wonder if NFC would replace QR Code in the future?? or can they be integrated to become a better technology??

What a cool experience!!!

On Monday class, I got to know one more function of twitter: real time tweet.
It likes chatting, I mean conference chatting. But all comments and tweets can be saved in twitter for later review. In the classroom environment, this tool can help shy people, like me, to speak up and share opinions. In the larger conference, it can be very useful for people to share without spending too much time for all answers. No one will be missed. In addition, personally I felt relax to give my ideas since twitter is a very informal tool for sharing.

I am still not interested in twitter as much as facebook. However, this cool experience draw my attention to this social media tool. I believe there will be many cool social media stuff out there which can support class room environment.

Campaign will be started in a week......

We will start our competition in a week... It's exciting!! However, I wish we have more time to go deeper before starting the campaign. 

My team got 3 meetings with our client, Seven Cups Inc. And I myself learned many things from the conversations. Austin, the owner, is a brilliant guy. His IT background and the love of tea helps him start and run the business successfully. 

I don't know about other teams, but my team has a very specific goal: make people sign up brokerage and wholesale form. It seems easy but it is not at all. Deciding for a brokerage and wholesale contract is a huge decision. It is a long term investment, not just like sign up for donation or volunteer. We do not have many campaigns with different things. So it is tough for us. 

Anyway, we still have 5 more days to finalize our pre-campaign strategy and report. 

Now, I understand how much time and cost people have to invest in a small word ads. Behind all those ads are huge strategies. Yes... I am eager to learning more about online ads, and business intelligence in generally.

Overwhelming..........

I have never cared about what social media is, until I take MIS 496A.
Now I feel I am overwhelming with all information about social media and how businesses, school,.... shift to an "open world". I mean the world that everyone can share and can see each other opinions and ideas.

Some colleges now use facebook and twitter in their lectures to make class time more interactive. It is very effective because everyone can have chances to shares what they think. In traditional classroom, students who are "timid" will never say anything.

An article mentioned that some schools now require students express their ideas in just 200 characters. It is actually a real challenge. Everything needs to be concise, short, clear and enough ideas. I believe schools should teach students how to do this because it is necessity in the "fast-moving" world.

By the way, our team got a great client, 7 cup tea. We are looking forward to work with them, drink fine tea, and win in the case.

Yes... I still feel really overwhelm with all information I got... need to upgrade my "CPU" and some time to process though... :-)

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence is the term of how businesses collect data, and use it to measure, analyze, understand and predict in order to improve their own businesses. A company can collect information of customer’s habits and hobbies when they shop in local store. Then special software is used to analyze the information to help the company to understand their customers in order to have attractive advertising campaigns in every different region. Business Intelligence is very important tool for businesses to grow and achieve their goal.

In the modern business world, business intelligence does not only limit in some specific software, but also open to many different ways which base on internet, such as social media and web analytics.

Today, social media become a “trend” of how young people get connection. Each people who is under 30 year old, has at least one account in a social media page. Some of popular social media websites are facebook, youtube, twitter, e-harmony,…. Social media is places for everyone to make friends, keep in touch with their old friends, share ideas, pictures or play games. It is a virtual world where everyone communicates through internet. And it now becomes a huge inexpensive resource of ideas and inputs for businesses. By understanding social media, companies can collect variety data and information from consumers through apps, games and promotions….

Web Analytics are tools to track flow, traffic of visitors who visit website. Through web analytic, businesses can know most information about web visitors, such as: age, country, region, device use, how many time of visiting, and other useful information. From this data, businesses can set strategy for their campaign, or adjust services in order to satisfy customers.

In general, business intelligence is the decision support for every modern businesses today.

Source: Ryan Mulcahy, Business Intelligence Definition and Solutions “http://www.cio.com/article/40296/Business_Intelligence_Definition_and_Solutions” 

First day of class

3 months of summer flies too fast... Here I am back in Tucson and ready for last 2 semesters as student.
MIS 496A: Business Intelligent is great. I am so excited about the projects and what I can learn about social media in this class. I use facebook a lot but do not know anything about it.... yeah! now I get to know facebook, twitter and others...
Reading the article which was posted by the professor, I can see how facebook, twitter... is used by businesses today. Even Tucson local news, such as 4 news, has facebook page. I believe social media is the future of how businesses get internal and external connections.
By the way, I also get excited about the 1st project. It will be challenge for me... But surely I will learn a lot.