3rd Blog

Online Reputation.

Reputation is the opinion (more technically, a social evaluation) of the public toward a person, a group of people , or an organization. It is an important factor in many fields, such as education, business, online communities or social status.

Reputation can be considered as a component of the identity as defined by others.

Reputation is known to be a ubiquitous, spontaneous and highly efficient mechanism of social control in natural societies. It is a subject of study in social, management and technological science. Its influence ranges from competitive settings, like markets, to cooperative ones, like firms, organizations’, institutions and communities.

Online reputation is a factor in any online community where trust is important. It affects a pseudonym rather than a person.

Most of us don’t recognize Internet as one of the many tools to advertise, research, download, and many more. For most companies, they don’t realize that Internet is a great way to start a business or expand the company. Some companies still do the traditional way like giving away fliers; advertise on TV and newspapers, which nowadays is taking more time to be seen than the Internet.

People see a lot of good things about what Internet can do. Yes, it can help us communicate relatives and friends abroad. It also allows us to search for long lost friends, schoolwork and almost about everything. We can also go shopping online, watch movie online, sell online and a lot more. One trend that is growing fast on the Internet is blogging. A blog is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Blogging is an online journal that friends and relatives can read it. An example of this is blogger.com, where one can freely post anything without caring what other people will think. But what we don’t know is Internet can also destroy reputations. Your company’s reputation.

It is not what other people think of you that matter. It is what they can find out about you on the Web that will affect your ability to attract customers. Making a good reputation online is not easy. You need to ask people to write positive reactions towards your company. According to this website, there are tools that are faster and more efficient in finding out what the web has about your company’s reputation.

1. Monitoring Your Online Reputation. In order to do something about your reputation, you need to find out what people are saying about you. Google Alerts are actually e-mail updates based on specific query or topic. It’s very easy to set up, pretty reliable and free.

2. Manage Your Reputation. Once you know how to check your online reputation, you need to find the best way to managing it. Here are some great tools to help you with that:

Naymz.com is a great way to help you manage your reputation. You need to sign up, invite people and let them write reviews about you, your company, your products, services etc.

RapLeaf is another great website, where you can write reviews about other people and their companies. They will be invited to write about you in return.

Trackur was built by one of the biggest gurus of online reputation management, Andy Beal. You can set it up in minutes, and choose between individual, company and agency package.

3. Your online profiles are very important. You need to monitor and manage your online profiles. People can “Google” you anytime just to check if you are credible for the company or your company is not facing any legal matters. What we read on the Internet might change our mind. Here are some very good tools to help you manage your online profiles:

Comwat helps you “organize” your profiles, put them all together and in one place where you can find them easily. This way, the whole process of monitoring and managing your online profiles looks like a piece of cake!

SocialURL is another great way to organize your online profiles and connect them all with one simple URL.

So now you know some tools on how to check and be updated with your online reputation, next step is how to maintain it. Maintaining is difficult because there can be millions or even billions information about your company that you cannot control. Even the one liner bad information about your company can be really dirty for your company. Hence, according to Alexandra Levit here are five simple steps in managing your online reputation:

1. Listen and respond to online conversations before an issue reaches critical mass and damages your reputation. The best protection against negative comments and gripes is to build a positive reputation ahead of time.

2. In the event of a crisis, you or your leader must take responsibility in order to recover corporate reputation.

3. Explain your solution to the crisis/issue and then carry the solution into action.

4. Set up specific online destinations to solicit negative comments and deal with them separately. Bank of America set up a Twitter rep to deal with customer complaints.

5. To change how you appear on the Internet, push down the relevance of negative results and give the search engines positive new content.

Building a great online reputation will not only help your company attract more customers but will also help your company improve your products and services to have loyal customers. We may think that having bad issues about the company will destroy its reputation, but in the long run it will give positive effects in the company. Here are some positive effects:

· Improve customer satisfaction by gaining valuable insight into what your reputation is, you can be proactive in changing areas of your company or operations that are receiving negative publicity.

· Increase perceptions of brand by seeing what customers and potential customers are saying about your brand and the brand(s) of competitors, you can improve upon perception.

· Reduce internal costs by employing services, which save time and money can make or break a company. Online reputation management can achieve just that.

For more effects, visit Effects of Online Reputation.

Negative reputation can either be a good or a bad thing. It depends on how the company will take it. If they take it against them and just be affected by it, they will be having a hard time gaining what was broken. But if the company uses the negative reputation as a good thing, then it won’t get any worse instead they will improve. Be happy that when there are negative issues then your company is visible to people :) It also can be a good way of being famous!

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation

Second Blog

Data Mining on Healthcare

A topic as delicate as healthcare requires a mother load of data about patients, doctors, overhead cost, services provide and many more. The decision-making process becomes more and more difficult the less data that is present.

Like all data, it needs to be analyzed, and in the healthcare industry there are four types of data, patient-centric data which is directly related to patients, aggregate data which is based on performance and resource management data, transformed-based data for planning, clinical and management decision support, and comparative data for health services research and outcomes measurement. Thru the years much of this data is accumulated but information is very low, with the data warehousing of today and data analysis, the healthcare industry can use past data and turn it into better decision-making.

Data in its self has zero organizational value, but when turned into information has the ability to increase profits, control cost/expensed, speed-up services, perform technically sound procedures and maintain high quality of patient care. With the use of data mining; advanced algorithms, multiprocessor computers and massive databases, it is now possible to create patterns from data gathered, turning difficult decisions into a near resemblance of a Standard Operating Procedure. Example, if a doctor is trying to figure out what necessary steps are needed to cure a certain type of cancer attacking a particular part of the body, he would simply check previous data from the data mining, check the patterns that have appeared, age, status, blood pressure, body type, physique, height, weight, symptoms, drugs taken, blood type and the like of that patient and compare it with the other patients suffering from the same cancer, if there are 800 matches for all healthcare centers, than a decision is made quicker and more reliable, thus possibly saving a life, which is the target of a healthcare center.

With data mining, we are now able to use several techniques to further enhance the quality of service, techniques such as decision trees, neural networks, predictive modeling, fuzzy logic, rule induction and many more. These techniques, given data, can help determine survival rates, thus giving priority to patients that are in need of healthcare.

“IBM and the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, the formal name for the Rochester, Minn.-based nonprofit health care organization, announced that they were teaming up in early 2002. After initially putting the medical records of about 4.4 million patients treated at Mayo's three clinics into a DB2 database, IBM and Mayo have spent the past two years developing and testing a methodology for mining the data.”¹ More and more healthcare centers are aiming to be the best at delivering service to the clients.

In data mining it is equally important for the analyzer to have visual capabilities; the ability to spot patterns. Success of data mining tools relies on the ability of the analyzer to evaluate, analyze and detect patterns from the data.

As science of gathering data and mathematics of analyzing data, become more and more advanced, technology comes up with newer computers or software that help the analyzing of this data to a detail. “Mayo researchers will use Blue Gene to do "deep computing and deep science," including mathematical modeling and a simulation of gene structures to help predict the behavior of diseases”², it is truly amazing that the creative mind can turn prototypes into an actual useable product.

From a business standpoint, being able to predict trends or fads is always a plus with always one step ahead of the market and two steps ahead of the competition; as long as the data is well analyzed there is very minimal error. Errors can be made if even though the data was properly analyzed, given that there will always be unforeseen events, there will be slight errors, at the same time if even the errors were accounted for and there are scenarios prepared for these possible errors, than data mining for business will have close to zero errors because everything has been predicted.

In my personal opinion, data mining is definitely a growing technology. I would expect this to bloom in the future to be a “tool of the trade” for all healthcare centers as well as other industries. This technology can be used in various business by predicting the up and downs of the stock market, whether to build more building or less, to be able to understand the movement of several types of clients if passive or aggressive it would be easier to determine how to act, by clustering clients, decisions could be done by cluster instead of by person, this will control costs and maximize profits.

In conclusion, I believe data mining is an asset for the healthcare industry as well as other businesses interested in improving quality of service/products, speeding up service, improving business decision-making, and understanding the different classes of people/clients involved. If I had a long standing business, investing in data mining would be something I would definitely look into.

Reference:

1. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/95115/IBM_Mayo_Clinic_Take_Next_Data_Mining_Step1&2