Reputation: The World’s Window on Your Status

What is Reputation?

What is 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.”

Why build up your reputation?

As an individual we want to have a good reputation because these merits exclude us from extensive inspection from others as well as bad publicity. Since the dawn of civilization people are trying to build up their reputation for a lot of reasons.
First, it builds up your credibility, it helps you build trust and credibility with other people; it can help a merchant or businessman persuade someone to buy from you if they are not sure and it is also far easier to raise your prices if people perceive you as an expert. Second, reputation can take you anywhere; politicians with good reputations almost always win a sit in their intended positions and win the heart of its voters. Companies with good reputation also have an advantage over its competitors because they can get the trust of their customers for as long as they can assure the quality of their product.

Third, reputation can alter everything. It is true that reputation is the window of the world to your status so you must take care of it. “It takes twenty years to build a good reputation and only five minutes to easily ruin it. A good example of this in the telecommunications industry, Big companies like Globe, Smart and Sun took years of good reputation management to keep them in their game but it only takes one bad rumour to spill a stain in their good reputation.
Reputation is a factor worthy of being monitored and taken care of because it a major factor that will take a person, group of people, a company or an organization a step closer to their goals.




How to monitor your reputation?
Before the birth of the internet reputation is only small and difficult to trace, since there is no means of sharing on line before reputation revolves around the word of mouth and years of dedication of building one though publicity. But with the birth of the internet information transfer from one are to another in a snap became possible and so does the scope of on line reputation.
From that day reputation of a person or a company takes on a bigger area because it is not only concentrated on one place, their reputation can go all over the world because of the vulnerability of their data in the internet.
Yes, their good reputation can go all over the world in just a few clicks of the button but also their bad reputations or some fancy rumours about people and their company. So people and companies must device a way in monitoring their own reputations and take actions immediately to stop the bad publicity ruining the company’s impression.

But there is good news, monitoring tools are available and attainable to help an individual or a company keep an eye on their publicity issues. These tools can help people and companies detect the problems and look for a possible solution before the problems develop into bigger liabilities. Not only can monitoring tools give you a clairvoyant eye on your publicity problems but it can also detect how your customers, competitors and stakeholders feels about your company.

According to the book of Radically Transparent by Andy Beal and Dr. Judy Strauss, there are three essential monitoring tools that you can use in keeping a close eye on your reputation.

1. Really Simple Syndication (RSS):
Stated from www. Wikipedia .com: RSS (most commonly translated as "Really Simple Syndication" but sometimes "Rich Site Summary") is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed" or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based.




2. Tracking software: tracking software is used to track the most hidden web content and will notify the user as soon as the changes occur. This incurs a cost to the user but is it worth it especially for big companies that are having a hard time monitoring their valuable reputation.

3. Email Updates: this is the simplest form of updating you with the changes in online activity and it is easy to use. Just subscribe to Google Alerts and type in the phrases you want to update on the program will instantly alert you via email to the latest updates related to the words you had type into. This is compatible to small scale business or individual people because it is free but at the cost of causing a flood on their inboxes.

A leading problem in the telecommunication industry in the Philippines is the issue with the unwanted extra charges being placed in customers load. This issue not only appeared in the newspapers but also in news on line and in blogs of other people. Through on line monitoring telecommunication companies such as Smart can take action quickly by removing the problems associated with the issue.

Lastly, you must have someone to monitor your company, Monitoring tools are useless without someone to monitor and sort out data so it is advisable to hire someone who can do these things for the company. It is also less advisable to out source because in house employees are more dedicated than out source employees and knows the company better.

For us students I think we can benefit from these monitoring tools like Google alert, ACS's Serph and Boardtracker.com if we start the research on our chosen company and our main competitors. I hope Mr. Ramon Duremdes can give us more knowledge in using the other tools stated above so we can perform at our best.
For references and other opinion about my blog please consult the blogs of Danielle Benig, Camille Caleon, Julie Nolasco and Ikah Hemedez.

THE JEWELS OF DATA MINING

Mining for jewels is not an easy task, you need all the useful information you can get to harbour precious stones such as rubies, sapphires and emeralds. But it is not an easy task, usually in mines not all rocks contain elegant stones so the information you have in hand must be accurate to get to your goal and successfully get what you want.

Data Mining is also similar to Geographic Mining, according to the introduction to Data Mining by Kurt Thearling: “Data Mining is the extraction of hidden predictive information from large databases”. It is a powerful technology that is developed through the years of data collection and is used to harvest the most important information hidden or stocked in data warehouses. It is considered so powerful because according to the article it cannot only solve business problems but predict the future trends of your businesses so you can come out with a plan before the problem even starts.

To operate such complicated software Data Mining needs three basic foundations. First, it needs a memory that can handle various amounts of data because of the existing amount of information today. Second, it needs multiprocessor computers which can analyze data in shorter time to gather data faster. And third, it needs Data mining algorithms which serve as the protocol in managing information. With these foundations Data mining is considered stable.

So what are the advantages of data mining?

Given its big memory size and quality of its service Data Mining can provide Capabilities like Automated prediction of trends and behaviour and discovery of unknown existing patterns.
Because it can forecast in to the future trend or demand the user of Data Mining can have a competitive advantage over its competitors because they have a step forward against them. And since it can see through the unusual patterns in demands the company can see the anomalous data in the data warehouse and they can fix it before it can cause trouble to the data reservoir.

Data Mining is also a great aid to Database Systems and Data Warehouses because it had made getting the data you want easier. The book “MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYTEMS BY HAAG” defines Database as a collection of information that you can organize access according to the logical structure of the information. Data mining tools such as Query and Reporting tools, Intelligent Agents, Multi dimensional Analysis and Statistical Tools are used to query information in a Data Warehouse. Here is the Information about the following Data Mining Tools:

· Query and Reporting Tools: Similar to QBE tools, SQL, and report generators in the typical database environment.

· Intelligent Agents: Utilize various artificial intelligence tools such as neural networks and fuzzy logic to form the basis of “information discovery” and building business intelligence in OLAP.

· Multidimensional Analysis: Slice and Dice techniques that allow you to view multidimensional information from different perspectives.

· Statistical Tools: Help you apply various mathematical models to the information stored in data warehouse to discover new information.



As I go down to this part I realize that Data Warehouses and Data Mining are related to business intelligence and gaining competitive advantage. Due to the information extracted from your data warehouse you can get knowledge about customers, competitor’s partners, suppliers, the competitive environment and your internal operations. These factors can help a company build effective and important business decisions. It can be also be combined to one’s advertising strategy, information on customer demographics and can identify possible target markets.

Now that you can see that Data Mining, Data Warehouses and Business intelligence work hand in hand to produce a significant data and helps company build better strategy as well as competitive advantages over their competitors.

Relating to Telecommunications Data Warehouse, Data Mining and Business Intelligence can be helpful in their strategies. For example, Smart Telecommunication needs to successfully identify its target market and aligned its advertising strategy to that market. With the existence of data warehouse SMART’s marketing team can trace out the biggest market shares of cell phone users based on the latest trends, with that smart can point out to which customer they will advertise their commercial advertisements. Another application of data mining is that it can trace which post paid users are willing to have a second post-paid account. Not only it saves money in advertisements it also gives very useful information with just a touch of the user’s finger. It is very convenient and at the same time efficient.


In Conclusion, INFORMATION is very valuable to a company so they need the proper data mining tools in order to get the proper information that is hidden under the bedrock of data.

With the help of Kurt Threaling’s site and our reference book in Data mining I was able to come up with this blog. But I find it hard to read Kurt Threalings’s Post because most of the terms in the overview are too long and full of information. I think it would be best if the writer chops down the chunks of information posted on the readings so that the readers can easily digest all the complicated terms. And I hope that in our Datamin class Mr. Ramon Duremdes can give us a more detailed idea about the
subject matter for the benefit of the whole class.

For more information about Data Mining please see the blogs of my fellow colleagues: Danielle Benig, Camille Caleon, Jerika Hemedez and Julie Nolasco.