Finals Exam
Coverage: Week 7 to Week 12
70 points
20 items
1 hour
*All multiple choice questions are right minus wrong.
Search and Recommendation
Engine4 min read
1 Comment / Information Technology / By cj
It is easy for us to get lost and confused with the vast amount of resources
available to us in the internet. Fortunately, lots of websites and apps use
search and recommendation engine to help us navigate our way around and
sometimes even make the decisions for us. This article will try to explain in
simpler detail what search and recommendation engines are all about.
What is Search Engine
Search engines allow us to search a database for information.
This is probably the most basic definition we can use to understand what
search engine is. This article discusses in more detail how search engines
work. For students however, it is probably just easier if to give you
examples.
Examples of Search Engine
Google is probably the most common example of Search Engines. Whenever
you come across an assignment which you have no idea about, you most
probably rely on Google and its search bar. Gone are the days when students
have to go to the library for their academic papers and their RRLs. As
someone who has never used the library for its academic purposes, I can
vouch for the power of Google.
However, the key to determining examples of Search Engines is not about
thinking of websites or apps similar to Google, it is simply about thinking of
websites or apps that use a similar tool – the search bar. Youtube, Netflix,
and even Facebook all use search bars and therefore are all examples of
Search Engines. Think of the e-commerce platforms or social media apps
you use which have search bars somewhere in its interface, all these use
Search Engine technology. This article gives some more common examples of
search engines.
Recommendation Engine
The power of these platforms and apps does not simply rely on their search
bars. The secret lies with their recommendation engine.
A recommendation engine suggests and matches products, services,
and/or information to user preference based on analysis of data.
Have you ever seen phrases like, “Friends also liked…”, “People who bought
this also bought…”, or “You may also want to try…”?
These phrases are the reason we waste more time and money than
necessary in the internet. Just kidding. Or maybe not. (Wink)
Benefits of Recommendation
Engine
It is all about improving the user experience. After watching a series or
movie you liked in Netflix, the platform does an excellent job of suggesting
similar shows which will successfully take up your whole schedule for the
weekend. Thanks to their recommendation engine.
Google’s search bar sometimes does the thinking for us. Using data they
have gathered around the world, they can predict what we are thinking and
suggest auto fills on the topics we are searching for. Thanks to their
recommendation engine.
E-commerce platforms are the worst. I meant best. They are the best
salespeople in the world right now. They can suggest products for you to
buy which you have never even thought of buying in the first place. And the
crazy thing is, they make you think that you needed their suggested product
all along! Thanks to their recommendation engine.
These are just examples of the magic of recommendation engine. Notice
how there is a slight difference when it comes to how these examples use
data to suggest and match user preference? That is because there are
different types of techniques for Recommendation Engines.
Types of Recommendation Engine
There are two most common types of recommendation systems.
Content-based Filtering
Content-based filtering uses a single user’s data, yours, to recommend
products, services, or information for you. This is very useful for platforms
and apps to carefully and personally tailor-fit their user experience for you.
However, as you can probably imagine, this can be limiting to users who
want to explore experiences and preferences outside their usual tastes.
Collaborative Filtering
Collaborative filtering uses data from multiple users to suggest the best
matches for your preferences. This helps us avoid one of the biggest
tragedies in our lives nowadays: FOMO. For those not familiar what FOMO
is, use a search engine to find out! (Wink)
On a more serious note, collaborative filtering helps companies expand the
personal user experience for you and allows them to upsell you with their
other products or services that are not necessarily within your initial
preference bubble. However, this type of data analysis is harder to pull off
and it requires a certain number of active users to draw inferences from.
To find out more about Recommendation Engine, check out this article.
Conclusion
Imagine yourself being pulled down the rabbit hole to the world of Alice in
Wonderland. Search engines help you find out where exactly the exit is and
how to get there. Recommendation engines will make the journey more
exciting. (Wink)
3 Benefits of Social Media for
Businesses6 min read
Leave a Comment / Digital Marketing / By cj
Social media is integral to our individual lives. You want proof? Check your
phone’s battery usage. Most of your battery or time is probably dedicated to
a few social media apps. The recommendation engine of these social media
giants keeps us glued to our phones. (Check out our article about search and
recommendation engine to learn more.)
Since all of us consumers spend most of our time in the social media world,
it is paramount for businesses to establish their presence in social media in
order to stay relevant.
Here are 3 benefits social media offers to businesses and brands:
1. Advertiser -friendly
Most popular advertising channels for businesses before used to be TV,
Radio, and Newspaper. All of which cater to millions of people. They also
cost you millions of cash. Unfortunately, compared to social media
advertising, these mass media advertising platforms are not as efficient nor
as effective.
Efficiency is maximizing your resources to produce outcome. Whenever you
have to buy a 30-second advertising spot in between two popular TV
programs, you have to pay a huge amount in order to secure that spot. Add
to that the huge production cost to create a 30-second spot. It is justified by
TV ad numbers which show that millions of people in the country watch TV
shows. But do they really? It is possible that the TV is running but no one is
looking. I know of people who use the TV simply for background noise. It is
even worse if you think about the fact that some people do watch the shows,
but do something else during commercial breaks. The millions you spent on
the TV ad spot and production? Wasted.
Effective is being able to achieve the outcome you want. When you advertise
via radio, you most likely choose which radio stations cater to your target
age demographic. What if you are targeting kids and young adults who
prefer to stay glued to their mobile phones or use earphones whenever they
are inside cars on the way to their schools? Despite millions of potential
reach, the 10-second radio ad you produced will not be as effective as you
want it to be if your target market is not listening to it anymore.
How do you know how many people really read your newspaper ad or how
engaging your TV ad really is? You cannot. Traditional advertising channels
offer very limited data to gather insights from. Social media advertising on
the other hand, gives you specific data such as Reach, Engagements, and
even the specific demographics and interests of people who saw your ads.
Things are different in the social media space. You can control the target
market who will see your ads. You can specify age, gender, interests,
and even behavior among others. It is a much more targeted and effective
advertising tool compared to most mass media channels.
Social media is advertiser-friendly because
it is data-driven, much more targeted, and
much more relevant compared to
traditional advertising platforms.
Most people these days spend most of their time exercising their thumbs
scrolling through their feeds. Nowadays, social media is the most efficient
and most effective platform for advertisers.
2. Brand-friendly
Since social media allows people to engage with the brand and keeps track of all kinds of data, it
is easy for brands to determine the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. It is helpful for
brands to sense the market’s reaction. Brands can see whether we liked their post, whether we
shared it with friends, or we commented something bad about them. This helps brands react and
adjust almost in real time to what their customers want, to what we want. If in case a brand
launches a not so effective campaign, they can look into the data and tweak it as necessary.
The same luxury cannot be applied in traditional advertising channels such as TV, Radio,
even billboards. Given the lack of engagement and data capturing, it is almost impossible for
brands to adjust and react to the sentiments of their customers. Billboards do get vandalized
sometimes. Maybe that is kind of similar to comments on posts? Hmmm…maybe not.
Social media also allows brands to sense not just their market’s wants, but also their competitors
acts. It is as easy as going to your competitor’s social media page and scrolling through their
personal feed. Some social media platforms even have features that allow you to watch and
monitor your competitors’ posts and its performance. Even without actual sales numbers, this
helps brands get an idea of their brand strength and market share relative to their competitors and
the rest of the industry.
On top of all the market-sensing, social media also allows brands to have their own brand
ambassadors for free. Given the nature of social media, people are encouraged to make User
Generated Content (UGC) which help brands market their products or services for free. These
brand ambassadors can also sometimes engage with other users and vouch for the brand’s quality
and trustworthiness. You can’t get that level of engagement in flyers or pamphlets!
Social media is brand-friendly because it
allows brands to do a market -sensing of
both their customers and their
competitors, and cultivate brand
ambassadors for free.
3. Customer -friendly
Speaking of engagement, social media is simply the best communication platform these days. It
even serves as a channel for customer service or after sales support. It is easy for brands to
engage directly with their customers via social media channels. Brands cannot do this with their
TV or radio ads.
An actively-managed social media account of a brand will show lots of back and forth
interactions between customers and the company. You will see different versions of “Thank you
for loving our product!” alternated with different versions of “We are sorry for the
inconvenience! Please check your inbox!”. We also see popular catchphrases like “PM is the
key!”
This level of direct engagement between brand and customer has never been practiced in most
other forms of marketing channels. Not even word of mouth advertising or guerilla marketing
has this level of communication between brand and customer.
Speaking of word of mouth, social media also allows customers to interact with other customers.
Given the nature of social media platforms, potential customers can see reviews and comments
of past and existing customers. As a brand with a quality product or service, this is beneficial and
can only help you in the long run. Because everyone is now spending their time in the digital
space, word of mouth has transformed from gossip vines to forum threads.
Social media is customer -friendly because
it allows brands and customers to actively
engage and communicate with one another.
Clearly social media is so much advantageous for businesses nowadays. Hopefully
this 3 ABC benefits I wrote about gave justice and helped summarize the benefits
social media platforms provide to businesses. If you are a hesitant business with
minimal social media presence, hopefully this article gives you that push you
need to start working on your social media game!
Crash Course: Impressions, Reach and Engagement
It is no exaggeration to say that say social media has a language of its own. From
emojis to abbreviations to tons of different metrics, many terms can be easily
confused by even the most fluent social media users. Today we will dive into one of
the biggest sources of confusion for many people: the difference between reach vs.
impressions, and how these metrics influence engagement on Facebook.
These terms are all used frequently when referring to social analytics and are
essential to forming an idea of how your Facebook page is performing. To help clear
up any misunderstanding when it comes to these terms we will first define all three,
and then break down how they relate to each other and why they are important to
reporting on your Facebook performance. So let’s dive right in!
Impressions
Impressions are the number of times a post from your page is displayed. For
example, if someone sees a page update in their Facebook newsfeed and then sees
that same update when a friend shares it, that would count as 2 impressions.
Reach
Reach is the number of people who received impressions of a Page post. If we
continue with the previous example, there was only one “reach” recorded for that
post, even though it was seen twice by that same person. That is because it was only
one person who saw it.
While this is the most basic definition of “reach” there are all also three different
categories reach can fall into on Facebook.
1. Organic Reach: this represents the number of unique people who saw a
piece of content for free, or without any advertising dollars spent, in their
newsfeed after it was shared on your page.
2. Paid Reach: This is the number of people who saw your post as a result of
a promotion. Paid reach is influenced by your ad spend, so the more you
spend the more people will see that content or ad.
3. Viral Reach: This is the number of unique people who saw your post as a
result of another Facebook user liking, reacting, commenting, or sharing
that piece of content. This can be a result of organic posting and/or paid
posting.
Now that we understand the difference between impressions and reach, we can dive
into engagement!
Engagement and Engagement Rate
Engagement on Facebook is when people perform actions on your content. They may
like a post, click on a link or comment on an image. The number reported by
Facebook as engagement is defined as the number of clicks, likes, shares and
comments on a post.
Engagement rate is the number of people who’ve engaged with the Facebook post by
liking, reacting, commenting, clicking on or sharing the post divided by the number of
people who were reached. For example, if you had 10 likes on a post that reached
100 people your engagement rate would be 10%. The average engagement rate for
our industry is right around 2%.
Why Should I Care About Engagement?
Past post engagement plays a huge role in determining who is going to see your
posts. Engagement is a major factor in Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm that
determines who gets to see your posts, or in other words what your reach is going to
be. The algorithm is meant to enhance the user’s experience so it takes into
consideration if a user has engaged with your posts before when determining who to
show your post to. This is why engaging content should be the overall goal for your
Facebook posts. The more your content is liked, replied to or shared, the more
unique users you will be able to reach!
The relationship between engagement and reach is therefore co-dependent. You
need reach to build engagement, and high engagement to keep increasing your
reach. This means you need to focus on creating high quality content designed to
engage with users while at the same time thinking of new ways to attract new
Facebook followers to increase your reach.
For ideas on how to build high quality content and increase your Facebook reach,
check out our Dealer Content Suggestions to start brainstorming!
Project Management and Waterfall
vs Agile Method5 min read
Leave a Comment / Information Technology / By cj
Waterfall and Agile are two of the most popular project management
approaches in the software development industry. Both concepts are
extremely complicated to grasp and understand from a student’s
perspective. As students, we rarely get the opportunity to participate in a
project which uses such approaches. Today, we will do our best to simplify
these methods in a relatable manner for students.
What is Project and Project
Management
Let’s start first by defining what a Project is and what it means to do
“Project Management”
A Project can be loosely defined as an
undertaking of plans to achieve a specific
goal.
It is that simple.
If you plan your schedule for the day in order to prepare for your exam
tomorrow, your to-do list may probably look something like this:

Wake up
 Breakfast & Chill (Youtube)
 Review & Chill (Spotify: Relaxing Music)
 Lunch & Chill (Youtube)
 Review & Chill (Spotify: Study Music)
 Sunset & Chill (Youtube)
 Realize the day is almost over
 Panic (Spotify: Inception Movie Soundtrack)
 Skip Dinner
 Review Hardcore
 Panic Some More
 Skip Sleep
 Take Exam at 8AM
 Submit Exam at 11AM
If your goal was to pass your exam, and you did because of your awesome
to-do list, congratulations! You just completed a successful project!
Your to-do list may look sloppy, but hey, you got the job done. You just did
project management.
Project Management is basically: getting
things done.
Organizations and businesses which undertake projects will have more
elements and intricacies with their project and project management. There
will be differences between projects for small companies vs big companies,
short-term projects vs long-term projects, etc. However, all projects will
have the same elements or building blocks.
Building Blocks of a Project: Time,
Cost, and Quality
This picture does a great job summarizing the impact of the different
building blocks of a project.
As you can see, it is very difficult for a project to be able to achieve all
three. Most projects succeed with two building blocks. However, getting two
out of three usually results to a minor drawback.
Using the example above, focusing on Time (getting things done quickly)
and Cost (getting things done at low cost) will result to a cheap, quick, but
low quality project outcome. Meanwhile, focusing on Quality (getting things
done with high quality) and Time will result to a fast, good, but expensive
project outcome.
To learn more about projects and project management, check out this link.
Waterfall and Agile Method
For the longest time, the Waterfall method has been considered the
traditional and most popular project management approach in the IT and
software development industry. However, the advancement of technology,
especially the emergence of Cloud computing (check out our article on Cloud
here), has empowered startups to practice a more Agile approach. The lean
and small teams of startup companies rely on the Agile method to get
things done quicker and to release beta versions of their products in the
market earlier.
Releasing MVPs (minimum viable products) earlier help startups get
customer feedback, raise funds, and pivot to success much faster.
This is why Agile method has been gaining success and more popularity over
the years. However, before we get ahead of ourselves and shout “Agile!
Agile!” to passersby, it is important to compare and differentiate the two
methods in order to get a better appreciation of both.
A good way to differentiate the two methods is by looking at how they
interact with the Triple Constraints.
Triple Constraints Theory of Project
Management
The figure above shows the three constraints on project management:
budget, time, and scope. Budget and time are already explained above. The
new word is scope.
Scope constraint talks about features and details involved in the
software development project. Imagine the last app you used and all its
features: UI, UX, dashboard, etc. The more features a software has, the
bigger its scope. Looking outside the IT industry, scope of project may entail
the details involved in it. For example, a college party with more scope will
have more elements involved like professional DJs, guest celebrities,
multiple mobile bars, smoke machines, first aid station, and more.
Waterfall Method vs Agile Method
The two popular methods handle the three constraints differently.
Waterfall Method has a fixed scope, and
variable budget and time constraints.
Agile Method, has a variable scope, and
fixed budget and time constraints.
Think of Waterfall Method as a more “stubborn” approach to project
management with a very clear set of goals to accomplish and features to be
included. It is more stubborn in the sense that it will be willing to
increase its budget and extend its deadline schedule just to make sure
that all desired features and scope are accomplished.
Agile Method, on the other hand, has a more forgiving approach with the
scope of the project. With Agile Method, it is okay to come up short with
some of the planned features of the project as long as you stick to the
assigned budget and the agreed deadline. The fixed budget and time
constraints are the reasons why Agile Method is popularly used by a lot of
startups with limited resources: both manpower and money.
In order for Agile Method to reach the same level of features or scope as the
Waterfall Method has planned, the former will have to undergo multiple
iterations or cycles of development. Have you ever seen games with
multiple launches of updates and latest versions? Games with Waterfall
Method development will most likely have something like: v1, v2, v3 while
games with Agile Method development will have: v1.1, v1.2, v1.3 and so on.
If you are interested to learn more about these project management
methods, check out this article which discusses project management methods
in detail.