Editor's note: Seyed Ziae Mousavi Mojab is a MBA Student in the Mike Ilitch School of Business at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI and currently in ISM 7505: Inbound Information Technology

These days, everyone talks about Social Media. Social Media is now the primary source of information and a key resource for communication. Facebook has more than 1 billion registered users and each day around 500 million tweets are sent out. People use Social Media not only to build inter-personal relationships, but also to learn about consumer products and to read consumer feedbacks. Many business owners, also use Social Media to attract and engage new customers. Effective use of Social Media can in fact, bring great opportunities for many businesses. Effective use of Social Media can bring great opportunities for your business.

While Social Media marketing looks easy, cheap, and effective, a wrong Social Media strategy can end up damaging your business and brand reputation in the market. The question; however, is how you should approach Social Media marketing.

Editor's note: Seyed Ziae Mousavi Mojab is a computer science student from Wayne State University in Detroit, MI and currently in ISM 7505: Inbound Information Technology

Data Mining and Business Analytics: Developing a model to solve a typical business problem

• Would you like to know more about the customers’ past experience?
• Would you like to predict their future behavior with high accuracy?
• Is the market changing so rapidly, that you feel you are in need of more intelligent reports, and accurate information for a quick and strategic decision?

If you are a decision maker inside a company, and you are concerned about your business' most valuable asset, “customers”, and their relationship, you may need some evolutionary techniques.

One of the main techniques to explore and extract useful information from a huge amount of data is called Data Mining. In general, Data mining is defined as: “the computational process of discovering patterns in large data sets (big data) involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, and database systems." (Wikipedia)

Data Mining can also be considered as a systematic information processing technique to discover valuable knowledge in data. Using statistical methods, or genetic algorithms, data sets can be automatically searched for statistical anomalies, patterns and rules. Data Mining is not something new, and statisticians, for many years, have manually explored, and mined their data. However, the new technologies are helping us use more robust and efficient algorithms to simplify and automate the whole mining process. Using Data Mining techniques, you can adjust your final model to accurately predict the unknown data.

Editor's note: Seyed Ziae Mousavi Mojab is a computer science student from Wayne State University in Detroit, MI and currently in ISM 7505: Inbound Information Technology

Search Engine Marketing

An essential tool to reach a global audience

If you haven’t yet started marketing online, it’s time to do so. If you are of the belief that marketing online is a waste of money, think again. There are many reasons that you should consider the online marketing. Increasing brand awareness, targeting more customers, flexibility in scaling your advertising campaign, being cost-effective, and reaching and engaging more people are some benefits to count.

One of the major online marketing channels is Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which includes both Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Search Engine Advertising (SEA). Optimizing your website, and using search engine advertising such as Google AdWords, may have a tremendous effect on attracting new visitors to your website, and turning more of those visitors into new sales leads and customers.