Brief Description of the tool:
Zoho Reports is an Online Reporting and Business Intelligence service that helps to easily analyze business data and create insightful reports & dashboards for informed decision-making.
It is easy to use, provides a user-friendly drag-and-drop user interface. It also offers a wide variety of reporting options like dashboards, charts and tabular reporting options that help you do your business intelligence analytics easily. It also provides advanced features such as - Pivoting (or Crosstabs), querying using SQL in all major database dialects, filtering, drill-down and extensibility with Application Programming Interface.
Being a cloud-sourced application, it requires no hardware or software installation. Also, it can easily be accessed with a browser and an internet connection, anytime, anywhere.
Some of the features of Zoho that we’ll be using:
1. Importing data from an existing database: Zoho lets us import data from an already existing database application such as Excel, Google Docs, MS Access, MySQL, SQL Server, Sybase, PostgreSQL and Oracle.
2. Drag-and-drop based Chart Creation: Zoho lets us use a drag-and-drop based designer to create required charts.
3. Multiple Chart Types: There are several chart types available to aid better visualization of data, such as: Line, Scatter, Bar, Stacked Bar, Funnel, Web and Table chart types. Both 2D and 3D charts are supported.
Description of Data used:
LinkedIn contacts of a particular user would form the raw data for the final presentation. Currently, LinkedIn does not provide option to export all contact related data in an easily usable format say csv. The basic ‘export connections’ would just extract the name of the person, current job and email ID into a csv file. So, we use a freeware available on the web called ‘LinkedIn Contact Manager’ (LICM) to get all contact related data into a single spreadsheet (screen shot shown below).
Additionally, a paid software titled ‘LeadGrabber Pro’ was used in trial mode to search LinkedIn connections with a particular keyword (say by Profession or by current city) and extract contact information from them. The relative advantage of this tool over the earlier one was that it allowed to search by specific keywords which gives more meaningful and relevant results than getting all contacts. But a relative disadvantage was also found in the fact that it extracted the records page by page and needed human intervention after each page (screen shot shown below)
Business Value
1. Better visualize your network – The combination of tools used will let the user better visualize his/her network on any Social Networking Site. The example data will be taken from LinkedIn to demonstrate the viability. The data can yield valuable insights about a user’s network such as – sorting of connections based on key attribute (city, industry, designation, number of connections).
2. It can be useful for Marketing Managers who can use their company’s official social media accounts, to help in –
- Lead generation
- New campaign launches
- Market Segmentation and targeting for improving the effectiveness of Marketing communication.
3. It can be useful for the HR managers in ways such as –
- To hunt for eligible candidates for recruitment.
- To target a recruitment campaign based on – city, industry, job position.
4. It could be used by promoters of educational or industry events to target potential audiences and design effective communication/promotion material
