I would like to microgift Danielle by devoting my first blog entry for the semester to her. This blog entry will also be helpful to our community because each of us will remember something different about her presentation, therefore compiling all of our reflections on Blogs@Baruch will probably reinforce what each of us learned yesterday. The reason I prefer to use Blogs@Baruch is that sharing with people who are not registered in one particular class takes no effort on my part. We actually had students from four different classes present: four of my honors students; two of my CIS 9467 students from last semester; two of my Saturday afternoon spreadsheet applications class students and my current CIS 9467 students. All of us can interact in the Blogs@Baruch space whereas adding so many guests to BlackBoard is doable but certainly tiresome.
Danielle urged you to approach her about internships and also stated that L2 will be hiring in the near future. If you think that working for her would be helpful to your purposes please follow up.
If you cannot write a lot in terms of microgifting Danielle the very least would be to tweet that you enjoyed her presentation using our course hashtag #cis67. The second least time consuming microgift would be to write a comment to this blog post. The third type of microgift would be to write a Blogs@Baruch post of your own. I will set up a survey to collect the URLs of your blogs and post them on BlackBoard later today.
Danielle explained that Instagram is a pictorial social media and that people have been relating to one another through pictures for millions of years whereas speaking and writing came much later in our evolution as a species. Her description of the Instagram’s growth in popularity was fascinating. The fact that younger people are fleeing Facebook as the likelihood that their parents would have an account rises seemed intuitively logical but was still surprising as I had until yesterday considered FaceBook to be the most formidable social media platform.
Danielle had two large files that she receive daily form Instagram that contain API data. Together we sorted several columns of this data trying to figure out what we could discern about trends and patterns.
I learned a lot yesterday and also came away with many questions…perhaps you will answer some of my questions in your comments.
Can I obtain API data as a private citizen? I’d love to obtain one of the Excel files Danielle used yesterday.
Her presentation really demonstrates the power of Pivot tables. I plan to present PowerPivot, a new Office 2013 application later in the semester. Danielle did not hide the fact that she uses Excel on her Mac so she may not even have access to PowerPivot. One cannot even do Pivot Table Slicers on a Mac so I wonder what other important Excel functionality is lost because she is using a Mac.
Will post more later this afternoon….forgot about daylight savings….
It is the first time for me to see the real big data collected thru URL, and I was told that this kind of data collection is getting more and more popular. I think maybe we can also do some factor analysis for example to decide which feature of the particular product would ultimately have high influence in the Instagram community.
In stat course here, We normally use sas enterprise miner to do this kind of data mining ,especially for those data sets more than 100000 entries. I will try to use excel to do some analysis after this course.
Thank you for the talk, it is very interesting !
I thought Danielle’s presentation was fabulous. Her work is cutting-edge in today’s society, and I loved how she related it back to the work we are doing in class by making various pivot tables and summaries of data. Professor, thank you for inviting her, and Danielle, thank you for presenting to us!
Meghan
Firstly, I am really grateful to Prof. Wheeler for inviting Danielle yesterday. It sure was one of the best presentations that I have attended. One of the most important things I learnt from the presentation was that before jumping into any analysis on data, it is imperative to go through a QA process and clean the data. Another thing Danielle mentioned that I completely agree with is that while doing analysis is important, being able to tell a compelling story of the analysis is the even more important. Danielle told us a very compelling story on how Instagram is gaining traction among brands as their choice of social media platform, and it kept me wondering why Chanel would want to lose out on this massive opportunity. Also, it was great to see how some brands are using Instagram successfully to attract, engage and interact with their customers.
Thanks Danielle!
Pari
Use this link to access a survey that will collect the URLs for your Blogs@Baruch blogs: http://1drv.ms/1fi6kXY
I just came across the official Instagram blog: http://blog.instagram.com/
Would there be any utility in setting up an Instagram hashtag for this class? If anyone wanted to capture a video of step six for Tutorial 5 Case 4 I am sure that your current classmates and many other students around the world would love to be able to access that.
At some point Danielle asked how to filter some of her data within a Pivot table. I was standing near the door and really couldn’t see as well as I wanted to. What was her question specifically? Do you know the answer?
What are the popular Baruch Instagram hashtags?
Are any of you tempted to post a picture on one of the Instagram prestige brand hashtags? If so which one(s)?
Danielle said that she avoids doing subtotals. It would be interesting to find out why.
I think that someone could create (or find) a blog that lists the Excel for Windows features that are not available on the Mac version of Excel.
The http://www.xbrlx.com model worksheet uses the indirect command on the Standard sheet. Perhaps this command would be useful to Danielle as she works with API data. Perhaps you can make another recommendation for her.
Here are the questions that Danielle solicited from students that she ultimately answered using Excel and her API data:
Most frequent posters
Most popular (# of followers)
Geographic differences
# likes and # comments
Community Size
Spikes and dips in following
Media types – engagement
Growth
I enjoyed the presentation and was glad I attended. Danielle did a good job summarizing her analysis of Instagram and its growth. The comparison to other competitors was well done, and although I don’t use instagram, I can understand why it is so popular. As always, excel is useful in analyzing the large amount of data that her company collects and converts. I liked how she mentioned that you should be careful when first looking at data. Before jumping in and doing analysis, you should make sure the data is accurate and reliable. She had flexibility in analyzing the data because she had access to time series data and end of date data, so that was nice. She said that she didn’t do any statistical methods that people learn in elementary statistics, but I would be interested if statistical analysis could possibly be incorporated. Instagram is still new so I will wonder how far it will go, but from the presentation, I was convinced that it was a good purchase by Facebook.
I’m glad that I attended this presentation. It gave an insight how someone would use Excel at work when it comes to analyzing massive data. Data is useless if one cannot analyze it and make it into information. Excel has made it easy to sort and organize data into a presentable and readable way.
Using a Mac as well, I realized some functionalities are missing on Excel. It was a disadvantage when I tried to complete a homework assignment. Though I’m not sure how much of those functionalities will affect when it comes to analyzing data or presenting data since it may also affect efficiency.
I’m surprised the term API was mentioned during the presentation. Even though I am still oblivious to what an API really is. I was playing around with Facebook API as I happened to wandered into that page. If anyone is interested, it’s this: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/ I’ll probably have to read into the functionality of that web-based API since I only did some basic things without putting much thought into it.
Thanks Danielle for such a wonderful and informative presentation.
I felt that Danielle’s presentation was very insightful. It showed how advertising through digital services like Instagram has developed and how much more information companies are able to gather through these digital services as opposed to traditional forms of media.
Danielle did a fabulous job presenting to us. The one thing I enjoyed most was seeing how fast we could sort the data to answer our desired query. Excel and other computer programs are extremely powerful tools and are capable of even more.
I also enjoyed how Danielle told us how she started off and how she got to L2 by way of a chance meeting in the subway. What L2 is doing is really innovative and is helping companies more than just providing analysis on them. Danielle had showed us that companies that used social media like twitter or instagram increased their public presence and used very little resources. This is an important point because advertising can be a huge cost for some companies and using social media would change the whole dynamic of the way companies operate.
From what I read in the blog post, it seems like Danielle’s presentation was both interesting and informative. I wish I could have made it to the presentation to see her discuss the growing popularity of Instagram and why so many teenagers were leaving Facebook. I use both social media sites equally as much, but it would have been fascinating to hear her take on the situation. I think it would be a great idea if Danielle came back for a second presentation to talk with our class. I’m sure she can teach us how powerful excel really is, while giving us great tips about excel.
I was not able to attend, but after hearing about it from others it seems like I missed a great presentation. This is the first time that I have ever heard about another social media platform surpassing Facebook. Whenever I think about “social media” the first thing that comes to mind is Facebook, not Instagram. However, the world is always changing, so it was probably inevitable that something else would take its place. It would have been great to hear the arguments in person, rather than reading them. I really hope Danielle can come back for a second presentation so I can have the chance to see her explain her views and data.
It was a great presentation. I learnt a lot. It is honored to be there. We could see how much effort John puts on his work.