Social features of Web Assisted Tobacco Interventions (WATIS) : case studies

textWeb Assisted Tobacco Interventions (WATIs) are proliferating due to their cost effectiveness and their compatibility with a fast-paced lifestyle that needs to be time and space detached. Following a general trend in web assisted interventions, WATIs are increasingly incorporating social media features. Often though, because they are added post-facto to a solid preexisting foundation that privileges information delivery, the social media and the informational sections are developed independently: the social component has no impact on the informational content. This forms the basis of this study, which proposes to do a detailed analysis of a WATI recommended by a panel of experts in the area of smoking cessation. An emphasis will be given to the visibility of social media features and the degree to which content from the social media component contributed by users impacts the informational component generated by content experts. This analysis will be supported by instruments for data collection especially adapted/designed for this study. This dissertation proposal is at the cusp of disciplinary boundaries as its theoretical underpinnings are in the intersections of three domains: design, health, and social media. This interdisciplinary approach is necessarily reflected in the study's conceptual vii framework, which draws from constructs such as "design with intent", tailored health interventions, and social networks for participatory culture. As a result of the detailed analysis, and the author's own expertise in social media across other fields, a set of recommendations will be proposed for the design of WATIs with social features aiming at a greater impact of these on the evidence-based informational content.Radio-Television-Fil

Alter ego, state of the art on user profiling: an overview of the most relevant organisational and behavioural aspects regarding User Profiling.

This report gives an overview of the most relevant organisational and\ud behavioural aspects regarding user profiling. It discusses not only the\ud most important aims of user profiling from both an organisation’s as\ud well as a user’s perspective, it will also discuss organisational motives\ud and barriers for user profiling and the most important conditions for\ud the success of user profiling. Finally recommendations are made and\ud suggestions for further research are given

Patterns of Engagement with Youth Savings Groups in Four African Countries

This report details findings of research undertaken under the Banking on Change Academic Partnership, which was established in 2014 between the Banking on Change (BoC) programme (a partnership of Plan UK, CARE International UK and Barclays Bank) and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). The research sought to identify and explore different patterns of engagement with the programme’s youth savings groups, and how those patterns relate to members’ socio-economic characteristics, income-generating activities, and the training they had received. BoC, whose last phase focused on youth savings groups and ran from 2013 to 2015, operated in seven countries: Egypt, Ghana, India, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Field work took place between April and August 2015 in Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Ghana. The research team engaged with two savings groups in each country. Information was gathered through group discussions, 57 detailed interviews with individual savings group members, and analysis of individuals’ savings and borrowing activities as recorded in ledger books and passbooks. The strategy used for identifying savings groups and group members for interview was not meant to yield a representative sample of BoC participants, but rather to capture the range of savings and borrowing patterns

To boardrooms and sustainability: the changing nature of segmentation

Market segmentation is the process by which customers in markets with some heterogeneity are grouped into smaller homogeneous segments of more ‘similar’ customers. A market segment is a group of individuals, groups or organisations sharing similar characteristics and buying behaviour that cause them to have relatively similar needs and purchasing behaviour. Segmentation is not a new concept: for six decades marketers have, in various guises, sought to break-down a market into sub-groups of users, each sharing common needs, buying behavior and marketing requirements. However, this approach to target market strategy development has been rejuvenated in the past few years. Various reasons account for this upsurge in the usage of segmentation, examination of which forms the focus of this white paper. Ready access to data enables faster creation of a segmentation and the testing of propositions to take to market. ‘Big data’ has made the re-thinking of target market segments and value propositions inevitable, desirable, faster and more flexible. The resulting information has presented companies with more topical and consumer-generated insights than ever before. However, many marketers, analytics directors and leadership teams feel over-whelmed by the sheer quantity and immediacy of such data. Analytical prowess in consultants and inside client organisations has benefited from a stepchange, using new heuristics and faster computing power, more topical data and stronger market insights. The approach to segmentation today is much smarter and has stretched well away from the days of limited data explored only with cluster analysis. The coverage and wealth of the solutions are unimaginable when compared to the practices of a few years ago. Then, typically between only six to ten segments were forced into segmentation solutions, so that an organisation could cater for these macro segments operationally as well as understand them intellectually. Now there is the advent of what is commonly recognised as micro segmentation, where the complexity of business operations and customer management requires highly granular thinking. In support of this development, traditional agency/consultancy roles have transitioned into in-house business teams led by data, campaign and business change planners. The challenge has shifted from developing a granular segmentation solution that describes all customers and prospects, into one of enabling an organisation to react to the granularity of the solution, deploying its resources to permit controlled and consistent one-to-one interaction within segments. So whilst the cost of delivering and maintaining the solution has reduced with technology advances, a new set of systems, costs and skills in channel and execution management is required to deliver on this promise. These new capabilities range from rich feature creative and content management solutions, tailored copy design and deployment tools, through to instant messaging middleware solutions that initiate multi-streams of activity in a variety of analytical engines and operational systems. Companies have recruited analytics and insight teams, often headed by senior personnel, such as an Insight Manager or Analytics Director. Indeed, the situations-vacant adverts for such personnel out-weigh posts for brand and marketing managers. Far more companies possess the in-house expertise necessary to help with segmentation analysis. Some organisations are also seeking to monetise one of the most regularly under-used latent business assets… data. Developing the capability and culture to bring data together from all corners of a business, the open market, commercial sources and business partners, is a step-change, often requiring a Chief Data Officer. This emerging role has also driven the professionalism of data exploration, using more varied and sophisticated statistical techniques. CEOs, CFOs and COOs increasingly are the sponsor of segmentation projects as well as the users of the resulting outputs, rather than CMOs. CEOs because recession has forced re-engineering of value propositions and the need to look after core customers; CFOs because segmentation leads to better and more prudent allocation of resources – especially NPD and marketing – around the most important sub-sets of a market; COOs because they need to better look after key customers and improve their satisfaction in service delivery. More and more it is recognised that with a new segmentation comes organisational realignment and change, so most business functions now have an interest in a segmentation project, not only the marketers. Largely as a result of the digital era and the growth of analytics, directors and company leadership teams are becoming used to receiving more extensive market intelligence and quickly updated customer insight, so leading to faster responses to market changes, customer issues, competitor moves and their own performance. This refreshing of insight and a leadership team’s reaction to this intelligence often result in there being more frequent modification of a target market strategy and segmentation decisions. So many projects set up to consider multi-channel strategy and offerings; digital marketing; customer relationship management; brand strategies; new product and service development; the re-thinking of value propositions, and so forth, now routinely commence with a segmentation piece in order to frame the ongoing work. Most organisations have deployed CRM systems and harnessed associated customer data. CRM first requires clarity in segment priorities. The insights from a CRM system help inform the segmentation agenda and steer how they engage with their important customers or prospects. The growth of CRM and its ensuing data have assisted the ongoing deployment of segmentation. One of the biggest changes for segmentation is the extent to which it is now deployed by practitioners in the public and not-for-profit sectors, who are harnessing what is termed social marketing, in order to develop and to execute more shrewdly their targeting, campaigns and messaging. For Marketing per se, the interest in the marketing toolkit from non-profit organisations, has been big news in recent years. At the very heart of the concept of social marketing is the market segmentation process. The extreme rise in the threat to security from global unrest, terrorism and crime has focused the minds of governments, security chiefs and their advisors. As a result, significant resources, intellectual capability, computing and data management have been brought to bear on the problem. The core of this work is the importance of identifying and profiling threats and so mitigating risk. In practice, much of this security and surveillance work harnesses the tools developed for market segmentation and the profiling of different consumer behaviours. This white paper presents the findings from interviews with leading exponents of segmentation and also the insights from a recent study of marketing practitioners relating to their current imperatives and foci. More extensive views of some of these ‘leading lights’ have been sought and are included here in order to showcase the latest developments and to help explain both the ongoing surge of segmentation and the issues under-pinning its practice. The principal trends and developments are thereby presented and discussed in this paper

Network Abstractions for Simplifying Mobile Application Development

Context-aware computing is characterized by the ability of a software system to continuously adapt its behavior to a changing environment over which it has little or no control. This style of interaction is imperative in ad hoc mobile networks that consist of numerous mobile hosts coordinating with each other opportunistically via transient wireless interconnections. In this paper, we provide a formal abstract characterization of a host’s context that extends to encompass a neighborhood within the ad hoc network. We provide an application in an ad hoc network a specification mechanism for defining such contexts that allows individual applications to tailor their operating contexts to their personalized needs. We describe a context maintenance protocol that provides this context abstraction in ad hoc networks through continuous evaluation of the context. This relieves the application developer of the obligation of explicitly managing mobility and its implications on behavior. The software engineering gains resulting from the use of this abstraction are measured through its expressiveness and simplicity of use. We also characterize the performance of this protocol in real ad hoc networks through simulation experiments. Finally, we describe an initial implementation of the abstraction and provide real world application examples demonstrating its use

A Protocol for Supporting Context Provision in Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The increasing ubiquity of mobile computing devices has made ad hoc networks everyday occurrences. In these highly dynamic environments, the multitude of devices provides a varied and rapidly changing environment in which applications must learn to operate. Successful end-user applications will not only learn to function in this environment but will take advantage of the variety of information available. Protocols for gathering an application’s contextual information must be built into the network to function in a timely and adaptive fashion. This paper presents a protocol for providing context information to such applications. We present an implementation and show how it provides context information to mobile applications in an on-demand manner. We also provide a simulation analysis of the tradeoffs between consistency and range of context definitions in highly dynamic ad hoc networks

Problems of Microcredit among Microenterprises in Nigeria

This study was designed to assess the problems of microcredit among microenterprises in Nigeria and make recommendations for remedial strategies. Microcredit refers to small loans made available to small producers otherwise known as the active poor to enable them start new productive activities, grow or sustain existing ones. The study was delimited to Aba which has the highest concentration of microenterprises in the South East Zone of Nigeria. The survey research design was used, and the questionnaire and face-to-face interview methods were used for data collection. Data were analyzed using tables, frequencies, percentages and Z-test statistics. It was found that problems of microcredit have significant effects on the performance of microenterprises in Nigeria. Ten recommendations were made based on the findings of this study. Keywords: Microcredit, Microenterprises, Micro-entrepreneurs, UNDP, MfB, CBN, Peru, Soft loans, FEAP, MSMEs, Vulcanizers, Venture Capitalist

Fogg and Cialdini's persuasive principles present in different types of e-services' web pages

This work is built on the research done on persuasion by Fogg and Cialdini. It investigates the type and number of persuasive tools applied to the web design of different categories of e-services, them being: e-commerce, e-banking, and e-government. The aim is to provide an insight into a possible link between the type of service provided and the persuasive techniques applied to the web design. The results of this study indicate that e-commerce applies almost all the persuasive tools described both by Fogg and Cialdini, while e-government is the subcategory that applies the least amount of persuasive techniques in their design. This study concludes by discussing the results and highlighting limitations and possible future directions.This work is built on the research done on persuasion by Fogg and Cialdini. It investigates the type and number of persuasive tools applied to the web design of different categories of e-services, them being: e-commerce, e-banking, and e-government. The aim is to provide an insight into a possible link between the type of service provided and the persuasive techniques applied to the web design. The results of this study indicate that e-commerce applies almost all the persuasive tools described both by Fogg and Cialdini, while e-government is the subcategory that applies the least amount of persuasive techniques in their design. This study concludes by discussing the results and highlighting limitations and possible future directions

Firm Strategies in Open Internet of Things Business Ecosystems: Framework and Case Study

We present a typology of strategies employed by firms using the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT is a distributed network of connected physical objects. As these devices exchange data with each other instead of through an intermediary, the IoT increases complexity of business ecosystems, and opens up new business opportunities. When the platform owner does not own the data and technology is mostly open source, other actors can use and build on them. In addition to platform owner’s strategy, we propose a framework with three additional strategies, based on whether the firms’ offering integrates into the specific industrial value chain or contributes to the IoT ecosystem, and whether the firm offering is by nature stand-alone or systemic. With a multiple case study design, we explore this framework in the setting of 23 firms in a large research project context. The descriptions of the identified IoT strategies support our framework