For two days in Early March (March 7-8), we hosted forty-eight of the industry’s most influential analysts in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, for SAS’ annual analyst conference. Collectively, the analysts generated more than 2,000 tweets – the bulk of which were created in a single day – the day our executive
One of the first things many of us do in the "monitoring and listening" phase of social media engagement is to sign up for Google Alerts. After you sign up for those alerts, one of the things to watch out for are scraper blogs. These sites copy and paste (or
I recently blogged about how to eliminate a macro loop in favor of using SAS/IML language statements. The purpose of the program was to extract N 3x3 matrices from a big 3Nx3 matrix. The main portion of my PROC IML program looked something like this: proc iml; ... do i=0
It should come as no surprise that one of the topics of great interest to the customer intelligence community is marketing measurement. And like anything, the better the measurement, the better the potential impact for management. So, to address the topic of marketing measurement for our recent Webinar with the
Influence is something we all want to attain within our respective markets, but questions often arise about what makes someone an influencer: How do you identify influencers in your industry? How influential are they really? How do they influence their audience? Where does their influence begin and end? How can
Recently, I was waiting at a stoplight listening to an author interview on NPR. They were talking with Joshua Foer, a journalist who, as part of a feature he was writing, decided to take on the challenge of the United States Memory Championship event and ended up winning. He’s written
Seth Godin, bald. Mitch Joel, bald. Greg Verdino, bald. Stacey Alexander, bald. Yes, you heard that right. Former SAS intern, Stacey Alexander, who blogged here frequently last summer, is shaving her head. But no, she's not really doing it to join the bald social media guru club. Instead, she's doing
Growing up in Michigan, I, like all state residents, learned early on that the lower peninsula of Michigan is shaped like a mitten. This piece of information has served me well all my life; whenever I meet a stranger who wants to know where in Michigan I grew up, I
SAS procedure SUMMARY is a quick method of converting your detail table to a fully summarized one. Included is a sample. The key option to set is the NWAY - this generates the lowest level of summary for use in the OLAP cube. Essentially - the class statement contains all
In the computer software industry, 35 years is like an eon. I mean, 35 years ago, the computing power that I carry around within my mobile phone didn't even exist all in one place; but if it did, it would have filled an entire building. That's why the recent posting
Statistical programmers can be creative and innovative. But when it comes to choosing names of variables, often x1, x2, x3,... works as well as any other choice. In this blog post, I have two tips that are related to constructing variable names of the form x1, x2,..., xn. Both tips
In the past couple months, this scenario has occurred twice. So thought I'd share a quick remedy ~ and save for my future reference when this occurs again :). In Star Schemas, there are sometimes occasions where the data quality isn't exactly perfect. And sometimes, for some users/companies, this is
Third Edition of SAS OnlineDoc® 9.2 PDF Files released today It's not often that you can purchase an entire library of reference documentation for less than the cost of a single book. However, that's exactly what you can do if you purchase the SAS OnlineDoc 9.2 PDF Files. This stand-alone
We're having an early spring in North Carolina. Trees are budding, flowers are blooming, and the warmer temperatures make even a pistol whipping more enjoyable. What better way to take advantage of the new season than filling your spring with educational opportunities in forecasting. Plan in Perfect Sync with Customer
Loony. Zany. Brilliant. Hysterical. Those are some of the adjectives I use to describe The Far Side® cartoons by Gary Larson from the 1980s and early '90s. I recently rediscovered an old book, The Far Side Gallery 2, which collects some of the best of Larson's wonderfully wacky cartoons. Every
This week I made a quick trip to Predictive Analytics World in San Francisco. It was my first appearance at that event, and some great things are going on at it and related conferences. It was held in conjunction with the eMetrics and Conversion conferences—all put on by Rising Media.
SAS Global Forum 2011 just over two weeks away. The R&D and product management teams are preparing the demos to show on stage during the highly-visible opening sessions. A tremendous amount of work goes into planning the program. It's great to see what they come up with. When it comes
On St. Patrick’s Day there are green rivers, mugs of green beer, and lots of green outerwear. I’m not sure what percentage of SAS Publishing book covers are green, but it's high. And in all probability for good reason. Besides being the most appealing color to the eye (I didn’t
Did you know that several major contributors on the collaborative online community for SAS® users worldwide are SAS Press authors? In fact, sasCommunity.org, created by SAS users for SAS users, includes authors Art Carpenter, Don Henderson, Kirk Lafler, Michael Raithel, Howard Schreier and Charlie Shipp on the current advisory board.
In a previous blog post, I showed how to use the SAS/IML SORT and SORTNDX subroutines to sort rows of a matrix according to the values of one or more columns. There is another common situation in which you might need to sort a matrix: you compute a statistic for
I’m amazed that so many financial institutions seem to hold fraud at a seemingly low priority. Fraud is often viewed as “the cost of doing business.” What if your view of fraud could be altered so that it became “the profit of doing business”? With the growth in new payment
I’m here at the what might be the biggest gathering of social media minds, Austin’s annual South by Southwest Interactive conference. With over 15,000 interactive registrants this year, many brands, big and small, are looking for innovative ways to grab the attention of SXSWI attendees who, by nature, suffer from
This is my first post on this blog so let me introduce myself. I am Will Waugh – I am responsible for campaign management, channel optimization and marketing investment for Financial Services in the US. I am a B2B marketer with some big time business challenges. Traditional campaign management means
Last week, SAS held its annual analyst conference in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where SAS leaders and SAS customers spoke to a room full of industry analysts about the direction of SAS products and business strategy for 2011 and beyond. It's a pretty exclusive event, so not many attend. But -
eBooks are all the rage now in the publishing industry and for SAS Publishing, we’re just as excited as the rest of our publishing friends. But not all e-reading experiences are created equal. Smart phones, tablets, and dedicated eReaders have opened the door to eBook delivery. These devices offer beautiful
Tapan and I had the chance to talk with Karen Washburn, Manager for the SAS Business Knowledge Series, a SAS Education Division program, who is joining us at Predictive Analytics World this week! Karen will be participating in the conference and seeking out new partners to join the Business Knowledge
Sorting is a fundamental operation in statistical programming, and most SAS programmers are familiar with PROC SORT for sorting data sets. But did you know that you can also sort rows of a SAS/IML matrix according to the value of one or more columns? This post shows how. Sorting a
OLAP Calculated Members need to be tested to ensure that the numbers are correct in various tools. What we recently found was that the member tested properly in the OLAP Studio View Cube but then in Web Report Studio, the measure wasn't correct. Essentially, it was calculating the custom measurement
Bill Franks, Chief Analytics Officer (CAO) of Teradata spent some time with us this week to talk about next week's Predictive Analytics World activities! Predictive Analytics World that takes place during Data Driven Business Week March 14-15 in San Francisco. Any thoughts you would like to share about the upcoming
Business Intelligence is a phrase that means many things to different organizations, which is why all BI vendors have their own definition. The term was coined in 1958 by Hans Peter Luhn of IBM*, who described it as “the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a
