Rajalakshmi School of Business Current Issues

in Business & Society - IV In-Class Assignment

– Tuesday, 1st September, 2020

a) What did you do during the pandemic period?

During this pandemic period, I had engaged in various activities that will help to improve
my career & health.

I was constantly improving my skills which helps me to stand out from the competition. I
kept myself engaged all the time by doing various online courses in various platforms
like LinkedIn, YouTube Etc.
In additional to this, to get practical exposure and to become industry ready I was doing
various Internships in different companies.

b) How has marketing been affected by the pandemic and how has the practice changed
due to the pandemic?

There has been a lot that has happened as a direct or indirect result of COVID-19.
Companies have to continually seek out ways to engage with customers and provide
multiple avenues, brick and mortar and online. We can already see many companies
adjusting their messaging, incentives and value propositions. They will certainly adapt to
whatever situation is to come, hopefully in innovative and inspiring ways. 

There will be a huge increase in digital ad spend over the next few months as consumers
will naturally be spending more time online, especially choosing to shop online versus
leaving the house. Additionally, as people travel less and work from home more, I also
expect to see mobile and social opportunities increase

Due to increased use of social media, spend across the social platforms is likely to increase.
With more people on their phones, looking for engaging content to keep them busy as they
try to tackle the emotional burden of self-isolation, social media will become a daily routine
that people need to keep them grounded, give them a sense of community and regular
updates on the global crises.

As content creators, providers or facilitators, we have a unique responsibility to be

conscious of the content that we publish at this time. Consumers need support from the
brands they love, and social media provides a great vehicle to deliver that.
c) How has HR/Finance/Business Analytics been affected by the pandemic and
how has the practice changed due to the pandemic? Obviously, you will
choose your second specialization.

The analytics industry has always been very diverse and dynamic. Just like the impact of
coronavirus depends on the market, industry and business function; similarly, the impact
on analytics companies depends on whose needs these analytics companies are
serving. Apart from the supply chain and manufacturing industry, COVID-19 has the
most significant negative impact on industries that rely on the movement of people like
travel, tourism, live events, and hotels, and consumer-facing industries whose products
and services are seen as non-essential.

Along with that, financial services industries are also impacted, which have lent to cash
strapped industries or provided unsecured loans to individuals who may default.
However, several sectors, like e-commerce, video conferencing, online education, and
online gaming companies, are hugely benefited with social distancing. Therefore,
whether analytics companies do well will depend on how reliant they are on industries
that will experience a slowdown. Further analytics companies who can work without
physical contact for selling, data collection and analysis will do well while those that rely
on an onsite model will suffer.

d) What did you do in your SIP? What challenges did you face? How did you
solve those problems?
I had done Sentiment Analysis using Analytical Tools Like Python, R, SPSS &
Excel. In this project I had analyzed around 30000 tweets in each of the 5 latest
Tamil movies. From the results insights are obtained to understand what people
talk, think & expect from a movie. These Insights will be helpful for filmmakers to
understand the sentiments of audience thereby helping them to produce quality
films.
I had faced various challenges during the course of this project some of them are,
1. Extracting the Tweets because of various restriction imposed by
Twitter.
Used a Python Script called “TWINT” to extract tweets without any restriction.
2. Extracting & Analyzing the Tweets in Native Languages i.e. Tamil.
Extracted tweets is usually saved as csv file in a specific Python Output
format (Encoding Style), There was a computability issues between Python &
Excel for Tamil Texts/Tweets. Then, using transform data function solved this
Compatibility issue. Finally, the Tamil tweets were translated to English and
then Analyzed.
3. Cleaning the data & Choosing the Right Program for Analysis.
Removing the junk letters, symbols and unwanted text made the program
complicated. With the help of Github & other open source websites coding
was done accordingly to my dataset.
4. Handling & Computation of Big data in Excel.
Excel struggled in handling big data because of excessive use of formulas in
each row & column. (30000 rows*16 Columns approx.) This is because the
memory consumed by excel to compute & store these formulas was very
large. Using some techniques like Paste of Numbers, Save as Binary
Workbook helped to reduce the memory space of those data’s which made
the analysis easier & faster.