Marketing Automation is a tool that automates and measures marketing actions/tasks and workflows across multiple online channels (email, social media, websites, blogs..etc).

Lead generation is the process of converting strangers into leads. Leads represent individuals that have expressed interest in a company's product or service. The lead generation process is broken up into two types: Inbound and Outbound.

Inbound lead generation is all about helping potential customers find your company, product or service using channels that are owned or managed by the company. By building easier presence and awareness this can lead to higher conversion into a lead or win. In order to do this a variety of different channels and tactics can be used. Listed below are a few examples:

• Search Engine Optimization: By improving the search-ability and awareness of your site, visits and engagement are subject to increase
• New Content: Creating content that is relevant and impactful to a desired audience can easily lead to visits, engagement and sharing
• Website Organization: The website is the key place where visitors need to be converted to leads and opportunities. Strategically organizing the layout, design, content and calls-to-action can make a big difference between visitors and leads
• Company Blogs: A blog can be a great tool for educating readers on your company, products or services without explicitly advertising. Keeping readers engaged, interested and returning will allow you to build a strong base of users that can potentially be converted  
• Social Media: Social networks and channels have now become the new channels for people to research and learn about products and services. Ads and peers can have a big influence on generating buzz or awareness for a particular company, product or service. Strategically using social media to be in front of your audience and customers can help establish credibility and generate awareness.

​Outbound lead generation is also about helping potential customers find you company, product or service. It serves as complementary to inbound lead generation activities. While inbound lead generation utilizes channels that are owned or managed by the company, outbound lead generation utilizes channels that are external and paid for. Listed below are a few examples:

• Email Marketing: Despite the prevalence of social media and networks, email still remains as one of the more prominent forces in communicating and promoting. By using email to stay in touch with customers, educate them on your company or leading them to one of the inbound lead generation channels, you can ensure your company remains on top-of-mind
• Display Ads: Display ads allow for highly targeted visibility on large exposure search networks. These ads can be used to drive leads to new content on one of your inbound lead generation channels. Display ads create short sparks of interest that should be nurtured/directed to inbound lead generation channels and eventually to conversion.
• Events: Similar to display ads, events can act as methods to create short sparks of interest that should be used to drive leads to inbound lead generation channels. On top of a driver, events are very powerful because they can be used to build a much stronger connection to leads because of face value. These interactions are the most important because there is no buffer of anonymity to polish or refine an image. If done correctly it can quickly turn an individual into a strong lead.

Social media and the availability of online content has created huge barriers of entry for marketers to penetrate through the noise and directly reach leads. Due to this saturation of content, using traditional mass advertising and marketing techniques are ineffective. Lead conversion needs to be broken into stages and emphasis has to be drawn on nurturing a lead all the way to a customer. Lead generation is key to customer conversion and sales because even with a robust and refined funnel, the challenge still remains to acquire and attract potential leads. Lead generation seeks to target the greater challenge of identifying, attracting and channeling leads into the funnel. Without this key process, the only lead source is word of mouth, and with the current saturation of content in the market, this is becomes increasingly unstable.

One of the key components in the Hadoop framework is Map Reduce. It is a distributed data processing model and execution environment that runs on large clusters of commodity machines. It uses the MapReduce algorithm which breaks down all operations into Map, Sorting and Reduce functions. Coming from a non-programming background can make this a difficult concept to understand. A good analogy to use when trying to understand Map Reduce is to associate it to SQL based concepts. Most of the world is familiar with relational databases and SQL, thus, putting it in that context can put a tangible definition to Map Reduce. 

Listed below I have broken out each of the components of Map Reduce and provided a SQL construct as association. It is important to note that Map Reduce jobs and SQL Queries have their similarities but also can have very different purposes. As such, there are times when the SQL analogy cannot be used verbatim or may not align 100%.  

Maps are individual tasks that seek out and retrieve  Key Value pairs that match a criteria. Although Maps are functions, when using the analogy of SQL it is easiest to think of them as the FROM, WHERE and UNION operations in a SQL query.  Maps act to seek out data sets before any reducing, shuffling or sorting is performed . In SQL, the FROM, WHERE and UNION operations seek out data sets before reducing (SUM, COUNT, MIN...etc), shuffling or sorting (GROUP BY, ORDER BY) is performed.

Reduces are tasks that aggregate, summarize and reduce the shuffled and  sorted outputs of the mappers.  Using the analogy of SQL, the Reduce task is similar to the aggregate functions like SUM, DISTINCT, COUNT, MIN, MAX, AVG...etc in a SQL query. Reducers act to aggregate and summarize the data from a full data set into a smaller and manageable output that was originally specified by the user or job. In SQL, the aggregate functions (SUM, DISTINCT, COUNT, MIN, MAX, AVG..etc) operations act to reduce the data across multiple tables into a smaller output specified by the query or user. 

Shuffles and Sorts are tasks that group, sort and organize the outputs of the mappers. Using the analogy of SQL the Shuffle and Sort tasks closely resemble the GROUP BY and ORDER BY operations in a SQL query. Shuffles and Sorts are key to organizing the data in formats and orders that are easiest to perform reduce functions upon. In SQL, the GROUP BY and ORDER BY operations act similarly to organize and group data so that reducing (SUM, COUNT, MIN...etc) functions can be easily performed.