Do Something With Your Marketing: Take a free IBM Cognitive Class!

In this week's Do Something With Your Marketing, one of the most common questions that I'm asked every time I give my uh AI and marketing keynote is okay. Well, how do we get started? Are there are there books? Are there courses? Are there things that we can do to get started?

And the answer is yes, actually. Uh, there are a tremendous number of resources, but today I want to highlight one to you uh and urge you if you have any interest in big data, data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain, you name it, if it's current, if it's trendy, um, and you have a genuine interest in learning the technology and learning how to to at least think about this stuff, if not implement it yourself, then today's do something with your marketing is to take a course with cognitive class. Now, full disclosure, cognitive class is sponsored by IBM, which means that uh from an FTC disclosure perspective, I am an IBM champion. My company, Trust Insights, is an IBM registered business partner, and thus, if you buy anything through IBM to from IBM through us, we I gain some indirect financial benefit. So FTC disclosures out of the way.

Nothing to buy. That's the wonderful thing about this system. Nothing to buy, no zero dollars to spend. So let's go ahead and bring this up here. This is cognitive class.ai.

That is the the URL you want to go to, cognitive class.ai. And what you'll see, of course, of uh the usual fun stuff on the homepage, let's click on courses and see what are the different courses that are available. Actually, learning paths is kind of nice because it gives you a a general idea of sort of the the types of things you can learn, like data science fundamentals, big data fundamentals, uh Hadoop and Spark and Scala. If you know what those things are, they're they're useful. Deep learning.

I would say that for most marketers, the ones you want to start with, uh, you want to start with uh data science foundations and big data fundamentals. Those two learning paths will be really terrific. Inside data science foundations, there are a series of uh three courses here. There is introduction to data science, which is total beginner uh from the ground up, no technology at all. It's just like, hey, this is what data science is.

Some of the basic data science tools, which if you want to do implementation, this is a good one to go through because it covers things like Jupiter, R Studio, etc. Uh, and data science methodology. Now, this one I think every marketer who has a serious interest in uh data science should take this course. You can take the academic portion and do very well with it. And if you don't want to do the implementation, you don't have to.

It helps to be able to do it, but uh it will get you to thinking about how data science works, which is of course the underpinning and foundation of machine learning and artificial intelligence. This is an excellent course. So I'd recommend strongly that you go through if you're a marketer who's interested in it. Intro to data science, optional data science tools, for sure the academic portion of data science methodology, that will give you a real leg up. And it doesn't take that long.

These courses, they do say, you know, um, can take up to uh three to five hours. Yeah, if you're drunk, um, most of these courses, they're they're in little bite-sized chunks of you know, 10 to 15 minutes a piece. You can cruise through them on a Friday afternoon, uh, or uh off hours and stuff. Uh, but most people most of the time are not going to take the full three hours to do any of these courses. Again, big data 101, I think it is a super course and is one that you should definitely take for the academic knowledge.

Uh Hadoop and Spark, uh, I those are specific technologies that you that you can learn about, but certainly big data 101, just to get thinking about what does it mean. Who should take these courses? If you're a marketer, you should be taking these courses. Why? Because these are terms that you're gonna see a lot.

They are terms that vendors are going to flash in front of you. And wouldn't it be great to talk to a vendor and they say, Oh, well, you know, we use we use uh uh Spark and Scala and a and a Spark cluster. I'm like, cool, I can do that too. What makes you different? What makes you special to be able to push back on a vendor that's trying to to you know dazzle you with their their buzzwords, and they'll say, No, no, I I understand what those words mean.

You may think I don't, but I understand what those meet words mean. Tell me what makes you different, and you will find um fairly often that uh once you scratch below the surface, the salesperson doesn't know what they're talking about either. So take those two learning paths. Other ones I would uh suggest taking a look at blockchain essentials, very, very good one. Again, basics.

This is at the and you can with all these courses, you can take sort of the the academic portions without having to actually do the labs if you don't want to. I would suggest doing labs or at least trying the labs so that you can have the experience, but certainly just to get a background knowledge, take the academic portion. So that one's an excellent one. Um, I would say another one R, if you either R or Python, data visualization with Python, also very good. Any of the beginner courses uh would be very, very good for the marketer to take advantage of because you'll get enough to speak the language, you'll get enough to know when someone's BSing you, or when a vendor really doesn't have anything that special, or maybe when a vendor actually does have something uh special and and interesting, and then from there on you can move up through the curriculum to things like deep learning with TensorFlow, which is an advanced course, and it's advanced.

They're not lying. Uh machine learning with R. Uh Data Visualization, a good basic one with either uh Python or R. I would suggest for if you're a marketer who is uh tasked with reporting, both of these could be excellent classes for you. Statistics 101.

Take this course. If you do any kind of reporting, take this course. It is a beginner level course, it is super easy, and you go through some of the basics of you know what the the general stats that you'd want to be able to do and and reproduce and things. All of these courses, like this one here, requires you to use SPSS. You can sign up for a free account to do that again.

No zero dollars out of pocket for this stuff. But go through and start racking up your um your knowledge. Nice side bonus when you go through these courses. If you test if you take and pass the test successfully, uh you get these cool little badges, and these badges are things that go on your LinkedIn profile. Um, you get a little certificate, you can print it out and hang on the wall of your your office or your cubicle or whatever.

Um, but they are super helpful for being able to show, yeah, I did this thing, and by the way, I did this thing, I passed the test, and it's got IBM's name on it. In a world where there's a whole bunch of questionable uh certification authorities out there that are saying, like, yes, you passed this six-week crash course and and something, and you're like, I've never heard of this company. You've heard of IBM, right? Just like you've heard of Google. When you take your Google Analytics certification, the reason why it's one of the gold standards in marketing is because everyone's heard of Google.

People know who Google is. Um the same is true with IBM. You can start racking up these badges and you put it on your LinkedIn profile, it looks good, but most important, the knowledge is in here where it can start doing you some good. So that's this week's uh do something with your marketing. Take a course for free with cognitive class.ai and start racking up your badges and your certifications to show that you know what's the deal is when it comes to data science, when it comes to machine learning, when it comes to artificial intelligence, when it comes to blockchain or big data or Hadoop or reactive architectures or whatever it is that that is of interest to you and your employers.

Now, especially for those folks who are agency folks, this is for for my agency friends. When you get a client, if you work in B2B tech, when you get a client that does something like blockchain, for example, hustle over here and take the blockchain 101 course so that you can be a better partner to your client, right? If you have a technology company as a client, take the course in here for free so that you are on point. And then if the first client meeting you have, guess what? You'll have an incredible vocabulary that will let you ask really great questions of the client and make them go, Wow, we we really hired the right folks.

These folks know know the basics of our business. Yeah, they're not as good as our sort of subject matter experts. We didn't expect them to be, but at least somebody who knows the difference between a blockchain um and a and a cryptocurrency. Wow, this they they they've done their homework. So if for any of my friends who are agency folks who have tech clients, this is the place to skill your knowledge up.

As always, please leave comments in the comments below and subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. And I'll talk to you soon. Want to help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.