Educating Future Social Media Professionals
"Social Media Awesomeness" a term coined by a team of students as an expression of how much they enjoyed Sudha Ram's MIS496A course titled "Web and Social Media Analytics."
The course (offered for the first time in Fall 2011) was an interdisciplinary course open to freshmen, sophomores and juniors from all Eller departments (MIS, economics, marketing, etc.) and other UA departments such as Media Arts, Computer Science, Sociology, Library Science plus others.
The main goal of the course was to teach students how to use basic Business Intelligence theory and combine it with Social Network Analysis (SNA) to gain insights about the emerging social media phenomena. Students used their newly learned analytical techniques and applied these techniques to mine through large amounts of data to provide actionable business insights.
Not only did students learn about the current popular social media platforms – they used them in the classroom. Some of the online tools used during the course include
1.) Google AdWords – each student team had to develop an online ad marketing campaign for a small local company.
2.) Gephi (an open source visualization tool) – helped to visualize and analyze networks constructed from data gathered from the social media sites such as You Tube (video sharing), Facebook (social networking) and Yelp (reviews and recommendations) and others.
3. Twitter - provided a forum for discussion and real time feedback on all homework and project presentations. Every time a student presented their resume, Google project, or their homework everyone in class had to tweet their feedback using the hashtag #MIS496A. The class used a big screen display to show the tweets as they showed up during the presentations so students were able to respond to all of the comments from the class immediately.
4. Facebook page – used for the entire group to share and discuss articles, blogs, videos and other interesting material relevant for this class.
"It was amazing to see how the class bonded as a community using social media – initially they came in as individuals and most of them did not know each other.” Sudha said, “By the end of the semester, they all knew each other, were helping each other tremendously and constantly sharing feedback, new information, and interacting with each other via social media (Twitter, and Facebook) and outside the class. What was also very nice to see was that they were all genuinely interested in sharing feedback with each other to help each person improve their project or homework."
Students gave the course raves reviews and many were impressed by what they learned. Even though they use many of these social media platforms every day, they learned the power behind analyzing the data to help monetize a product or a person.
Below are a few samples of the students work. This is just a small sample of the “awesomeness” of the work produced by the students. We wish we could have posted each and every project, blog, infographic, video, website, QR code and game that was produced during this course but unfortunately we are limited by available presentation space.
Final projects
The assignment was to answer the question "What we learned from this class."
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Team: Ha Lam, Tingting He, Aayush Goel, Pao-Lai Hong |
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| Team: Betty Lee, Andrew Nolan, Taylor Hedberg, and Russ Cook Visit the team here to find out what they learned. |
Inforgraphic resumes
Students learned how to creatively "monetize" themselves.
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| Miguel Acero Jr.'s interactive infographic resume. Experience it here. |
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| Samantha Kluth infographics resume. Click here to view the .PDF. |
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| Livio De La Cruz infographics resume. View it here. |
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| Andrew Nolan infographics resume. Click here to view in .PDF |
Blogs
Blogs were used to journal students thoughts and insights about the class.
| James Carpenter | http://jhcarpentermis496a.blogspot.com/ |
| Katherine Lynn Coppola | http://mis496.blogspot.com/ |
| Jennifer Dicochea | http://analyticalrambling.blogspot.com/ |
| Christine Megumi Kerns | http://christinekernsmis496a.blogspot.com/ (Viewed best in Chrome, Firefox, Safari or IE9) |
| Blaine Harlan Light | http://entrepreneurialenterprises.blogspot.com/ (Viewed best in Chrome, Firefox, Safari or IE9) |
| Charles Mattingly | http://charlesmattingly.blogspot.com/ |
| Camille Sabino | http://cmsabino.blogspot.com/ |
| Ahmad Taleb | http://mycoolestcollegeclass.blogspot.com/ (Viewed best in Chrome, Firefox, Safari or IE9) |
| Jake Thompson | http://jaketmis496a.blogspot.com/ |
| Jacob Webb |
For additional information, please contact us.
