Social Media and Networks

6A1: Network Communication and Social Media

In this module component students gain insight into important theoretical aspects that provide a framework for the emergence of the network society and social media and its impact on society. The importance and impact is stressed from economical, organizational, political and law, but also from social, cultural and psychological perspectives, both at organizational and individual level. In addition to the opportunities that social media offer, students also learn to critically reflect on the impact of communication through social media. Concepts as cybercrime, cyber bullying, privacy, transparency, authorship, identity, and social relationships are discussed. After all, social media are not undisputed and recent developments demonstrate important ethical issues. Students will identify both opportunities and challenges that social media create.

6A2 Ethics of New Media

In this module component, students will study ethical theories that structure our reflection about right and wrong, situated in the context of social media and computer-mediated communication. Ethics is ultimately the study of living together in harmony, whether online or offline. We will examine how the Internet expands our possibilities for interacting with one another and what new challenges are posed for morality, politics, and self-understanding. Ethical and political theories will provide frameworks that help us understand these challenges and decide how to meet them.

6C: Network and Content Analysis

As part of the project (6D) students learn how to conduct a content and network analysis of data collected on social media, here being Twitter. By means of Grounded Theory, Twitter data will becollected and analysed. Content analysis on Twitter has some important characteristics. Due to the personal and interactive communication format, tweets are often less formal and unmediated. They are fragmented, do not follow grammar rules, and rely heavily on slang, abbreviations, and entity variations. Minimal clues are left for automatically identifying context. Network analysis will be performed to identify the structure of the network of the chosen organization, key players in the network (organizations or individual people), their roles in the network and connections.

6D: Organizational Social Media Strategy

In this individual project, students develop a Twitter strategy for an organization. The base of this strategy is an analysis of Twitter messages from and about the organization. Over a period of one month, the student collects all communicated tweets. This collection, for example, enables the possibility to analyze how often specific words are mentioned or what messages are often shared or retweeted. Network and content analysis as described above (6C) provide insights on what the network of people look like that talk about the organization, and what is being communicated. From the analysed data, students write a social media strategy. The goals of this strategy depend on the organizational goals. It can be branding, engagement, informing, conversational, persuasion, problem solving, community building, relationship building, commitment, co-creation, service delivery etc. The focus the student chooses depends on the organization. The eventual developed strategy will be presented by means of a poster presentation.