Courses & Programmes

What can organizations and brands learn from interactions with users on social media (e.g., Facebook, Instagram), websites or other digital environments? What insights can communication specialists gain from user behavior in the digital space? Can so-called big data hep them to gain knowledge about industry trends and future prospects for their organizations? Web behavior, social media interactions, and other digital traces left by people produce data that record, often in great detail, interactions between different stakeholders (including consumers, media outlets, members of political parties, etc.) and organizations. This overflow of data poses important opportunities to communication professionals. For example, how can we use such data to evaluate the outcomes of political, marketing, corporate or public health campaigns or help predict the success of communication efforts? At the same time, new challenges arise. Organizations are required to collect and process digital traces respecting the privacy of the user, as well as in an ethical and responsible way.

This course focuses on the process that communication professionals use to identify communication challenges that could be answered with digital analytics. In this course, we focus on the different steps of this process, including the gathering and understanding of the data, preparing the data for analysis, building models, and evaluating the effectiveness of the models in formulating actionable recommendations that address the challenges. We also discuss how to relate digital analytics to communication theories, as well as evaluate the privacy and ethical impact of the activities performed (e.g., ethical machine learning).

Throughout the course, students become familiar with some of the most common types of digital data (e.g., web and social data) and tools (including Google Analytics), learn how to analyze digital data, and evaluate their limitations.