This is a Level 3 Information Systems (IS) course that continues students’ study of strategies to create and extract value from social media. In particular, the course will focus on the influential power of social media, the effect of social media on operational matters, social media metrics and strategic aspects of social media analytics. The course will help students better understand various social media technologies, platforms and their applications in a business context. The course will present the purpose, function and design of social media platforms and help students to understand the benefits and drawbacks of using such technologies. The course will also present social media data analyses and how they can assist organisations to improve their overall efficiency and provide a competitive advantage. In lectures, students will learn about the scope and metrics for assessing the effectiveness of social media and networking, and to develop models for implementing and leveraging social media. In addition, students will understand techniques for sentiment and text analytics and communicate and assess a firm’s social media strategy with a professional approach in written form. Students will also learn to discuss the challenges associated with implementing social media, analytics and networking technologies and their impacts on organisations. In workshops, students will learn to apply a set of techniques to create and extract value from social media, social media metrics and strategic aspects of social media analytics. Students will work on practical examples to complement the theoretical frameworks and concepts. Some of the workshops are also intended to provide students gain basic hands-on experience and practical proficiency using SAS text mining software.

SAS software tools will be used for the skills components of the course: “Text Analytics Using SAS Text Miner”, “SAS Contextual Analysis”, and “SAS Sentiment Analysis".