Progress Magazine Annual Report 2011 - Eller College of ...

innovations
building social
media intelligence
undergraduate course
uses business intelligence
to understand social media
See the animation
of the Egyptian
Revolution spread
via Twitter by
scanning the
QR code.
Daron Shade Photo
“Recruiters are looking for
employees with expertise
in social media and
business intelligence,”
said McClelland Professor
of MIS Sudha Ram.
Ram already teaches a
master’s level course that
gives students hands-on
experience putting
business intelligence
theory to work for large
and small businesses and
non-profit organizations.
The success of that course
has fueled demand for a
similar offering for
undergraduates students.
MIS 496A-002: Web and
Social Media Analytics
is an interdisciplinary
course open to all
UA undergraduates.
“This course will give
students the opportunity
to apply business intelligence
techniques with
social media tools to gain
insights into emerging
social media phenomena,”
Ram said.
Ram said the proliferation
of social media has
provided huge volumes
of data that can shed light
on the emerging social
media technologies and
their utility. She pointed
to an animation that
researchers developed to
illustrate how this year's
Egyptian Revolution
unfolded online via Twitter,
a network in motion.
Ram’s class will focus on
real-world projects for
local non-profit and small
businesses. First student
teams will collaborate with
client organizations to
develop and run online
marketing campaigns
using Google AdWords.
In the second project,
students will use an
open-source software
package for visualizing
and analyzing large
networks or graphs
to map and measure/
analyze relationships
between people, groups,
organizations, computers,
URLs, and more.
“The students will be using
social media including
Foursquare, Facebook,
and Twitter, but that’s just
one part of the equation,”
Ram added. “What the
class will do is give them
the analytical tools they
need to understand large
amounts of data and
provide actionable
business insights.”
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