This course will teach you new methods to collect and analyze data from social media and the internet. New tools of analysis will help you uncover patterns in big data, and allow you to construct meaningful descriptions of stakeholders in the form of personas.

Deriving insights is an increasingly important success factor in today's communication environment. Measuring, analyzing, and implementing data into decision-making processes create effective and efficient PR and marketing campaigns. With societal issues increasingly occupying management's agenda, communication departments are increasingly tasked to gather and develop insights into complex problems. On the agency side, value is increasingly created through creative and strategic planning, which itself is dependent on creating insights.

In this course, the general objective is to provide students studying digital communication and marketing the adequate competence to use these insight- and data-driven methods/tools. Data is collected from online sources such as social media, blogs, forums and websites. This will give students the ability to understand audiences, to become skilled in developing persuasive and customized messaging, to select the best communication channels for messages, and ultimately, to achieve optimal results. The emphasis of the class will be on application and interpretation of the results, providing input for making real life business and communication strategy decisions. We will focus less on the mathematical and statistical properties of the techniques used to produce these results, and more on the methods used in analysis of the data itself.