APPLIES TO ACADEMIC YEAR 2015/2016 Norwegian version

PRK 3662 Insight-driven communication

Responsible for the course
Christian Fieseler

Department
Department of Communication and Culture

Term
According to study plan

ECTS Credits
7,5

Language of instruction
Norwegian and english

Introduction
Insights are an increasingly important success factor in today’s communication environment. Measuring, analyzing, and implementing small and big data into decision-making 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. And on the agency side, value is increasingly created through creative and strategic planning, which itself is dependent to create insights. In this course, students will.

In this course, the general objective is to provide students studying PR and marketing communication these insight- and data-driven methods/analytics that can are instrumental to understand audiences, to develop 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 applications and interpretation of the results from locating and collecting data and analyzing information 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.

Learning outcome
Recquired Knowledge
Students will obtain an understanding for the role of data in today’s marketing and communication environment, and will get acquainted with up-to-date methodology to plan and to frame research questions, both for practical as well as for academic endeavors.
Participants will learn both classic and new approaches of gathering data and to extract insights from these data, ranging from traditional perception studies to techniques of gathering insights from new online media such as facebook, twitter or google.

Recquired Skills
Students will get to know effective ways to derive and present findings from data, ranging from visualization to insights-driven argumentation. In detail, students will learn:

• performing literature and state-of-the-art reviews based on secondary data
• conducting perception studies and identifying key influencers
• using google, twitter, facebook and other social media analytics tools
• using data to define stakeholder personas
• aggregate and visualize insights

1. Introduction: Why Insights
   The first lecture will introduce the importance of insights for communication strategies, and will showcase advances in small and big data generation and exploitation. Students will obtain insights into the applicability of such approaches for data-driven campaigns and will develop an understanding for the nature, opportunities and challenges of data.
2. Communication Evolution and Social Strategy: The State of the Research
   With the advent of the Internet, data has become available in great quantity and immediacy. In this session, students will get acquainted with various efforts to gather such data and to put it to use, in examples ranging from political developments such as the Arab spring, to better understanding human behavior in general, to generating customer, advertising and campaign insights.
3. Literature and Content Analysis
   Most research projects, both in practice and in academia, start with gathering and interpreting secondary sources. In this lecture, students will learn how to gather and present state-of-the-arts, how to locate and analyze studies, and how to conduct and present content analysis – both from a design as well as from a hands-on perspective.
4. Opinion Research and the Importance of Influencers
   Students will learn about processes of opinion formation, and the importance of influencers in this process. Both in classical forms (such as perception studies) as in online forms (such as influencer marketing) of communication, the identification and assessment of key stakeholders is paramount, the course will introduce matching techniques.
5. Customer and Stakeholder Personas
   Building on the last lecture, participants will learn about methods to explore and describe the values and demands of organizational stakeholders. Here, the course will place particular emphasis on creative approaches to visualization of such groups, in the form of personas and rich descriptions to create deep stakeholder understanding.
6. Internal Consistency and Obtaining Internal Data
   Generally, organizations possess rich inventories of data that are useful for generating insights. Increasingly, communication is also faced with aligning communication efforts – to this end, in this session, forms of how internal alignment can be measured, in terms of culture, editorial principles, timing, reach and connectedness of communication efforts, will be explored.
7. Using Big Data for Business Challenges
   This lecture will introduce students in-depth to the concept of big data, and ways of making the most of the masses of information and mining techniques that technology has enabled. This lesson will in particular look at the potential for such data for strategic insights, and the design, implementation and measuring of data mining efforts.
8. Google analytics, facebook and twitter as tools to generate insights
   In these sessions, students will work hands-on with various new media to learn ways to exploring trending topics, discovering what stakeholders are taking about, analyzing fan pages, examining friendships and getting to understand web site traffic and interconnectedness. Both standard as well as data-mining approaches to gather insight on these sites will be discussed.
9. Visual Netnography
   New media, such as instagram, also offer opportunities for gathering qualitative data, for instance on the ambitions, dreams and fears of customers and stakeholders. In this session, students will get to learn about several non-standard approaches to gathering insights, ranging from visual to diary to netnographic methods.
10. Presenting Insights
    In this final session, participants will learn about presenting their insights to a wider audience, and will discuss the challenge of finding a fit between audience needs and the right data presentations. Both structuration principles for arguments, as well as data presentation tools, including reports, dashboards, visualizations, and key metrics will be explained.