Assignment 1

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[Please feel free to modify/reuse this assignment in your class]

Sample Social Media Analytics Assignment: Text and Network Discovery

Objectives: The goal of this assignment is to apply techniques from social media analytics, text mining and social network analysis to analyze online discourse and network data from social media about a particular event, company, product or service in order to

  • Objective 1: identify main topical themes (e.g., what customers are saying about a particular product);
  • Objective 2: identify key influencers (both individual and organizational accounts), and
  • Objective 3: determine how to use information from (1) and (2) to improve products/services under examination as well as to develop a communication strategy to influence online discourse on this topic.

Software: Netlytic (https://netlytic.org)

Software Documentation (Videos and Guides): https://netlytic.org/home/?page_id=11280

Data source: Publically available social media data from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Youtube. Datasets for this assignment will be collected by students using Netlytic.


Main Steps:

    1. Review two case studies of applying social media analytics using both text and Network analysis with Netlytic:
      1. Text analysis with Netlytic: Sochi 2014 [https://netlytic.org/home/?p=168]
      2. Network analysis with Netlytic: Oscars 2014 [https://netlytic.org/home/?p=171]
    2. Select a topic relevant to your professional interests (e.g., event, company, product,
    3. Identify relevant social media platforms and public online groups/hashtags used to discuss the topic in quest
    4. Using Netlytic, collect publicly available social media data (e.g., Twitter messages, Facebook group posts, YouTube comments, or Instagram posts) and analyze it with the help of text and network analysis. The outcome of this step will be a set of interactive visualizations.

    5. Finally, use the resulting visualizations to complete Objectives 1-3 and prepare a final report (~10 pages). The written project report should be submitted electronically via the course website. The report template will be provided by the instructor.
    6. Present the project results in class in a form of “lightning talk” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_talk). The presentation should be based on the results to be discussed in your final report. One delegate from each group will have minutes to summary the findings. The presentation should be accompanied by up to Power Point slides saved as PDF and submitted electronically via the course website 24 hours before the oral presentation.