Insight-driven communication

Introduction

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 PR and marketing communication 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.

Course content

1. Introduction: why insights
This part of the course will introduce the importance of insights for communication strategies. 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 digital data.

2. Using digital data for business challenges
Students will be provided with an in-depth introduction to the concept of digital data, and ways of making the most of the information and data mining techniques that the technology has enabled. These lessons will specifically look at the potential for such data for strategic insights as well as the design, implementation and measuring of marketing efforts.

3. Tools to generate insights
Students will work hands-on with various new media to learn ways to explore trending topics, discover what stakeholders are talking about, analyze networks, discover trending topics, identify influencers, and gain an understanding for web site traffic.

4. Advanced topics
Students will learn about recently developed techniques for data collection and analysis, as well as new technology which could play a part in communcation professions.

5. Presenting insights
Participants will learn about presenting their insights to a wider audience, and will discuss the challenge of finding a fit between audience needs and proper data presentation. Principles for visualizing data, as well as data presentation tools, including reports, dashboards, and key metrics will be explained.