Speeches had been prepared, videos had been filmed and articles written and edited, when on the morning of the 11th November my alarm rang. Today there was no more preparation or planning; today it was time to facilitate. An email was already in my inbox: “Web science: how the web is changing the world – Week 1 has just started!” The first week was always going to induce a rather high bout of anxiety – both in an excited way (that’s all our work going out there to thousands of people at once!), and a slightly more apprehensive manner (I’m facilitating the very first day of a brand new course on an essentially brand new platform… what if it all goes wrong?!). Thankfully, it was the former that ultimately came out on top.

Facilitating – and tutoring (my content appeared as a part of Week 5) – on the MOOC turned in to a daily experience of checking the FutureLearn platform to see what comments and discussions were appearing on the activities in the course. The immediate interpretation of these was that the insights and experiences being spoken about in these conversations were almost as fascinating as the content of the course itself. The ideas of Web Science were mainstream. People all over the world were discussing and sharing stories on how their lives, work and leisure related to Web Science. Odd and rare technical mishap aside (for example Internet Explorer not allowing browser history to be copied in to a visualisation tool that had been created), the course kicked in to gear and before long it felt like a mature, living and breathing Web Science environment. Facilitation turned more in to a process of watching, reading and waiting to see if any issues arose, allowing the discussions that were happening to develop and progress naturally. I think this was a vitally important aspect of the course: from my own experience on ‘traditional’ University courses, many conversations about the content will occur outside of the teaching environment, with no input from the lecturer or academic, so it made sense to ensure that on the MOOC, these equivalent conversations were allowed the same room to grow and explore.

As the weeks went on, the topics of the content changed and some of my fellow facilitators stepped in to monitor specific discussions around their own content, meaning that there was always a good feeling that the best responses and feedback possible to the discussions for each activity were coming from the facilitation team. I found facilitating for the entire 6 weeks however provided a more holistic experience of the first venture into a MOOC – it was great to become familiar with particular learners on the course, recognise their names when they posted in discussions, and begin to build up an image of how people’s perspectives were changing throughout.

Week 5 was particularly interesting, as it featured some of my own content. It was a strange and slightly intimidating experience at first, taking what I’ve been working on for over 2 years now and extracting what are the core elements relevant to any Web Scientist, and then explaining them in a way that was accessible to all. Despite a few initial queries over one part of activity, a few replies to gently ‘push’ learners towards the sorts of things they needed to consider seemed to help a great deal and there was something incredibly rewarding to see people start to ‘get’ something that had initially thrown them.

Then, before I knew it, Week 6 was drawing to end and things were drawing to a close. The rewarding feeling grew as people said thank you and described how they had found the course, leaving the next-run of the MOOC in February as a bright spot to look forward to in the near future, with the hope that it can produce the same kind of reaction.

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The first thing that is immediately noticeable from this is the increased size of the overall network. The use of the hashtag is clearly spreading – more and more people are tweeting with it as the MOOC progresses. Additionally, there appears to be a larger, closer cluster of users in the centre of the graph, comprising of the highest indegree users (those who are mentioned the most in tweets with #FLwebsci) and some high outdegree users (those using #FLwebsci in tweets the most). Lisa Harris, for example, has become more closely embedded in this central network, perhaps reflecting that the users she has been contacting are now interacting more with other central accounts relating to the MOOC.

The other big change is the introduction of the official @UoSFLwebsci account that has increased rapidly in ‘importance’ in the network, ranking as one of three most active tweeting accounts, and growing in size to show that people are mentioning it when using the hashtag.

If you are interested in how I made this visualisation, the process is the same as the original diagram, which is detailed here.

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Using a Tweet Harvester run by the University, and the open source graph visualisation software Gephi, I was able to collect all tweets containing ‘FLwebsci’ and produce the network image below (click on it to load a larger, more detailed version). The size of nodes (users) relates to their in-degree – or how many times a tweet containing the hashtag mentioned them or was a retweet of their own message. The colour of nodes relates to their out-degree – or how many times that user tweeted using the hashtag – blue nodes are a low number of tweets, white nodes slightly higher, and red nodes are the highest.

You can also view a PDF of this graph.

What is surprising here is that Simon Fogg (‘srjf’) who is a registered student on the course, appears as the ‘reddest’ node, showing that he has been enthusiastically tweeting about the course. He has also produced a Google+ community around the MOOC, to further develop its presence online. This has worked as a great supporting movement to the establishment of the MOOC, and to show this, a layout algorithm was run in Gephi to arrange nodes closer to those that they are connected to. As you can see below, ‘srjf’ is connected to a large number of nodes in the left hand side of the image, who would have otherwise not been included in the network at all. This demonstrates the effect that ‘srjf‘ has had on propagating news of the MOOC and the hashtag for it to new members of the community. This is a great example of how the combination of social media and enthusiastic, devoted supporters can open up and expand the audience of a particular brand, community or organisation. Thanks must go out to Simon for the excellent work he has been carrying out in promoting the MOOC and welcoming other learners.

There will be more discussions about how network visualisations can be used for social media analysis in Week 5 of the MOOC, so if you haven’t signed up yet but are interested in this topic then head over to Futurelearn to find out more!

More details of the methodology are available on my blog too

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Last summer (2012), the BBC investigated the value of ‘likes’ on Facebook (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18813237). It found that companies were spending money to obtain likes, when these might often not actually be real people’s accounts – or from people who actually have an interest in that company. They demonstrated this by creating a completely fake page and received over 3,000 likes in a week. Obviously this shows that measuring the number of likes (or ‘followers’ to carry the example over to Twitter) is a questionable method of determining social media success or popularity.

But is this all bad? It definitely suggests you shouldn’t use measures like this for determining business success, returns on investments, sales, or engaged, dedicated brand-advocates. But does a page with more likes appear more attractive to a potential customer? Consider whether you would rather ‘like’ a company’s page yourself if it had 2000 likes, or 10? Or 0? It is possible that an initial spike in the number of likes could help give the community a chance to grow, develop and take off, attracting the valuable customers that the business needs for a supportive, engaged group.

Alternatively, what happens when someone arrives at a page, sees that it has a few thousand likes, but there is no interaction in return to the brand’s posts: no likes, no comments, no shares. This paints the picture of a very un-engaged audience, which is probably true if these likes are people who know nothing about the company. Would this desolate space put you off interacting yourself?

This is undoubtedly a tricky balance that companies need to get right in order to succeed on social media. But it is clear that any success at all depends on committed, engaged supporters who interact on the brand’s content, create their own, and were aware enough that the social media profile existed in the first place to be able to do so.

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Social business is an area that has been massively influenced by the Web. Tremendous opportunities are now available for companies to engage with their customers and supporters, receive and respond to feedback, and carry out market research by being on social media. But to determine what value this really has for an organisation – moving beyond solely financial value – interdisciplinary research via Web Science is required to elicit  – and attempt to quantify – the advantages that this new phenomenon affords.

The types of value that Web Science will examine – as well as the financial savings and rewards – include: customer loyalty from more engaged consumers who feel like they have a personal connection to a brand; increased exposure to a wider customer base who become aware of a product through their own social connections; and the potential for marketing messages to spread virally through a massive network of interconnected people. Web Science is contributing to the understanding of what these things mean for a business, and is looking at finding suitable, contemporary measures for how effective they are. Looking forward, this will provide organisations of all sizes a way to determine whether they are meeting their goals through social media – currently an issue that has yet to be achieved in the existing disciplines. With more and more people flocking to social media sites to express their love of – and frustrations with– companies, learning how to reliably assess this landscape is of the utmost importance to businesses going in to the future, and Web Science offers the mix of perspectives and methodologies to achieve this.

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Briefly tell me what your session is going to be about –
My activity falls into Week 5 (Economy) and covers the topic of Social Business – primarily focusing on how businesses and organisations can carry out social media monitoring and analysis to improve their performance. This will go over the advantages of using social media, problems with determining whether it has much of an effect or not, and begins to indicate some areas where network analysis could be used to gain valuable insights into an online brand community.

What are the main aims you want to achieve? –
I’m aiming to get people thinking about what it is about social media that makes it so engaging, and how this is utilised by organisations to get people interacting with their brand. By understanding this, you will have a much greater sense of the effect that social media has had (and is having), and why it opens up completely new forms of communication, that in turn facilitate new opportunities for businesses.

How will the learners benefit? –
They will learn about some of the main issues preventing reliable social media measurement at this time, and begin to understand that the meaning of certain actions on social media are questionable – especially when an organisation is trying to gauge the audience response to something. What did it mean when you ‘liked’ something on Facebook that your favourite shop posted? But rather than just focusing on the negatives, we’ll look at some of the really innovative campaigns that have been carried out, where social media has definitely had a positive results, to appreciate the power that these new services posses.

What excites you most about delivering this session within the Web Science MOOC? –
The most exciting thine to me is that the very process of offering this session through a MOOC is like practicing Web Science in action. This is the Web changing the way people can approach, carry out and engage with education, and to be a Web Scientist involved in delivering part of this course is really invigorating. Delivering this session relating to social media is great because it ties in with my research interests and lets me share what I’ve been working on to a new audience – and hopefully will help to spark their interest and curiosity in to the topic!

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