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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