Bachelor
2024/2025
Management and Social Media
Type:
Compulsory course (Digital Product Management)
Area of studies:
Business Informatics
Delivered by:
Department of Business Informatics
Where:
Graduate School of Business
When:
4 year, 2, 3 module
Mode of studies:
offline
Open to:
students of one campus
Language:
English
ECTS credits:
5
Course Syllabus
Abstract
The course provides an analysis of social media as multi-sided digital platforms and the distinctive ways they serve the interests of a range of stakeholders, including platform owners, users, advertisers and third parties such as start-ups and data analytic companies. The course pays due attention to how user participation is engineered to procure data on users that sustain social media as business organisations. The course combines theory and case study examples that illustrate the variety of contexts in which social media companies are active today.
Learning Objectives
- The goal of the course is to develop analytical skills and critical and creative thinking about the emerging digital world marked by the presence of social media and the type of services they produce
Expected Learning Outcomes
- Analyse the technological, social and economic forces that make social media such ubiquitous and often powerful economic actors
- Critically assess the modus operandi of social media and the logic on the basis of which social media are able to sustain their business operations
- Investigate how user participation online is an essential force through which social media construct a range of services for third parties and for users themselves
- Link social participation to data production and assess the significance of data for revenue generating services
Course Contents
- A brief history of social media
- A description of social media as organisations, with special emphasis on the varieties of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Last.fm, Spotify, TripAdvisor etc.
- A description of the Internet ecosystem with special emphasis on the evolution of the Internet towards increasing levels of social participation
- A detailed account of how social media engineer user participation, to make it the engine of data production on social media
- The operative logic of social media and the significance data assume in the making of most services social media deliver
- A description of the value creation process in ways that break with the traditional product-centric view of value, but also the more recent understanding of value as user product or service experience
- An account of the business models pioneered by social media , including the freemium model exemplified by Spotify, the affiliated marketing model of social media for shopping, the hybrid model of Facebook featuring open participation and two-sided markets, and the new (data) sharing economy of companies exemplified by organisations such as Uber and Airbnb
Interim Assessment
- 2024/2025 3rd module0.2 * Analytical report + 0.2 * Essay + 0.4 * Exam + 0.2 * In-class participation
Bibliography
Recommended Core Bibliography
- Van Alstyne Marshall, & Parker Geoffrey. (2017). Platform Business: From Resources to Relationships. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsbas&AN=edsbas.9A77A504
Recommended Additional Bibliography
- Ben-Gad, S. (2016). Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How To Make Them Work for You. Library Journal, 141(5), 120. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=asn&AN=113815587