We have a new media analytics major at Elon, as well as graduate courses in strategy. Here's what we are teaching.

1. S
Teaching Analytics
Amanda Sturgill
Elon University School of Communications

2. In a Full Curriculum
S Understanding Audiences
S Communicating Media Insights
S Applied Media Analytics
S Strategies for Emerging Media
S Measuring Media Impact

3. Understanding Audiences
S Communications theory
S Variables that describe audiences and how they are
measured

4. Communicating Media Insights
S Interpreting analytics results
S Ethically and competently presenting it
S Words
S Data visualizations

5. Applied Media Analytics
S Understanding appropriate questions that can be
answered through analytics
S Accessing, cleaning and analyzing data
S Discovering and reporting the answers

6. Strategies for Emerging Media
S Predictive analytics
S Evaluating emerging tools for emerging media analysis
S Collecting and analyzing data from emerging media
S Making informed predictions about short, medium and long-term
status of emerging media
S Strategy – using predictions to plan for use of emerging
media to meet goals

7. Measuring Media Impact
S Create insights and recommendations for a real-world
client using appropriate tools and data.

8. In a single course

9. SEO, Analytics, Social Media
S Work with real clients to develop business goals
S Learn tools for examining efficacy
S SEO Audit
S Analytics
S ORM analysis
S Major, streamed presentation to clients
S Surveillance assignment

10. Challenges
S It changes. A lot. And frequently.
S It’s a puzzle for industry as well.
S Data.
S The students. Also, decision-making.

11. Solutions
S Make new friends
S I’ve found digital marketing consultants the most helpful.
S But keep the old
S Analytics spans boundaries between comm, business and statistics.
Maybe even art and computer science. Find friendlies.
S Your own student media or university web presence can be a source of
data
S Do your diligence
S The overhead to remain current is huge.
S Use .rss and Twitter as ways to help