This course introduces students to social marketing, an approach that uses commercial marketing principles and techniques to generate positive social and behavioural change. Students’ learn to identify and build relationships with stakeholders, to apply social diffusion processes to accelerate adoption of new behaviours, and to critically reflect upon social issues and their impact or reach via various media. Students develop a clear understanding of how we can effectively design, facilitate, and evaluate social marketing programs that address a wide range of societal and community-based issues and goals. Through campaign analysis, planning, and design, students develop the critical mindset needed to analyze and creatively address complex social problems and hands-on, practical skills to implement concepts learned.
Examines theoretical discussions on social media and their impact on studies of human interactions and introduces current methodological debates in fields such as digital methods, digital humanities and ’big data’. Presents a variety of contemporary tools and techniques to help students navigate and analyse the emerging data landscape and to equip students with basic skills managing analytical tools, data sampling, basic statistics, network analysis, and data visualisation. Immerses students in the latest discussions on methodological development to take advantage of ‘digital trace data’ and computational tools.