MFC5582 - Online Community Management

Objectives:

On successful completion of the module, students will be able to:
Assess the functionality of online communities and social networks, and their appropriateness for engaging different communities and demographics using a range of theoretical and practical frameworks;
Use social media management and monitoring tools to analyse online communities, and utilise the data provided to improve engagement and suggest content that will increase the community’s usefulness and profitability;
Apply their knowledge of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing platforms to select the most appropriate for a given project;
Discover and make recommendations for the best keyword strategy for visibility to a given community and audience, and evaluate the necessity for paid for social advertising to supplement a content strategy;
Devise an appropriate response mechanism and matrix for a given brand community, including escalation processes and timescales.

Content:

This module will look at online community management and customer service, social content and engagement planning and introduce social media analytics, including those for advertising on social networks and online communities.

You will develop your understanding of the shift in business from Customer Service Managers to Online Community Managers and the requirement for every business and brand to know how to find, attract and nurture their customers with the hope of turning them into unpaid (but not unrewarded) ambassadors.

You will develop skills and knowledge around listening to customer needs through online communities and specialist software, along with crowdsourcing activities for product and service design and development.
Marketers need to critically assess different platforms for engagement with their customers.

The module will develop your understanding of online community tools and management techniques specifically for nurturing communities of practice as well as the life-cycle of a crowd-funded project.

Learning and Teaching Information:

Learning will be experiential, experimental and collaborative. Social Media is 24/7 – students will be expected to be part of a lively online community across Twitter and other platforms, and will be expected to login and contribute multiple times a week. Students will learn in a collaborative environment how to actively monitor and manage social media across several platforms – this is intended to be done using industry standard tools such as Hootsuite.

2 hour workshop x 20 Hours: 40
Intended Group size: 24

Two half-day (3.5 hour) live online activity
Hours: 7
Intended group size: cohort

Online community participation
Hours: 18
Intended group size: cohort

Guided independent study
Hours: 135

Further details relating to assessment
For the ‘Online Community Management’ assessment students will EITHER be given a live brief by an external business or voluntary organisation and will create a Community Engagement Plan including metrics for measuring success; OR be given a live brief by an external business or voluntary organisation and create a Crowdfunding campaign including metrics for measuring success.

Students permitted to take a half-module for the award of 10 credits will be assessed on the basis of an assessment negotiated with the module co-ordinator.

Assessment:

001 Active participation in the online community of the classroom: 20% assessed by community management ROI metrics (eg. 1 20%
002 Active participation in the online community of the classroom: 5% assessed by peers on their own agreed metrics. 5%
003 Online Community Management project 75%

Fact File

Module Coordinator - Liz Cable
Level - 5
Credit Value - 20
Pre-Requisites - NONE
Semester(s) Offered - 5YL

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