Practical Networked Leadership Skills

This course will use social network analysis, both its theory and computational tools, to make sense of the social and information networks that have been fueled and rendered accessible by the internet.

Everything is connected: people, information, events and places, all the more so with the advent of online social media. A practical way of making sense of the tangle of connections is to analyze them as networks. In this course you will learn about the structure and evolution of networks, drawing on knowledge from disciplines as diverse as sociology, mathematics, computer science, economics, and physics. Online interactive demonstrations and hands-on analysis of real-world data sets will focus on a range of tasks: from identifying important nodes in the network, to detecting communities, to tracing information diffusion and opinion formation.

Twitter lists are a powerful way to structure your attention on Twitter so that you focus on the people who matter most. By providing a way to sort different types of contacts into different HootSuite streams, lists help you focus on different people or conversations at different times or in specific contexts. They are just as helpful at a company-wide level, since it allows colleagues to build and share lists of people to follow without requiring them to follow everyone who might be relevant to anyone in the company.

But they have a crucial limitation: unless you keep your account and/or your list private, other people can see who you are tracking and how you’re tracking them. That’s why it’s useful to create a second “listmaker” Twitter account for the specific purpose of managing and sharing Twitter lists with your colleagues. Use this account to create lists like: