Learning about media analytics

Here at Elon's School of Communications, we have classes in understanding, collecting, getting insights from and making decisions based on data. If you aren't here, there are still some things you can try to learn on your own. Here are my favorite 3 tips:

Meet-ups. 

Most major metropolitan areas have regular meet-ups for professionals in various fields, often with an expert speaker. Meet-up.com is a great resource for finding sessions near you. If you find that there aren't any, don't despair. Many times, sessions are streamed for people who can't be there. Streaming links are usually tweeted and posted on the groups meet-up site right as the session starts. If you are completely new to a topic, look out for the session hashtag. Following the video stream as well as the Twitter stream is good way to see what more experienced people find important.

Blogs. 

The increasing importance of content marketing means lots of experts are giving away a lot of knowledge for free on their blogs. All of our contributors will be bringing you the best of blogs we are following in fall of 2016. Look here to see the full list. 

Get dirty. 

Use free tools like Twitter analytics and Google Analytics to look at your own data. If you want to practice with bigger data sets, there are some that you can use for free. They won't give you insights on particular media, but you can experiment with importing, cleaning, sorting, analysis, etc. I have liked practicing with data from the Pew Trusts and from the U.S. Census. Google also recently announced a demo analytics account where you can practice on their data. Good stuff.

--Amanda Sturgill for Elon Media Analytics