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Learner Reviews & Feedback for What is Social? by Northwestern University

4.6
stars
4,157 ratings

About the Course

The “What Is Social?" MOOC is for business owners, executives, and marketing professionals who want to significantly improve their abilities to grow their social strategy using effective, proven methodologies. This hands on, "how to" program won’t just tell you how to grow your professional persona using social – you will actually do it! This course is the first in the six-course specialization, Social Media Marketing: How to Profit in a Digital World. While the course can be audited for free, paid learners will receive additional content beyond the course basics. For MOOC 1, the toolkit includes a special video from Alessandro Acquisti on Big Data and a set of studies done by IBM on engagement and social marketing strategies with bottom-line profits. This course has been designed to give you the tools, insights, knowledge, and skills to immediately impact your organization. In addition, we will help you network with thought leaders in social. After completing this course, you and your organization’s staff will be able to position, engage, and grow relationships with the consumers of highest value to you. Today, we are living in a period of massive disruption. New technologies are changing the way people engage with each other and with the organizations that interest them. This course will start you on the path to growing your own social strategy using effective, proven methodologies. Additional MOOC 1 faculty include: * Judy Ungar Franks (President, The Marketing Democracy, Ltd. & Lecturer, Medill Integrated Marketing Communications, Northwestern)...

Top reviews

FF

Oct 6, 2016

Great course. Looking forward completing whole specialization.

Additionally, the course shares and recommends tools which are helpful if you are doing social media marketing or eager to become one.

CC

May 12, 2016

A really great introduction to Social Media Marketing and an opportunity to gain access to really useful tools that make me competitive in the job market. Very excited to begin MOOC 2 of this program.

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1001 - 1025 of 1,077 Reviews for What is Social?

By Saroj T

•

Apr 15, 2020

Nice!!!

By Muhammad A

•

May 25, 2019

Amazing

By Emma H

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Oct 9, 2016

Thanks!

By Bijith M

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Sep 13, 2016

good !!

By Mohamed S

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Jul 10, 2020

good

By Akanimo T

•

Oct 3, 2018

good

By Joelle C S

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Aug 2, 2017

The course was not as interesting as I had hoped, although it did provide a thought-provoking introduction to social marketing with some ideas and insights I was not expecting. I found the assignments to be mostly valuable, especially the peer-graded project that let us put learned material into our own words. Unfortunately, the teacher seemed somewhat bored of the subject and was not particularly inspiring. What really bugged me was that the background behind the instructor was in constant motion - simulating live tweet updates - which was not only annoying and unnecessary, but also very distracting.

By Aqua C

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Mar 12, 2017

It's a very basic introductory course. You can't actually expect much from this anyway. You really need to take the full course to evaluate if this is a great one. I did have learned something new but I'm not yet sure if it's useful or not. Guest speakers invited to this course do share some valuable ideas. For the main instructor, he's speaking really slow which can make you feel bored. However, it's reasonable when there is a big and varied audience on coursera because not everyone can hear a quick speech. I'm going to continue studying the course.

By Nadia B

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Aug 11, 2018

This course is relatively interesting, however there were several big issues I had with the material: the audio and video did not match up, no matter what browser and internet connection I used. Also the final exercise which is supposed to function as the metric for the rest of the course series relies on a website and service that has been disabled by the founding company for three months now (Klout). That's three months where the instructors could have updated their materials! How embarrassing!

By April S

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Jan 2, 2017

I thought this course could have been more engaging. I quickly lost interest when the second course module repeated a large amount of content from the first module--I think a better overview or editing approach could have fixed that. I also was disheartened with the "just around the corner" sales-pitch refrain in this course "in your next course, you'll have access to...". It didn't help maintain my interest in the course I was taking currently.

By Cameron P

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Jan 23, 2024

While the course itself is helpful in getting a foundational understanding around social, I do wish the materials were updated to reflect current status and trends of 2024 social media. I would love further focus on short form content platforms (i.e. TikTok) to match the current demands of consumers on social media. The concepts can be applied to emerging platforms today, but I do wish the examples matched what is current relevant.

By Sophia D

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Aug 17, 2020

It has some interesting things to learn but overall it felt like a big advertisement for the other courses. I also felt like I already had to be working in marketing and selling something in order to do this. I would have preferred a course which felt more... theoretical, I guess? I want to learn skills that might be useful for me in the future. Currently, I'm not working in business or marketing or have my own e-shop or something.

By Kadri A

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Jan 17, 2016

The course is quite short (videos are usually only 3-7 minutes long) and therefore could be completed very quickly and/or need quite little time investment. I did not like that they do not have any written materials cause at some points they go over written slides very quickly and it is tricky to follow and understand. On the other hand, there is a lot of repeats and therefore you will understand everything in the end.

By Guilherme S

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Sep 29, 2015

Good introduction. But it feels like it is not complete. It is not much without the other courses so you either take the entire specialization or the benefits are not that big :(

I feel like the specialization courses are an artificial break to a real university class... if the university class had only the content from those videos, that would not be enough.

By Denise F

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Apr 2, 2018

Although I didn't pay for this course, I didn't feel that I walked away with learning much in this course. I learned the most by watching the other videos they had recommended (I love statistical data!). There was a lot of talk for what we will learn in other MOOC's, so I suppose this class was a general overview of what the possibilities are.

By Hanna Y

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Sep 10, 2018

While the contents of this course clearly introduce the idea of Social Media Marketing, I was a little upset that Klout which is used for determining the social media presence score which would be also used in the follow up courses for tracking the progress throughout the courses, is not available as of 25 of May, 2018.

By Fabrice L

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Jun 5, 2017

I did this course for my own personal development and was slightly let down by the emphasis on being part of a firm. The final week in particular was about your 'companies' social media. Perhaps I missed this in the information about the course, if not I wish this had been made clear to me. Thank you

By Kim B

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Dec 17, 2019

I thought the course was well organized but found it difficult to apply to my actual job.

Rather than encouraging use of freeware tools, it would be good for NU to arrange for discounts or access to student editions of tools actually used in the business world (e.g. Sprout Social)

By Susan B

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May 10, 2020

Lectures were not necessarily in a logical order. Google Plus no longer exists and is still listed in content in many places, except for one mention in one lecture.

Into to concepts is fine/good, i would have loved to hear more about real world examples.

By Muhammad W Q S

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Nov 25, 2016

Content is really insightful, however, the instructor does not really dive into the details of most things. If you are paid learner, its better to get the whole specialization if you really want to get the gist of social media marketing.

By Candace H

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Jul 22, 2019

The material is old, the content is decent. However, my biggest issue is I had to "Reset My Deadline" 2 additional times waiting on assignments to get graded (as in, there was no more work for me to do). That was annoying.

By Diane M

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Aug 19, 2018

Unable to complete week 4 as no replacement tool was provided for Klout. As the material of that week is built on Klout, it makes it difficult to follow. This needs to be rebuilt using a tool that is currently available.

By Dannica

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Sep 23, 2019

I've learned so much about the fundamentals of social media in this course despite that, I think it needs to be updated to keep up with the current social media trend/channels.

By Anoop G

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Oct 11, 2015

I would like more content from this module. It was very slow to take off, especially week one. It was easy and enjoyable though. I would have liked it to be more challenging.

By Deleted A

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Dec 12, 2015

This is a nice introduction to social media marketing with professional insight from Randy Hlavac. I felt the content was a little too basic though.