One of the cool things about the Social Dynamics and Network Analytics (Social-DNA) course that I teach at Kellogg is that there are lots of new research articles, news stories, magazine articles, and blog entries coming out all of the time that are relevant to the course content. To help facilitate conversation about these current events, this quarter we're introducing #socialDNA on Twitter. Anytime you come across something relevant to the course topics (which you can read more about here), tweet about it with the hashtag #socialDNA. We're asking all of the current students to tweet a #socialDNA tweet at least once during the quarter (just retweeting someone else's #socialDNA tweet doesn't count!) We also hope that former Social DNA students will get involved too and this will provide a way for alumni of the course to stay connected with the latest Social Dynamics research and current events.
If you don’t have a Twitter account, the first thing you need to do is go to https://twitter.com/ and start one. Once you’ve started an account, you’ll want to follow some people. Here are few suggestions to get you started:
@pjlamberson — of course
@KelloggSchool — self explanatory
@SallyBlount — Dean of Kellogg School of Management
@gephi — you know you’re a social dynamics dork when … you follow @gephi on Twitter
@NICOatNU — Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
@James_H_Fowler — professor of political science at UCSD and author of seminal studies of social contagion in social networks
@noshir — Noshir Contractor, Northwestern network scientist
@erikbryn — Sloan prof. with lot’s of stuff on economics of information
@jeffely — Northwestern economics / Kellogg prof. and blogger: http://cheaptalk.org/
@RepRules — Kellogg prof. Daniel Diermeier
@sinanaral — Stern prof. who did the active/passive viral marketing study and other cool network research
@duncanjwatts — Duncan Watts research scientist and Yahoo, big time social networks scholar
@ladamic — Michigan prof. who did the viral marketing study and made the political blogs network
And don’t forget to post a tweet! If you are a serious Twitter beginner, check out Twitter 101.