Social media ha, given a boost to the artisan and craft trades. Many people embrace pastimes such as beer brewing, bread making, and pottery making. Social media provides both • mechanism for • dias.pora community to form online, and a medium for instructions and advice to spread quickly. It also provides a vehicle for new ideas, products, and services to go viral This has opened up opportunities for entrepreneurs and established companies to provide equipment and supplies to the artisanal community, and become small to medium scale producer; theIIlJielves. Before the advent of social media, the high cost of .dvertising and marketing confined most artisans to the ranks of dedicated hobbyists. Now the availability of social media as a marketing tool brings commercialization and expansion within reach of hnndreds of thousands of would-be entreprenenn, and their financial backers. And because social media has become the communication vehicle of choice for many in the artisan community, it is an important channel for established supply companies whose marketing budgets are not similarly constrained.

In the following problems, use the graph tool in NodeXL, along with inspection of the data, to learn something about the network. This is an exploratory task, with no correct or incorrect answers.

At publication date, NodeXL Pro was required for YouTube import, and Gephi, an alternate multi-platform tool, did not have a TwitterfY ouTube import facility.

a. Use NodeXL's import facility to import data from the YouTube video and user networks. Pick an artisan topic as suggested above (examples in the area of food making alone abound-e.g. pastries, cheese, smoked meats, backyard chickens, etc.)

Limit the number of videos initially to 100 or fewer, and experiment with the options for how to define edges. Produce graphs of the network, you examine, and explore their structure.

i. Can you identifY influential videos?

n. Can you identifY influential users?

ilL Imagine that you are a marketing consultant called to assist with the promotion of a product associated with this topic. Can you determine what social media strategies are in use among other marketers to this community?

h. Use NodeXL's import fucility to import data from the Twitter search network on a topic of your choice. Limit the number of tweets initially to 100 or fewer, and increase it step-wise as you detennine the required search time. ote: With Twitter, especially, choosing a topic that is too popular risks submerging the interesting information in a sea of irrelevant chatter.

i. Can you identifY influential users?

n. Looking at the data supporting the graph, can you detive some bro.d categories of tweets, and their relative share in the whole?

ill. Can you discern and describe marketing campaigns (e.g., the use of Twitter and other share buttons)?

c. Explore whether similar explorations are useful for other products and services that you are fumili.r with, such as consulting, software, and mobile .pps.