My initial reaction to the financial meltdown caused by the housing bubble was "Are our business leaders really that stupid?" Things like this news squib from Inside Higher Ed make me suspect the answer is "yes, they are that stupid":
Business schools -- including such prestigious ones as those of Columbia and Harvard Universities -- are adding courses on social media to the M.B.A. curriculum, Business Week reported. The rapid growth of social media has many companies wanting to know more about how to use various tools, creating an opening for new M.B.A.'s who want to make themselves more valuable to potential employers.
If you need a class to teach you how to use Twitter, you probably shouldn't be handling financial transactions involving millions or billions of dollars.
Now, to be fair to the business schools, reading the original article in Business Week makes clear that these classes are not on the basics of using social media, but on how to cynically exploit them for marketing purposes:
Topics include the underlying psychological and sociological foundations of social media and the metrics and measurement tools for gauging the effectiveness of social media campaigns. Students are required to participate in social media marketing projects for big brands including Coca-Cola (KO), Nokia (NOK), Hermès (RMS:FP), and BMW (BMW:GR). According to Stephen, a typical project involves developing a detailed social media marketing strategy for the client.
This changes my reaction to "Please don't." Not that it will do any good. But still, I'm not looking forward to the day when my Facebook and Twitter feeds are clogged with even more MBA-designed marketing activities. I guess that means it's time for some clever college kid to invent an entirely new social media phenomenon, to stay one step ahead of the B-school crowd.
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A large part of my work is developing better ways to enable people to do their jobs using social media, whether internal to the organisation or externally talking to customers, suppliers etc. One of the biggest challenges is keeping the sales and marketing weasels at arm's length!
I think there genuinely are opportunities for enlightened companies to use these new technologies to transform the way they engage with customers... But at the moment the vast majority do just see them as new and cheaper channels for "traditional" marketing.
Certainly 90% of the courses and seminars on how to use this stuff "for business benefit" are nonsense - I've unfortunately had to sit through a few...
Jim hits it right on the head. I work for a media company, and a lot of my job is using social media for community building and source acquisition. A good grasp of online media can get you hundreds of potential sources that you wouldn't have been able to find a few years ago. Online media's real value, though, is when you're looking for a specific type of individual that would be impossible to find unless they approach you. Sometimes sources just wants to know they aren't alone, and social media makes them feel like a part of a community.
The only reason we've seen any success at all: We keep our marketing department as far away from our efforts as possible. Packaging an advertisement as a facebook update is as unimaginative as it is ineffective.
We were looking at using twitter essentially as an information bus - pinging when an update occured so that listeners to the channel would be prompted to do a fetch.
Chad:
I believe you are missing the point. As one of the professors interviewed for the article I can tell you that at the Undergrad level (the writer mistakenly said we at Champlain are doing this at the MBA level, when I actually integrate this teaching into Internet Marketing and marketing courses at the undergrad level) it is very important to teach students how to most effectively use these tool.
1. They do not know how to use them in a way that adds value.
2. They do not understand how powerful these tools can be and cannot know until they are given opportunities to use the tools themselves.
3. The context of the teaching is around how the different (current) social tools impact the rest of an overall marketing strategy. How is it different from traditional media?
4. How to you measure the effectiveness of online marketing? What are the opportunities to create meaningful goals and understanding of success when we now have both quantitative (analytics) and qualitative (sentiment analysis) options that can be brought together.
I've been teaching students about Internet Marketing since 2000. The course and tools I teach have evolved dramatically over time. I have seen that once students take my course, they are more able to navigate online marketing, they have a greater grasp of the reach of the internet and they often get internships and then jobs once they graduate -- solely because of this course.
If one assumes that the MBA graduate is just going into Finance then that is not accurate. They go into many different areas. At the same time, the Finance student should understand the implications of these tools and what it means to be able to listen to feedback real time and watch news come in faster than ever. If they are trained to watch a stock ticker, why shouldn't they and others (especially Marketing students and PR students and HR students) be trained to watch a people ticker?
Also to the rest of you I am deeply concerned that you would feel you need to "keep the marketing department" away from your use of social media. That is flawed reasoning. If your marketing department is not educated then perhaps you should encourage them to go back to school to learn how to best leverage the tools. A "community builder" is in marketing and public relations. If you are not on message with the marketing folks then you both could do serious damage to the brand. To call marketing and sales professionals "weasels" is disrespectful and shows that you do not understand marketing at all. Talking to customers IS marketing and it is about sales! Working together, supporting the overall brand and helping one another accomplish your work with social tools will enable you to be even more successful.
Chad you say these things shouldn't be taught, and yet I have to ask that perhaps, if they are being taught the animosity towards marketing professionals that is inherent in these posts might not be here.
Sincerely,
Dr. Elaine Young
Assistant Dean of the Division of Business
Associate Professor, Marketing
Champlain College
@ejyoung67
Elaine,
The "weasels" line was not so much to mean that those who work in sales & marketing are all weasels, but more to mean that those who are weasels should be kept away. ;-) I could have perhaps made that more clear... My partner is a direct marketing specialist and definitely no weasel!
I'd absolutely agree that these tools do have a role to play in sales & marketing, as I tried to say initially. Unfortunately in my experience - and that is all I can speak from - there has been a tendency to exploit social media for "quick wins", rather than using it to build long term relationships. This has often had pretty damaging consequences...
Also have no disagreement with the concept of social media being taught for business people; I do think it matters and should be done properly. But forgive me my cynicism - there is an awful lot of snake oil out there, particularly business training organisations jumping on the bandwagon and promoting old techniques with a layer of social media sprinkled over the top. Would happily agree they're not all bad... just, rather a lot are.