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Get Your MBA in Social Media?

by Bill Ives

April 15, 2010 at 3:14 am · Filed under Social Media

The New York Times wrote that Business Schools Respond to Demand for Use of Social Media. The story began with some major mistakes that large firms have made in social media marketing. Now an increasing number of firms are asking for social media expertise in their candidates. These firms tend to feel that personal experience with social media is not enough, that business related experience is necessary. I would certainly agree here.

The NYT goes on to write, “To meet this demand for education in social media strategy, several top business schools are incorporating courses on social networks into their M.B.A. curriculums. These include Harvard Business School; London Business School; Insead, the international business school based in Fontainebleau, France; and the École des Hautes Études Commerciales, known as H.E.C., in Paris.” These courses have proven to be very popular.

The Tines writes that, “because of the relative newness of social media and their rapid evolution, there is no assigned textbook for the course. Students are expected to follow industry-specific blogs like Mashable and Groundswell to keep up with developments.’ I wonder how many assign the FastForward blog?

The professors create content by studying what is happening and bringing in guest speakers. This night create some awareness but I am not sure how many real skills are conveyed. When I worked for the City of New York in helping local community groups get more federal funding we would occasionally have to hire new people. If they had a Masters in Community Organization we generally subtracted two years experience from their credits. This was done as we felt they would need two years to unlearn what they were taught in school by experiencing the real world.

Some of the social media courses require actual work with real clients on their social media marketing. This is a good move and may avoid the need to do what we did in New York. Professors do admit that business sis driving innovation here and that schools are trying to catch up. I applaud the humility. There is hope. But I would still take someone with two years real experience in business social media before someone with the school work for now.

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Carri BugbeeApril 22nd, 2010 at 1:14 am

I actually teach a social media marketing class at Portland State University. This requires an ungodly amount of research and practical hands-on experience with clients. Things change on daily basis (look at how many changes have happened in the past two weeks with Twitter and Facebook!), so the curriculum has to change constantly as well.

I started joking that I was working on my social media MBA in early 2008 and given the amount of time and opportunity cost I’ve invested, I could have earned (and paid for) a real MBA twice over since then. That said, the concept of an MBA in social media is kind of laughable to me.

I think methodologies need to mature quite a bit first. Right now there are few tried and true techniques. Almost everything is experimental. Which doesn’t lend itself to a degree program. Moreover there are only a handful of people in the world qualified teach an MBA course in social media marketing. And their current careers are probably much too lucrative to bother.

BTW, the colors and fonts are your blog as so faint as to be almost unreadable. If you were my student, I might not give you a passing grade in usability.

@CarriBugbee
Social Profiles: http://www.CarriBugbee.com

Bill IvesApril 22nd, 2010 at 1:54 pm

Carri

Thanks for your candid comment. See my more recent post on whether there can be best practices in this space. You comment on UI is noted and will be passed on to those responsible.

Bill