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Social Media: Business Schools train network-savvy employees

News Barbara Bierach - 08.06.2010

A growing list of business schools are adding courses on social media to their MBA curricula, addressing the corporate demand for social-network-savvy employees. Now Harvard Business School and Columbia Business School have joined the ranks, reports Businessweek. The two schools are among at least six that have added courses in the past year that allow students to learn about internet marketing and social media strategy.

With Twitter's social networking site claiming 190 million users and Facebook reporting 500 million active members, companies including Sears, Panasonic, Citigroup, and AT&T have begun hiring social media directors to develop and manage marketing strategies that address the nuances of the online world. Social media classes are one way of preparing students for careers in a promising field, says John Gallaugher, associate professor of information systems at Boston College's Carroll School of Management, where "Social Media & Web 2.0 for Managers" is being offered, starting this fall.

Columbia, in New York, offers four internet marketing courses. Two of them, "Social Media" and "Media and Technology" will be offered for the first time next spring. At Harvard, in Boston, Professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski last fall introduced a second-year elective course, "Competing with Social Networks" and 172 students enrolled, three for every available seat. Other MBA programs that have added courses to explore social media include London Business School, INSEAD, and the HEC in Paris.

One of the earliest pioneers of internet marketing courses, Elaine Young, an associate professor of marketing at Champlain College, where social media has been part of the MBA curriculum since 2000, says understanding digital tools is critical for business students. Companies want to recruit MBAs with social media skills because tapping into online networks can be a powerful way to learn brand sentiment, identify new opportunities, and improve customer service.

At INSEAD, Professor Andrew Stephen says he created the course "Advertising and Social Media Strategy" shortly after joining the faculty in June 2009 to address what he saw as a need to train MBAs in non-traditional marketing techniques. The two-month course made its debut in January of this year. "My feeling was that all the B-schools were lagging behind in preparing MBA students for dealing with the new media landscape," he says. Students are required to participate in social media marketing projects for big brands including Coca-Cola, Nokia, Hermès, and BMW. According to Stephen, a typical project involves developing a detailed social media marketing strategy for the client. "One of the key lessons from the whole course is that what we're dealing with is social interactions between people and approaches companies can take to get involved in their conversations," Stephen says. In less than six months attendance in the course more than tripled, from 27 students in January to 45 in March and 93 in May.