Should You Get an MBA in 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 this blog? :)

The professors create content by studying what is happening and bringing in guest speakers.  This might 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 is 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. 

Comments

[Terri Griffith]

How about a combined approach? Raise awareness of how social media is used in organizations -- then work with an organization to support their social media efforts. Three of four of my MBA teams (course on Innovation & Tech Management) are hands on with organizations. Last term (course on Organizational Design) I think half the teams focused on a social media implementation or support within a real org. Agree that it's not living with the result for years. That said, most of our students have full-time jobs and so do get to practice what we preach.

[bill Ives]

Terri

Thanks for your comment. having been an academic myself I certainly realize there is value here and your suggestions make sense, I have also taught in situations where the students were part time and full time employees in business and this takes on a different context. Here there is the hybrid approach. I just hope that the approach is not one of best practices as I wrote about a few days ago. Bill

[Insead_asms]

Hi Bill, I'm one of the professors mentioned in the NYT article you wrote about in this post. I teach a course on social media strategy at INSEAD, on both of our campuses (France and Singapore). I completely agree with you that real world experience is critical -- which is why in my course arguably the most important component is working with real companies on their social media marketing strategies. This involves going from initial strategy planning through implementation, measurement, and so on. I make sure my MBA students get hands on experience because that's what they need to be useful in companies after their time at business school. This is hard in a relatively short 8 week term of a course, but what I find is that after my course is over students then want to work on "independent projects" where they can go even deeper to gain more hands on social media experience with real companies. None of this beats two full years of day to day experience in the "real world" of course, but we try to do our best. At the end of the day, a top MBA program should provide students with frameworks, conceptual/thinking skills, and hands on practical skills. That's what we deliver and it seems to work extremely well for our students.

Best regards,
Professor Andrew Stephen
INSEAD