Yes, There IS a Need for a Social Media Marketing MBA

Take it take take take enjoyment. Welcome to Social Business unplugged, helping you understand in plain English how to best leverage social media for your business. And now, here's the founder of windmill networking. Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, this is Neal Schaffer. And welcome to this new episode of social business unplugged. Today I'm gonna talk about the concept of a social media MBA. I just finished teaching a course at the Rutgers University social media marketing, mini MBA program, good news is that this program is going to be going online. So you don't actually have to come up to New Jersey if you wanted to see what all the hype is about. But this is not an advertisement for the program, but really about the need for education and why a social media MBA or taking additional education provided at universities, to me is really a no brainer. And I think that everybody who has gone through a similar program will tell you that now, the first thing that people tell me when I tell them I'm teaching a social media MBA program is well, anything that you learn is going to be irrelevant three months from now. So how can you charge people money for that? It's a fleeting, very soon to be irrelevant type of subject matter. And I think the problem is that when I get this comment a lot after I present on my course, because what a lot of people provide and whether it's, you know, corporate training, or consultants, or if you read books or blog posts, they go over, basically, the technical specifications for these sites, whether it be Facebook or Twitter, LinkedIn, Wordpress, what have you. It's not rocket science. If you work enough, with the platform's you're pretty internet savvy, you can figure out a lot of the stuff yourself true. Taking these classes can give you a quicker time to market. And you may learn a few tips and tricks, but it doesn't come down to the mechanics of the car, it comes down to where you can drive that car would probably be the best way to put it. And it comes down to concepts that you can use, you know, the module that I teach is called social media platforms or applied social media. And while I go over the platforms, I also bring up concepts that show people that although the platforms may change a lot of the core concepts, whether it be of how we use metrics to determine social media ROI, the need for constant experimentation, creating a social media strategy, concepts of content curation of you know, paid versus free, what have you. These are all core concepts that are not platform independent. In other words, the same concepts can be applied across all the platforms, I show a slide near the end of the presentation that says social media is here to stay. And it has a bunch of boxes, like you just moved, and you're trying to open up all your your boxes from from your move. And the funny thing is, it's an image stock photo from maybe two years ago. So you have like Digg and Reddit and StumbleUpon. I think blogger as well. Obviously, these sites aren't as relevant as newer sites like Pinterest, Instagram, Google Plus what have you. But you know, the key message I have is, look, the names on the boxes are going to change, right? Obviously, social media is here to stay. And it's about the concepts of how you exploit the opportunity at hand for your business, and really, you know, maximizing social business. And just as an example, I think it was actually Judy Gunn betta in one of her PR blog posts for women on networking that talked about the notion of insourcing your PR. And I really love that term, because the employees that accompany are your biggest brand advocates that companies usually forget about in their social media. And when you think of the need to create content, and to have people actually engage with others in social media, the immediate knee jerk reaction for a lot of companies is to immediately go the agency route, I obviously think it's going to be much more effective if you INSOURCE in sourcing employees who maybe can share the burden in sourcing employees who can create great content for your blog, or who can shoot videos when they're out in the field? or what have you, I think you get the picture that this concept of insourcing. And obviously I think insourcing blog content is the most relevant, but when you look at Twitter accounts that are handled by certain large enterprises where they have multiple people handling the Twitter accounts, you see how they've insourced that engagement, and there are multiple people working at any given time, there are a lot of things that can be done with that concept that I think very, very few companies have executed on. And by showing some examples and some platforms of how that can be done, you begin to see that I talk about everybody having a LinkedIn professional profile, because that's where professionals are. So wouldn't it be great if every outward facing employee had an optimized LinkedIn profile that was SEO optimized for keywords associated to your company so that you're better found that a LinkedIn profile search engine and that these employees actively not only engaged in relevant groups, but actually shared your content, it could equally apply to Google Plus, and in fact, that could be even more relevant from an SEO perspective, at least when you think of social search and all the unique networks every one of your employees has and the unique groups you know, networks of circles that can be created that can really We affect search results and can obviously have tremendous benefits for your company. So you're not going to learn a lot of these concepts in blog posts, maybe you need to buy a book, you know, more of the thought leader type of person to grasp these concepts. people's names I usually throw out or like the Brian Solis is the Jeremiah, oh, Young's what have you people talking about the future. But this isn't about the future. And I already talked that in previous podcast about the here. And now, this is about how you can best leverage social media in the here. And now by grasping a few of these concepts. I'm really excited. This is going to be my first public announcement, actually. But I actually recently signed a book publishing deal with a major trade publisher to publish a book that will estimate it to be published in the fall, that's really going to bring forward all of these concepts to really help you get a grasp, there really is a need for social media MBA, because there are significant issues. And I would almost call it a social business MBA, because as I was talking to people today, and this is a social media marketing mini MBA program. You know, I was talking about employment brand name, because a lot of companies, your LinkedIn company page is not run by the marketing people. It's run by the HR people. I talked about how customer service reps often make great community managers, we talked about legal issues, of what sort of photos can you and can you upload and you know, social media for pharmaceutical companies and the need that everybody in your company has have a seat at the table. Therefore, whatever you would study in an MBA program, there's probably a social layer that you should be studying. I don't even care if it's accounting or finance. There's a social layer, which is how's the CFO going to calculate your social media ROI? So that's my thought for today. If you're interested, like I said, check out the Rutgers University Program, it'd be online very, very soon. I hope you glean some value from this. Always appreciate your comments, your review on iTunes. Thanks and make it a great day. You've been listening to social business unplugged with Neal Schaffer, social media author, consultant, speaker and university professor. If you'd like any specific topics covered on future episodes, or if you'd like to be interviewed for this podcast, please connect with me by email. Neal at windmill networking.com on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/neal Schaffer and on Twitter at Neal Schaffer. Please also visit windmill networking.com for daily Social Media for Business updates. Thanks for listening and make it a great day.