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Social Media is definitely worthy of a degree course. As you say though, the problem is rapid change.

When I was doing my Broadcasting degree at Leeds ten years ago, it suffered from not covering the increasingly multi-tasking nature of television production work. It was great if you wanted to be follow the traditional ‘Researcher – AP – Producer’ route but it didn’t account for the fact that increasingly researchers were starting to have to be one-person TV production crews, shooting DV footage for transmission.

The course will have changed now no doubt but it couldn’t turn around fast enough to cover the rapid changes in TV.

The Social Media MA is an exciting development, but I hope that, unlike my degree, the syllabus can be turned around quick enough to account for new developments. The course people start might not be the same one they finish!

When I tell people I do live video streaming from my phone, upload geotagged photos direct from my phone and communicate via Twitter, people very often don’t understand what the benefit of all this is. Anything that increases people’s understanding of Social Media has to be a good thing. While it’s possible to learn Social Media skills on your own, not everyone can and an MA in it would look good on the CV!

I’ll add that there’s definitely room for a course studying Social Media from an academic, Sociological point of view as well.

Hi Chi-Chi thanks for the tag!

If I knew that I would end up getting my hands dirty with social media I personally would have done my MA in sociology or anthropology. I feel that both subject areas have the most influence on social media, and it is important to understand human motivations, behaviours and attitudes. I do not know whether the MA Social Media syllabus includes electives such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, marketing?

I believe it would be better to study toward a formal degree and bring something different to the table as social media like web programming moves so fast that you need to learn this on the job.

Alternatively if you really want to have a career in social media then you should be doing this in your spare time or as part of another degree or past time.
That said, it is great to see that social media is being recognised as a mainstream subject for study. It would be an interesting course but one that would need to be fluid.

How about a collaborative MA in social media whereby the modules are produced ad-hoc, working with companies and agencies on campaigns, at the same time involving professionals and academics mashing up the course to make it relevant and real-time? Now that would be social media in action!

Chi-Chi
Having thought more about this since Sarah first contacted me for a comment on her story I feel there’s a risk of students investing in a course of study that becomes obsolete before they’ve even started.
Learning about social media feels like a more practical than academic exercise; more about doing than theorising. Sure, there are principles, but I’m not convinced that there’s enough depth for it to be turned into a full-blown course. Maybe it would be a worthy module of a broader subject, because as important as social media is, it’s not the whole picture.

@MartinSFP,

Excellent thoughts… and one that I hope the team at Salford University take on board.

I agree that it would appear a monumental task to put together and deliver a degree in such a fast moving industry but one can argue that the first degree courses in Computer Science would have had the same problem.

I dare say even Electronic Engineering, which I studied for five years at York, is one of those degree subjects that struggles to keep up with the latest industry developments.

Having said that, my lecturers always said that the point of the course was to prepare fresh faced students for industry.

I hope that the academics at Salford Uni recognise that teaching students about the sociological impact of social media is as important as teaching them how to use social media tools.

Like you say, it is certainly possible to ‘teach yourself social media’ but I suspect that those who have the inclination to do so also have the aptitude to teach themselves lots of other things. ;o)

‘Normal’ people just wouldn’t bother!

@TomChapman

Great points there, thanks for your comment.

I agree, it would be great if the MA Social Media syllabus “includes electives in anthropology, sociology, psychology, marketing”. That alone would make it highly attractive to lots of postgrad-wannabe types!

Having said that, the MA in Social Media is aimed at a ‘different kind of local student’ as reported in the Manchester Evening News blog article, so I guess the electives will probably emphasise local community reporting and other community media aspects.

I love the idea of a collaborative MA in social Media where modules are produced ad-hoc as you described, however I don’t think the powers that be at academic institutions are quite ready for that!

I met Gareth Palmer, the academic behind the MA in Social Media late last year and to be honest, I think he’d like to implement what you described.

It may not be possible just yet though due to the way courses are planned, ‘signed off’ and delivered at most universities.

I’d love to see a university pull this off though as I’m sure students would fall over themselves to study such a practical and industry-focused course.

@JonClements

I have to disagree there. Thanks for your comment though!

It is important that there is such a thing as a taught degree in Social Media if only as a way of speeding up the training of those who are interested in ‘learning it’ from a professional perspective.

Picture this:

You are a 3rd year student studying English and Screenwriting.

You are considering doing a postgraduate course in film making when you graduate.

You hear about a new course in Social Media that can bring you up to speed in a year on some of the new tools and techniques available for promoting and delivering films online.

You know a little bit ‘about‘ Social Media; you are on Facebook every day and have checked out Twitter but never really found the time to blog.

You submit coursework online once a term, applied for your undergraduate degree online and can’t imagine life without the internet.

You understand better than most that the web is fundamentally a two way medium.

The new postgraduate course in Social Media is a certified degree qualification and one that will sit nicely alongside your current BA (Hons) in Screenwriting on your CV.

At least you have the option of deciding whether or not to study it.

Unlike most of your potential employers.

Chi-Chi
I remain sceptical!
Your person learning about how to find an audience for his/her films online could probably find all they need to know from locating the digital communities doing that already, without going through a year-long post-grad course.
From our experiences here at Staniforth, we’ve found that providing learning on social media (which we’ve done through in-house courses) is valuable only if people are then putting it into practice. Once people see the practical application, they’re hooked.

Speaking from first-hand (ongoing!) experience of trying to give social media some kind of academic framework, I’d suggest that social media and a degree course is a bad fit.

So far as I understand it, university syllabuses (syllabi?) have to be accepted by the relevant boards several months ahead of a particular year actually starting, which when combined with the extraordinary pace of change in the social media world, does not make for an up to date and relevant course.

To me it would make far more sense to include it as part of a wider digital marketing/communication course, for the time being at least.

Ditto @Jon Clements. Universities rigorously uphold certain standards, and these include the strong academic foundations upon which knowledge, skills and values ar ebuilt.

It might be easy to equip folk with skils to operate in a social media world with some training, but to be able to deal with these within some kind of framework might be difficult. Unis are slow (yes – I have to rail against a slow uni every day) but basing the course in some kind of foundation such as marketing, PR, communication, arts, or something else will give it a foundation. Having put a contemporary programme onto Uni books, I’m glad that our “modern” stuff has got a field in which it can place itself. I worry “Social Media” may be as adrift as “Media Studies” in some certain institutions.

And I really feel it will age badly. It may be social media today, but we called it online communities 3 years ago.

@JonClements

Hmm… good point.

I guess the question the course developers need to be asking themselves is whether they should set entry criteria based on an applicant’s current use of social media.

I’d argue that even if they did, there is still scope for a course that stretched those already active in social media.

At the very least, we’d get some very well put together academic studies on ‘social media usage in the real world’!

The worst that could happen would be that the course developers would be in the awkward position of having to assess students possessing better social media skills than they do!

@David Prior

I see where you’re coming from and respect the fact that you are one of a handful of people studying Social Media in an academic context in the UK.

However, if you put aside the cumbersome process of developing and validating an academic Social Media course, I think there’s more to be gained from students studying a course thus described than not.

I think that a digital marketing course may emphasise existing digital marketing concepts like SEO, ad networks, ‘digital’ creative copy, marketing using the web, CDRoms and other digital media and only just skim the surface on social media.

A digital comms course is probably a better bet for a hybrid course but even so I suspect it would focus on the PR element more than anything.

If a dedicated course on Social Media is taught by a social media practitioner, I daresay students would get more out of it than any of the two examples above.

Why?

Because it will teach them about two way communications on the web and not just about marketing or marketing comms.

Our Digital Marketing courses emphasize interactivity and individualisation. Social media tools are (yet) another channel with which we can communicate with potential customers.

I don’t think our MSc in Digital Marketing Communications skims the surface: in fact many of our students are choosig the “Reputation Management” and “Social Media” options as part of a wider, interactive portfolio for communicating “with” (not “to”) customers.

@David Bird

Hmm… two thought provoking comments!

To answer your first one:

I totally understand what you mean by the difficulties of ‘course placement’.

It is precisely because Social Media is so new that it lends itself to being adopted as a ‘new fangled science’ by everyone and their dog, myself included!

However, that does not discredit it from being worthy of studying as an important ‘sociological and cultural development’ in its own right.

And yes the tag ‘Social Media’ is also susceptible to aging…. I do agree with you there.

Gosh, this is hard.

I’m starting to really like @TomChapman’s idea of a collaborative Social Media course developed by industry and students on an ad-hoc basis.

I guess your point is that we are light years away from something like that. (

Still….

It would be a real shame if no-one attempted to provide a Social Media degree course that could stand up to the rigorous scrutiny of active social media users in different industries…

Which is why I applaud the University of Salford’s attempt to at least start one, with the support of the Social Media Centre in Salford.

To answer the second:
I wasn’t referring to your course in digital marketing in particular, I was only surmising from what I understand of digital marketing.

Having said that, I’m impressed that you teach modules on Reputation Management! That’s pretty impressive considering a lot of media agencies have been using reputation management tools for less than eighteen months.

Hi Chi-chi
Great comments but I hope you do not think I am taking it “off conversation” by adding my pennyworth?

Our traditional media company is building its digital business every year. Key ingredients are culture and recruitment – do we appoint people like ourselves or should we make sure that new people have, at minimum, a social media footprint?

Again and again we return to the same point. We will only appoint the best person for the job – that is someone with core journalism, marketing or sales qualifications.

Social media is just the next way of doing our jobs. When the excitement has died down, what would be the point of knowing about the kit rather than the core skills themselves? Why appoint someone good with Twitter if they cannot write, market or sell?

Cheers

@John Welsh

That was really insightful, thanks.

I think you hit on something that a lot of social media buffs have overlooked so far:

there is a difference between knowing how to use social media and knowing how to use it to sell (or ‘market’).

I guess the takeaway for anyone developing a course with a large social media component is to recognise that marketers have very different social media needs to everyone else.

It’s easy to forget that the majority of the population using social media at the moment use it for entertainment or peer group communication.

Using it for marketing is a very different skill and that is why the the early adopter ‘social media mavens’, the Twitter power users that are not celebrities or TV personalities are often in the media, PR and marketing industries.

The winning combination will be a course that combines a solid introduction to marketing and sales with an understanding of the human element of web interaction enabled by social media.

What people will want.

The key is the focus though. I know when I bump into people at PR firms, marketing agencies, publishers – they all say, “Great, but how can I use it for PR/Marketing/Publishing/etc….”

If the course was called “Social Media Marketing”, you’d get a certain audience with a certain set of skills. These would be very attractive to employers. Ditto if it was called “Social Media PR”, or “Social Media Journalism.” Students and employers would know where the focus lies.

As it stands – by title alone (and that’s dead key in this market), I can’t tell what I’ll be once I’ve studied, and as an employer, I don’t know what students will be capable of once they’ve finished.

Our employers expect marketers who are confident of operating as marketing professonals in the digital paradigm (of which social media is a subset) once they have competed the MSc – what will they be confident of when someone has completed this MA?

@David Bird

I’m not sure whether the focus of the course is to train marketing professionals; I get the impression that it is more about equipping (local) community content producers. I guess we’ll find out when prospectus details become available.

You raise some interesting points. It’ll be interesting to see how social media as a field develops.

TV, radio, print and other forms of marketing have matured to the point that people can separate the medium from the purpose. We understand that advertising pays for soap operas and accept that the two co-exist.

With social media things are still rather fluid. Advertising isn’t embraced as much, we tend to see the purpose as being about communication.

Sorry if that sounded freeform, just thought it was interesting…

I plan on posting a follow up to this, by the way, with an interesting case study pointed out to me by @John Welsh on Twitter.

[...] February 4, 2009 · No Comments Would you be impressed by a candidate boasting the University of Salford’s proposed MA in Social Media (hat tip Chi-chi Ekweozor)? [...]

[...] was pointed out in the comments in response to the earlier post, there is a difference between knowing how to use social media and [...]

[...] Chi-chi Ekweozor put an intriguing blog post on Is That A Degree Qualified Social Media Consultant? | Real Fresh …Here’s a quick excerptJon Clements: Chi-Chi Having thought more about this; Tom Chapman: Hi Chi-Chi thanks for the; MartinSFP: Social Media is definitely worthy; Email Marketing Strategy » Blog Archive » Social Media Usage in the FTSE 100: Company Profile … [...]

[...] Chi-chi Ekweozor added an interesting post today on Is That A Degree Qualified Social Media Consultant? | Real Fresh …Here’s a small readingJon Clements: Chi-Chi Having thought more about this; Tom Chapman: Hi Chi-Chi thanks for the; MartinSFP: Social Media is definitely worthy; Email Marketing Strategy » Blog Archive » Social Media Usage in the FTSE 100: Company Profile … [...]

[...] interested in hearing how their course compares to Salford University’s Social Media MA which stirred much debate here when it received approval a few weeks [...]

[...] I also added that Salford University also has a Social Media MA degree which I’ve blogged about. [...]