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.

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?

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.

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