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I Want to Teach a Course in Social Media Marketing at Your University

It’s been tough to find time to blog lately, between a new job (with a long commute) and the holidays.  I have, however, squeezed in a couple of social media seminars over the last several weeks, including one for the New England Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives and another for Bryant University.  All of which got me thinking about how much I enjoy teaching the principles of social media marketing.  Now that I am relocating to Boston, I would love to find a local university that would have me as a guest professor for a semester to teach a course on social media marketing.  So today I am using my blog for my official pitch: I want to come teach (part-time, preferably in the evenings) at your university!

My qualifications are straight-forward enough: I graduated with degrees in Political Science and Philosophy from Brown University.  I went on to a successful fourteen-year career in traditional media, working at radio stations all over the country, including New York, Boston, Seattle, St. Louis and Providence.  After a brief stint as a filmmaker, I launched my own business, which evolved into New England Social Media.  I now work full-time as the Marketing Campaign Manager for the executive development firm Linkage, where I am orchestrating and implementing the social media marketing strategy (including some cool, cutting edge work with WordPress MU and BuddyPress).  Along the way, I have given numerous seminars on Facebook, Twitter, and social media.  I have hosted seminars for universities, chambers of commerce, state economic development corporations, casinos, radio station clusters, realtors and more.

I’ve done some research into similar courses at other universities around the country, including UC Berkeley and Brigham Young.  Generally speaking, I agree with the  curricula I have seen.  A course would be structured something like this:

  • Week 1: The rise of the internet and its impact on marketing. Permission Marketing, Conversational Marketing.  Data as king.  Granular, real-time, and location-based data mining.  The power to opt out.
  • Week 2: Email Marketing, Message Boards, Instant Messenger, Skype.
  • Week 3: Blogging: WordPress, TypePad, Blogger. The effect of blogging on journalism and marketing.
  • Week 4: Web 2.0. User-generated content.: Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, Vimeo.  Tagging.
  • Week 5: Social Networks:  Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning.
  • Week 6: Microblogging:  Twitter, Identi.ca, Tumblr, Plurk, Ping.fm.
  • Week 7: Listening:  RSS feeds, Google Alerts, Radian 6, Scout Labs.
  • Week 8: Peer-to-Peer Reviews: Yelp!, Get Satisfaction, Angie’s List, Amazon Reviews.
  • Week 9: Social Bookmarking:  Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon.
  • Week 10: Audio: MP3, Napster, Podcasting, iTunes, Pandora, LaLa. Video: YouTube, Vimeo, Animoto, iMovie, Facebook, Hulu.
  • Week 11: Collaborative Learning, Crowd Sourcing.  Wikis.  Memes.  Open Source: GNU GPL, Unix, WordPress, Firefox, Gimp.  Cloud Computing:  GoogleDocs, Salesforce.
  • Week 12: Search Engine Optimization:  Google, Yahoo!,  Bing, Alexa.  Suggestion Algorithms: Amazon, Netflix, Pandora.
  • Week 13: Mobility.  iPhone, Google Droid, Location and GPS-based services.  BrightKite, Loopt, Dodgeball.
  • Week 14: Revenue Models: Advertising, Data Mining.  PayPal, GoogleCheckout, Craigslist.  Price Comparisons: Froogle, NextTag, PriceGrabber, Shopzilla.
  • Week 15: Legal Issues.: Privacy, Security, Intellectual Property.  Napster, BitTorrent.
  • Week 16: Week 14: Real-time data.  Virtual Worlds: Second Life, World of Warcraft.

As I’ve looked though other syllabi, I’ve noticed a tendency towards shorter articles.  However, I think there quite a few longer texts that ought to be included in such a course, including:

Boston has a wealth of local social media experts who could be invited in as guest lecturers as well.

This is a rough sketch of the course I’d like to teach.  If you are a faculty member or student at a Massachusetts higher learning institution, and you think a course like this would be a valuable addition to your marketing track – I’m available!

Posted by SethResler on Wednesday, December 2, 2009 


Seth Resler is the President and Founder of New England Social Media, a company that provides practical social media solutions to businesses that, frankly, have too much to do as it is. New England Social Media can set up and maintain your online presence so you can focus on running your business.
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