Social Media in the Classroom

I recently had the opportunity to speak to a Social Media class for MBA students at NC State. The 2nd year class is taught by Claudia Kimbrough and she worked with Chris Moody to arrange an awesome lineup of guest lecturers. I was excited to be included on a syllabus that included Joseph Jaffe, Andy Beal, Wayne Sutton, Katie Morse and Camden Watts.

I arrived at the class on a particularly busy day, between final preparations for our business conference the next day and heading to the State Fair for a Tweetup. I was asked about slides or presentation, and I replied that I didn’t have any. Some people call this “going rogue,” but I just call it speaking. All I needed was an internet browser to show examples.

My general topic was using social media to build community around a business or organization. I talked about various projects that I am working on, as well as answering questions along the way. Claudia took great notes and posted them on the class blog. The high level takeaways are listed below. Read the blog for the detail under these points.

• Figure out who and WHERE your customers and prospects are
• Content is still King
• Use Google Analytics and some other cool tools
• RSS feeds are inherent to blogs
• Start a blog for Personal Branding

It was fun to speak to a class about social media, because these are the next group of business leaders. Everyone assumes that the digital generation knows all about social media, but that’s really not true. They understand it as a personal communication tool, but there’s a big leap transfering that knowledge to business applications.