A Semester in History…

by Dan Bailey

Well, well, well. This week I teach my last class for Georgia State University’s first Social Media Marketing course, which I researched, wrote the syllabus for, and began teaching this January. I have to say it’s been great – much fun and a feeling of accomplishment – hopefully for my students as much as myself. I truly feel lucky.

Although it seemed there just weren’t enough weeks to teach everything I wished, I think I dispensed of some good info along the way. I structured the class largely around team projects with new, actual social media channels promoting major brands as student “brand fans”. Teams would identify a goal “hub”, brand web landing page or social community to drive traffic to – then build blogs, Twitter and Facebook pages and Digg profiles to engage consumers and promote the brand and measure actual, marketing funnel traffic from channel to channel to hub.

Over the course of the semester, these student team blogs achieved between 150 to 300 hits each. Not too bad for getting the word out on their brands for the first time. Not surprisingly, in their final team papers, the most common conclusion was that the most frequent, fresh content (while testing different subjects) achieves the most traffic. Social media words to live by. Here are examples – the team blogs for the Atlanta Braves and Starbucks Coffee. Check them out – see what you think.

Oh, in case your curious about the next class – I’m looking forward to teaching it again at GSU this Fall – somehow it’s already fully booked.

Thanks for reading. Want more? Comment and connect with me!

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