At least six top business schools have added courses focused on internet marketing and social media to their MBA curricula in the past year as part of an effort to help students stand out to employers in a tight job market, a recent Bloomberg BusinessWeek article reports.
Harvard Business School, Columbia Business School and the Carroll School of Management at Boston College each will offer one or more social networking courses this fall, according to the report. And in Europe, INSEAD, London Business School and the École des Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC Paris) also have added or soon will add related course offerings of their own.
The BW Bloomberg report credits Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, as one of the earliest pioneers of Internet marketing courses, reporting that social media has been a part of the MBA curriculum there since 2000. According to Elaine Young, an associate professor of marketing at Champlain, students who have mastered digital tools add to a company’s bottom line, which improves their chances of getting a job.
“Companies want students to know this stuff,” Young told BW Bloomberg. “But it’s not just about having a Facebook page. Students have to ask themselves: ‘Do I know how to set up an official Facebook page and run it and engage people on it?’ ”
MBA students are clamoring to take the new social media courses as fast as the schools themselves can offer them. At HBS, 172 students enrolled last fall when professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski introduced a second-year elective course, “Competing with Social Networks” – three times the number of seats available. “Students know these tools are too hard to ignore,” Piskorski told BW Bloomberg.
Meanwhile, at INSEAD, professor Andrew Stephen created a new two-month course called “Advertising and Social Media Strategy” after joining the faculty in June 2009. “My feeling was that all the B-schools were lagging behind in preparing MBA students for dealing with the new media landscape,” he told BW Bloomberg. In less than six months, according to Stephen, attendance in the course more than tripled, from 27 students in January to 45 in March and 93 in May.
For more on these and other social media courses being added to top MBA programs, click here.
