Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Teaching Executives About Social Media

Fellow-student Tiffany Peralta is quoted in US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT!
 
The goal of the Social Media Marketing course at the University of California—Los Angeles Extension, a continuing higher education provider for working adults, is to equip students with social media tools of the business world, says Beverly Macy, author of The Power of Real-Time Social Media Marketing and professor at the UCLA Extension.

"There's a complete shift in how we're doing business," Macy says. "People are now getting their [information] from LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook."

The course, which Macy calls "social media for executives," teaches students how to act and react in real time by implementing social media practices. Macy live blogs during her class, and students are encouraged to live tweet notes and ideas using classroom hash tags to create Twitter conversations.

Though her classes are normally a mix of older students who are wary and skeptical of the value of real-time social platforms, "by the middle of the class they get it," Macy says.

The course has been "nothing short of life changing" for Tiffany Paralta, one of Macy's students. "I've been introduced to an entirely new world," Paralta says. "[I] realize that this class is a serious game changer in my career and in how I consume information in general."

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