The first time I taught a class on social media, students were relatively unconvinced that it would have any impact on communication-related fields such as public relations, advertising, and marketing. They laughed. No one laughs now. There real irony, however, is that nowadays, I spend less time teaching social media and more time teaching communication, even in classes related to social media. The reason I've adopted a different approach is simple enough. When people talk about social media today, they rely heavily on arbitrary measures like the number of friends, followers, and site traffic.
All of that matters, but none of it really matters. Volume isn't a suitable measure for a successful social media program. The ability of the program to achieve its intent is the only viable measure. Maybe some of the material in this deck will illustrate that.
The above deck is a supplemental teaching tool for Integrating Social Media Into A Communication Strategy for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The intent of this deck is to provide students with a reference to material presented in class two weeks ago.
Some of this deck might seem basic for people already working in the field. If this is the case, the more interesting material might be the one environment concept, advertising model, and contradictory expectations that the public had about engaging companies in social media. A few might also find it valuable to consider that social media is the only communication environment that allows for simultaneous one-on-one, one-to-some, and one-to-many communication.
