Riding the Social Media Wave

Social media networks were a big buzz at AACSB conference this year. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are mentioned in every session. My job in the next few weeks will be to get The George Washington University School of Business on these networks. We have talked about social media networks before, but never actually done anything. The main reason for the resistance is the time that devoted to these social media. Who is going to tweet? Who will update Facebook? Who is going to keep track of LinkedIn?

From what I have learned from the sessions, most of the B-Schools have a Facebook page to have a Facebook page. Some schools are using Twitter to let the students know about an upcoming event or to remind them a certain deadlines. A few use LinkedIn to connect with alumni. These reasons alone still weren’t convinced me those are the ways to approach social media. Hannah Paramore, president of Paramore Redd Communications, however, had shown us how to take advantage of social media as tools to reach different audiences. She gave an example of how a record company makes it profit by repacking its content. Take Miles Davis for instance. There’s the re-release of The 50th Anniversary of Kind of Blue, Miles Davis for Lovers, The Best of Miles Davis and so on. In comparison, social media networks are just different ways of getting out the message. Let say you write a blog post. The post could go on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to reach different audiences. Since most of these networks, especially Facebook, make sharing contents so easy, why not just make one and repurpose them to different channels.

Sounds like a fantastic idea to me. Does anyone else have any thoughts on that or how to best use these social media to benefit the school?