Social media campaigns designed by students in a course launched less than a year ago at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business are benefitting the local community.
Students enrolled in the new Social Media and Business course applied their social media lessons to new and established not-for-profits and social agencies on a wide range of issues, from life-saving transplants to disability in sport.
The course was taught at SFU’s Surrey campus last fall and again this spring by assistant professor Jan Kietzmann and instructor Ashish Gurung.
As a final project, students were tasked with developing a social media campaign for a community client or campus issue. Among highlights:
• “Don’t Be a Douchebag” used Twitter and Facebook to accrue over 100 registrations for the BC Transplant Society, with the aim of providing potentially life-saving transplants for British Columbians. The campaign’s social media messaging was endorsed and retweeted by the likes of musicians Jann Arden and Bif Naked, Global TV’s Chris Gailus, and NHLers Doug Gilmour and Brendan Morrison.
• Students with the #SIFEHungerArmy campaign raised over $500 for the Surrey Food Bank, and garnered over 1,000 blog page views to raise awareness of the food bank’s impact and needs in the community.
• A social media campaign addressing disability in winter sport, Adaptive Sliding Canada, was embraced by winter sports athletes and fans across Canada and is helping to build momentum for the inclusion of new sports in future Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games.
• A group of students going by the moniker “Jersey Score” – through fundraising tweet-ups and other social media activities – raised over $1,500 for sporting gear and apparel for soccer-playing youth in Manamani, South Africa.
Students used Facebook and the Twitter hashtag #BUS450 to engage with each other and their teachers, and to collaborate on assigned projects and readings.
In class, Kietzmann and Gurung invited industry leaders, entrepreneurs and businesses to share their insights and expertise in social media. Outside the classroom, students visited Vancouver’s Invoke and Hootsuite to learn from global players in the social media space.
“Our students worked very hard and, among the many difficult deliverables they had, they impressed me the most with their social media campaigns,” says Kietzmann, who with co-authors won a research award from the journal Business Horizons, for a recent paper, Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media “They truly engaged communities.”
On a related social media note, the innovation-focused tweets of colleague and MBA professor Ian McCarthy have earned him a spot on OnlineMBA’s international list of “50 Business Professors You Should Follow on Twitter.”