What if an MA in Social Media took a more vocational, on-the-job approach?

Paul Bradshaw’s course at Birmingham City Uni includes some work placement and hands-on doing.

Teaching takes place in small groups. There will be a mixture of lectures, seminars, research workshops, presentations and field-trips. In exploring and innovating in research in social media you will work with other students and engage with professional practitioners, interacting and disseminating ideas through websites, blogs, Twitter and other social media as well as at networking events.

Jamie, Neville and Dan have shared their thoughts. Now I’m going to wade in.

Because for some, there’s no beating learning on the job. And have no doubt, there are going to be more of these jobs to learn on. We’re going to have more need of people who can do, as well as think.

A vocational approach could prove to be a more affordable and realistic option for many grads (the BCU course is £4K and lasts 48 weeks), while at the same time delivering people with a skill set that is an exact fit with the requirements of social media businesses right now.

Let me be clear: I’m not suggesting there isn’t room for both approaches.

What I am asking for is help in defining those more practical tasks you think the holder of a Masters in Social Media ought to be able to accomplish.

For example:

• Able to quantify and cost a social media proposal - understand and value KPIs
• Perform a top level (and ideally deep level) brand listening audit - demonstrate effective use of listening technologies. Be able to advise effective response strategies based on analysis of that listening.
• Identify influencers, score for influence and sentiment
• Perform basic network analysis to identify relationships between users, influential nodes and important connectors
• Know and practice the basics of social media etiquette and demonstrate this in both their professional life and in building their own social graph (via blogs, forums, social networks etc). Demonstrate through action the value of partipation.
• Be able to identify a community of purpose and its needs and work with that community to build solutions that community will find useful enough to want to share (create social currencies).
• What else should be added? What should be removed? Add your comments please.

Is this in the remit of a Masters? Should it be? Does it matter what the qualification is called?

We welcome your thoughts because we’d really like to see something fellow social media practitioners will value, creating useful industry standards along the way.

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