CEMS Course Session Plan For The Year

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CEMS Course Session Plan For The Year 2015-2016

Course Title: Business Transformation with Social Media

Course Coordinator: Prof Somprakash Bandyopadhyay/Prof Indranil Bose

Course Background and Objectives:

Social media are fundamentally changing the way we communicate, collaborate, consume, and create. They represent one of the most transformative impacts of information technology on any organization, both within and outside organizational boundaries. Social media have revolutionized the ways businesses relate to the marketplace, creating a new world of possibilities and challenges for all aspects of the enterprise, from marketing and operations to finance and human resource management. Within organizations social media have the potential to transform the exchange of knowledge and expertise and thus accelerate innovation and the development of new products. Even then, a study by Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance on social media conducted in 2012 revels that, while 90% of respondents from the top management of different companies claim to understand the impact that social media can have on their organization, only 32% of their companies monitor social media to detect risks to their business activities and 14% use metrics from social media to measure corporate performance.

In this course, we explore how organizations can get off on the right foot by addressing the macro & micro-level strategic aspects of social media. The emphasis of this course is on understanding consumers’ social interactions, the various social media channels available to us, how to build social strategies, and how to track their effectiveness. Also, since social media is heavily technology-driven we will cover relevant aspects of Social Technology more broadly.

Consumers now have louder voices than they used to have, they are more socially connected than they ever have been, they expect more from brands, and information reaches them faster than ever before. In light of these fundamental changes, the learning goal of this course is to help you get a clear perspective on what’s really going on inside and outside organizations in the age of social/digital/mobile.

After successfully completing this course you should be able to do the following:

• Understand what social media is and how this new type of media and communications technology is impacting the way a business is done.

• Understand some key principles of “connected customers” in terms of consumer psychology and sociology and how they feed into social media strategy development.

• Know the main components of viral/buzz/word-of-mouth marketing campaigns and the best approaches for identifying and selecting the initial “seed” individuals who start spreading information/ content/ opinions over their social networks.

• Be familiar with some important aspects of monitoring tools to measure the impact of social media in an organization.

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Session Plan:

Session

No

Learning

Objectives*

Session Details

1 x Course Introduction

2 4 Connected Consumers: Social Psychology of Social Media

3 3 Case I: Starbucks: Brewing Customer Experience Through Social Media

4 1,2 Why and how….an Indian Success Story (Guest Speaker) 5 4 • The Dragonfly Effect: Using Social Media to Drive Change

• Discussion on Assignments

6 4 Why to Build a Social Media Strategy… and How: A Social Media Strategy Framework (how social media is affecting all aspects of a business)

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5 • Mistakes to avoid when starting in the social media Initiative: Managing a Social Media Crisis

• Corporate Social Media Policy & Risk Management • Legal implications of Corporate Social Networking

8 4 • Buyer Identification and Customer Aligned Sales & Marketing Process

• Keeping excitement alive over time: Ford Fiesta Movement 9 1,2 Guest Speaker: Social Media Marketing

10 3 Case II: Sephora Direct: Investing in Social Media, Video and Mobile

11 1, 4 Crisis Management and Social Changes with Social Media (Studies from American Red Cross, Haiti Earthquake, Egypt Revolution)

12 3 Case III: Greenpeace, Nestle and the Palm Oil Controversy: Social Media Driving Change

13 4 Listening and Monitoring : Social Marketing Analytics

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Session

No

Learning

Objectives*

Session Details

15 1,2 Guest Speaker: Social Media Analytics

16 3 Case IV: Circos: Tapping Into Social Media (A)

17 Student presentation and evaluation (Assignment 1 and 2) [3 groups]

Note: * The numbers in the Learning Objectives column represent; 1) Internationalism

2) Business Embeddedness 3) Responsible Citizenship 4) Reflective Critical Thinking 5) Comprehensive Leadership

Reading Material:

There is no text-book for this course. It is simply too new an area and existing books are either already out-dated or not up to the mark. Instead of a textbook there will be power-point presentation slides, videos and electronic links to different resources.

The following online resources/blogs are recommended reading on a regular basis in order to keep up with the latest news in the social media world:

TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com

Mashable: http://www.mashable.com

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Social Selling example video: ( http://www.slideshare.net/linkedin-sales-solutions/welcome-to-the-social-selling-era)

Indian Social Media Knowledge Storehouse: http://www.socialsamosa.com/

Must watch 20+ Indian Social Media Success Stories: (

http://www.digitalvidya.com/blog/social-media-casestudies/must-watch-20-indian-social-media-success-stories/)

Social Media Business Cases and examples: ( http://www.techinasia.com/30-social-media-business-case-studies/)

Evaluation Scheme:

Your grade will be determined by the following four components:

• Two Group assignments + Class Presentations as determined by the instructor (50%) • Class participation (20%)

• End Term Examination (30%)

Choose a specific existing social media campaign that you admire, do a formal analysis of what made it effective and suggest specific recommendations on where and how it might be improved.

Assignment #1: Campaign Case Study

(1) Formal analysis : Start with the Dragonfly Model and examine the campaign via its four components (Focus, Grab Attention, Engage and Empower). Consider contacting the instigators. What you interpret as a participant or observer of the campaign may be different from what the social media experts starting the campaign intended. Mind and mine this gap.

(2) Make it even better : Given your above analysis of the intended and observed results of the social media campaign, what can be even better? Were there social media tools that could have been used or better leveraged and how? Are there constituents that their campaign could have reached but did not and how could the campaign be improved to reach these constituents?

Present the key findings from your formal analysis and your recommendations at the end of your course.

This project will require you to develop, implement and measure a viral marketing campaign in a team. You and your team will create a (hopefully) viral video aimed at promoting a particular Product/ Brand / Service. You will then disseminate that content and try to make it “go viral.” Your broad objective is to raise awareness and generate interest in this product/ service/ brand. It is up to you how you formulate your marketing strategy (segmentation, targeting, positioning, etc) and your campaign’s specific theme/message.

Assignment #2: Social Media Campaign Development and Management

Before you start, clearly define the metrics by which you will measure the “viral-ness” of your experiment (e.g. number of hits on a webpage via Google Analytics for example, number of times you are re-tweeted, number of Facebook fans that join your cause).

The following steps must be followed:

1. Develop your specific strategy tied to the general objectives of raising awareness and generating interest.

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3. Develop a preliminary concept for your content, which will be a video. This doesn’t have to be fully fleshed out at this stage. This concept must be formally approved by Professor Bandyopadhyay before you go any further with it. Email a short description to Professor Bandyopadhyay with a subject line: “Group Assignment: concept” by the end of 4th week 4. Create the video content. It doesn’t have to be too flashy or professional looking. In terms

of length, keep it to no longer than approximately 2-3 minutes (shorter may be even better). 5. Develop a plan for distributing/disseminating your video using social media. Who will you

seed the video with? What will your message be? What metrics will be important to track and how will you track them?

6. Submit your video for final approval by Professor Bandyopadhyay. Email the video or a link to your private YouTube video to Professor Bandyopadhyay with a subject line: “Group assignment: video” by the end of 6th week

7. Once approved, post your video on YouTube and implement your viral marketing plan. 8. Manage your campaign for 10 days. This entails tracking your video’s progress and refining

your strategy as needed. You may use HootSuite or any other free monitoring & management tool for campaign management and tracking. Your campaign will run until end of 8th Week. This is the day before the final class presentation.

9. Prepare a short report (no more than 5 pages, single-spaced, 12-point font, 1-inch margins) giving details of (i) your marketing strategy, (ii) your theme/message strategy, (iii) your content strategy, (iv) your viral dissemination strategy, (v) your video’s performance on relevant metrics, (vi) how you refined your strategy once the video was live, and (vii) what you learned by doing this project. You should highlight the following:

• Finding your story. Briefly explain why you picked your goal.

• Applying the framework. How did you grab attention? Engage? Enable others to take action? Be specific, use examples.

• Tools. What social technology and traditional tools did you use, how did you leverage them?

• Outcomes. What were your measurable results?

• Legacy. What hope would you have for the legacy of this project? If you could create a wish list for a continuing impact of your project – what would it be?

Email this to Professor Bandyopadhyay with a subject line: “Group assignment: report” by the end of 8th week. Present the key findings from your formal analysis and your recommendations at the end of your course.