BADM 395: Social Media Marketing

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Summer Term 1: 2020

Instructor: Prof. Mark Wolters                  Email: mwolter@illinois.edu

Overview of the Course:

This course focuses on the ever-growing area of social media marketing. The course is set up in order to prepare students for the rigors of a career in social media marketing. The course will give students the practical and theoretical knowledge to be able to eventually run a social media marketing division of a firm. The course covers a wide variety of topics from social media platforms, to social media analytics, to omnichannel clients, to e-commerce, and many other social media marketing topics.

Objectives of the Course:

The course is set up to train and prepare students for careers in social media marketing and digital marketing which is the future of the marketing industry. The main objectives of the course are:

• Give students a firm grasp of what social media marketing is and how firms can use it to manage their business.
• Give students an insight into their future careers with the ever more importance of social media marketing for business sustainability.
• Give students the ability to handle, work with, and succeed with digital-first consumers,
• Give students the insights on developing social media plans, social media strategies, and social media tactics, including content creation and curation topics,
• Give students the knowledge to develop their own social media portfolio on a variety of platforms, including blogging, microblogging, video marketing, and visual marketing,
• Give students the ability to use the analytics throughout social media marketing to develop better interactive experiences for clients as well as develop new content for platforms,
• Give students a firm grasp of the ethical and legal issues they may face as social media managers.

Methodology:

The course is set up to be a hands-on class for social media marketing managers. Students will be learning key concepts and models for social media marketing during lectures, as well as using those concepts in active online sessions within the class time and outside of class time. Therefore, it is important that students have internet enabled devices in class so they can participate. Additionally, the course is set up in a way that students will be working on a number of projects for a client. Therefore, students will have hands on experience developing and running the social media platforms for firms. 

Course Materials:

Class slides: class slides will be sent to students’ emails before the daily classes.

Each student must have the following social media accounts. Twitter (sign up at www.twitter.com), Facebook (sign up at www.facebook.com), Instagram (sign up at www.instagram.com), Canva (sign up at www.canva.com), LinkedIn (sign up at www.linkedin.com), YouTube (sign up at www.youtube.com, if you have a Gmail account that is all you need for YouTube),

Topics to be covered:

Topics with links to the associated landing page. They will be populated as we go through the class with the videos and replays of the lectures.

Topic 1: The Basics of Social Media

Topic 2: The Social Media Mission Statement

Topic 3: The Social Media Plan

Topic 4: Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning, & Personas in Social Media

Topic 5: Digital Marketing Maturity

Topic 6: Digital First Consumers

Topic 7: Strategic Marketing Analysis of Social Media

Topic 8: SOSTAC & RACE Models for Social Media Analysis

Topic 9: Content & Curation Topics & Strategy

Topic 10: Social Media Platforms

Topic 11: Key Performance Indicators

Topic 12: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Topic 13: Developing a Social Media Campaign

Topic 14: Advertising and Affiliate Marketing

Topic 15: Email Marketing

Topic 16: Ethical Issues in Social Media

Topic 17: Personal Branding

Schedule:

Tuesday May 26^th: Live at 10:00am Chicago time which is 17:00 Vienna time. Topics: Syllabus, projects, best practices for social media accounts. Get to know each other. This may be a ZOOM meeting as then we all can say hi to each other. The link will be sent out before class, so check your email.

Wednesday May 27^th: These videos are all going to be on YouTube. Topic 1: Basics of Social Media. Topic 2: Social Media Mission Statement. I will send you the slides and the link to all the videos.

Thursday May 28^th: Live at 10:00am Chicago time which is 17:00 Vienna time. Topic 3: Social Media Plans, Topic: Social Media Marketing Campaigns. This will be on a YouTube link where students can watch live or later on as the link will remain available. I may split this into a couple live videos so that you do not have one four hour long video.

Tuesday June 2^nd: Live at 10:00am Chicago time which is 17:00 Vienna time. Topic: Digital Marketing Maturity. Topic: Digital First Consumers. This will be a Live class on YouTube. I will send the link out before the class begins. Please check your email.

Wednesday June 3^rd: These will be YouTube video classes: Topic: Personal Branding. Topic: Personas, Customer Journey Mapping, Segmentation. I will send the links to the videos before this date.

Thursday June 4^th: These will be YouTube video classes: Topic: Industry Key Success Factors, strategic marketing tools. Topic: SOSTAC, RACE, Strategic Marketing Models for social media. I will send out a link to all the videos as well as the slides.

Tuesday June 9^th: Live at 10:00am Chicago time which is 17:00 Vienna time. Topic: Content Strategy. Topic: Curation Strategy. Topic: Website integration. This may be on zoom so that groups can work together in the breakout session areas.

Wednesday June 10^th: This will be a YouTube video class: Topic: Key Performance Indicators. Topic: Search Engine Optimization. I will send out the links to all the videos with the slides prior to the class.

Thursday June 11^th: Live at 10:00am Chicago time which is 17:00 Vienna time. Topic: Ethical issues with social media. Topic: email marketing. This will be a Zoom class so that everyone can take part and share their thoughts on ethics in social media.

Homework blogs will all be due by the Monday of the following week. Most homework will be “turned in” via your blog post shares. 

July 1^st: Your team project will be due during the day of July 1^st.

Grading Scale:

A (90%-100%)                   B (80%-89%)                     C (70-79%)                         D (60%-69%)                    

F (59% and below)

Assignments:

5%: Social Media Signup: Sign up for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and have a blog with which to post your homework blogs.

10%: Social Media Mission Statement: Develop a social media mission statement for your firm/organization/social media empire. The assignment will be given in class.

10%: Social Media Analysis: You will analyze your company’s social media platforms. The assignment will be given in class.

10% How Gen Z shopping: This assignment is a personal assignment that you will be doing individually.

10%: Personal Branding Assignment: This is an assignment on developing your own personal brand. This will be an individual assignment.

10%: Key Success Factors: your team will develop 5-6 industry key success factors for two separate industries. One set of 5-6 industry key success factor will be for a specific social media platform. The second set will be industry key success factors for your specific organization’s industry on a specific social media platform. The team leader will send one email with this assignment to mwolter@illinois.edu with the title “Key Success Factors – and your firm’s name.” Please include all team members names on the word document. No google docs will be accepted.  

10%: Content & Curation Topic Circle: your team will develop a range of content topics and curation topics for your firm to share on their various social media profiles. You will also develop the content creation circle for your firm. This will be emailed to mwolter@illinois.edu by the team leader. Please title the email “Content & Curation Assignment – and you firm’s name.”

10%: Digital and data privacy blog: this is an individual assignment blog. You will need to discuss a minimum of three digital and data privacy issues you have found online in relation to social media and write a commentary on them. Please write between 3-5 pages, 12 font, 1.5 line spacing.

25%: Social Media Project: Objective: analyze and develop a digital marketing plan for your firm. This includes a yearlong monthly social media plan as well as any other digital or guerilla marketing ideas you may have for the firm.

Format:

• 1.5 Line Spacing, 15-25 pages, Times New Roman font, 12 font size. The page numbers may go farther as you will have example posts, spiral bound
• Title page should include: company name, students’ names, date of final presentation, please make it look as professional as you can,
• Title page, table of contents & appendices do not count toward the 15-25 pages, but are required,
• A one page executive summary of the key points should be placed after the table of contents, but before the body of the work.

Required Parts:

• Social Media Marketing Mission Statement: Write out what the firm’s social media mission statement should be.
• SOSTAC Model – explained and developed for the firm’s social media and digital marketing ventures. You can integrate the model throughout the project as many topics fall into the SOSTAC Model.
• Content Strategy – look into what they should be sharing, how they share it, why they share it, what benefits their content could bring,
• Curation Topics – main topics they should be writing about from their core business, side topics they could write about and share content from, and peripheral topics that they could curate from other sources, give them a list of twitter accounts, Facebook feeds, Pinterest, and other social media accounts or websites that they could find  information and posts to share from,
• Online Value Proposition: what are some of the online specific customer value propositions.
• Social Media Plan –
  • cover all social media platforms the firm should use, why they should use that platform,
  • which market segments they should target with each platform
• One year Monthly social media plan –
  • Have a topic for each month, ask the firm if they have different busy seasons, or products/services that sell better at any time of the year. This should influence the topics that you cover in each month,
  • Give one week of social media posts examples for all the platforms you recommend for three different weeks throughout the year, this allows the firm to understand what they should be doing with each platform and how they relate to the monthly or weekly social media plan recommendations,
  • You may want to put the sample posts in the appendix as they will take up a lot of space, or integrate them and make the paper longer
• Determine which Key Performance Indicators would be best for the firm to use & why. This may be a shorter segment.
• Additional Recommendations:
  • New ideas that you have come up with that could help the business,
  • Ideas gained from the in-class group chat,
  • Ideas shared by Mark, any small to large recommendations you can think of that you have not covered before, you may want to group by timeframe, short-term, medium-term, long-term recommendations,

Due Date Information: the final group project is due July 1, 2020. Multiple sections of the project you will have done in your homework assignments, therefore if you would like to finish your project earlier you can turn in the assignment any time after June 12^th.