I’ve published a curriculum for social media literacy at the college and graduate level.

This is based on my experience teaching the subject at the University of Miami School of Communication and on the presentations and workshops I’ve given. The coursework and some of the topics are also inspired by Howard Rheingold’s class on Virtual Worlds / Social Media:

In a few short years, the Web 2.0 has profoundly changed the communication landscape. With the advent of new social media tools, more and more people are participating and engaging in the conversation online. As former members of the audience become the creators of content, corporations and media organizations lose control of the message. After an overview of how and why we got here, this course will guide you through what works with social networks, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, media sharing, lifestreams, tagging and other social media tools. Since these tools and services are so new and continually changing, students’ degree of knowledge about the internet is not relevant. For continued effective communication, using these tools is not optional, it’s required.

The course will explore the new media landscape in terms of online expression, social networking, identity management, community building, and citizen journalism. How is social media changing the way you work and live? What are the implications for you and for the organizations you will work with? What opportunities and challenges do individuals, news organizations, and businesses face regarding communication, identity/brand management, and community building? How do we understand, participate in, and leverage communities in our current age of many-to-many media?

This course is grounded in practice, and students will be required to participate in social networks, forums, blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, folksonomies, and virtual worlds. Class discussions, presentations by students, readings, and examples of emerging technologies and media will bring us greater understanding of the issues and practice of social media. We will also learn from case studies, invited speakers, and our own learning journals, new effective strategies and applications of these platforms.

The class is highly participatory both offline and online. Between the weekly scheduled class meetings, this course’s discussion continues in a variety of online and virtual environments. Those who complete this course will know how to use blogs, tags, wikis, social networks, Twitter and Flickr productively, and have a framework for understanding and evaluating new social media tools and platforms.

The full syllabus including the course topics and coursework is on the wiki. This syllabus is distributed under a Creative Commons license.

I’ve had countless conversations with companies and interactive agencies on the significance of social media and the impact it will have on businesses’ marketing, PR and product development activities and processes. From these conversations and from my own experience using, teaching, consulting and working with companies and non-profits on social media initiatives and programs, I’ve developed an approach to frame the conversation, as described below. Please see footnotes for credit to Tara Hunt and Yvette Ferry. [1. Credit is due to Tara Hunt, who seeded my thinking on this, although this post is not necessarily reflective of her views. Please read her excellent blog for more on Social Media Strategy and community management.] [2. Yvette Ferry deserves credit for helping me organize these thoughts and motivating me to put pen to paper. She is a freelance writer you should consider hiring for your projects.]

The Premise for Social Media

An increasing number of companies are now dipping their toes into social media, but many are still unsure what it is and how to implement it for their customer base and profitability.

Social media sets itself apart from previous types of media in terms of the engagement and commitment of people. In mainstream media and advertising, people were relegated to the role of an anonymous and passive audience. This paradigm is no longer working. Today, the community is everything, and more and more companies are recognizing their need to change with the times.

In a social media setting, people become active and interactive by expressing their opinion on what they’re viewing, by having the ability to alter content, and by creating their own content to be viewed by others. The means of production, distribution, and story-telling are multiplied while costs are lowered, granting millions of people the possibility to produce their own individualistic content. The result is a new, more engaged type of user. This engagement is further increased when the user may create an identity and make explicit their social connections. All of this translates into increased efficiency, use and, ultimately, volume of business for appropriately engaged companies.

A Framework for Social Media Integration

Integrating new media into companies’ business practices and culture involves concentrating on three areas: communication, user experience, and product development. In large part, each area depends upon the others for resonance, coherence and reinforcement. You can increase conversion and retention from advertising and marketing (and viral) campaigns by developing and enhancing your communications, website usability, and product features, by selecting and integrating the appropriate social media for your markets and by optimizing the use of these media.

Communication

Effective communication entails developing a holistic marketing approach that works with and not against community-building efforts. Successful online companies are generally those that listen and respond to their customers, a simple premise that can be remarkably difficult to execute. Most companies struggle to listen to and “hear” what their customers are saying, and this unintentional deafness affects their bottom lines. You can create communication strategies for user engagement, as well as internal communication and implementation processes that both reflect and impact community and product development. In addition, you can develop social-network outreach strategies, integrate new media into corporate outreach efforts and optimize search-engine results in order to be more findable by your customer base. This effort involves developing an outreach strategy to identify and establish relationships with your users and also to create spaces in which your communities may interact, using new media.

User Experience

The ways in which your company interacts with your website users is critical to their experience. The cohesiveness of the community you build is largely dependent on the quality of the interaction your users have at your websites, and the community management resources you make available. This means creating websites with social attributes and affordances that encourage users to come back, because they can interact with your company and also with each other. It also implies creating dashboards, business processes and empowering (or hiring) employees to perform community management, ombudsman and relationship-building activities. You can lay the foundation for growth and optimize the results from advertising, direct marketing, and viral campaigns by developing optimized user experiences, using new media and social networks.

Product Development

Product development entails creating services and products based on the use and desires of users and customers. Using specific metrics and baselines for measuring user engagement and growth, you can hear what your customers are saying and assess the ways in which they are using your products, services and websites. You can use data and develop internal business processes to prototype, test and create products and services that are responsive to the stated and implicit needs of your customers and user bases.

Finally, monitoring your products, brands and reputations is important to your own ongoing success and you can track and manage the reputation of companies, brands, and products, using new media.

Overall, you may find that social media is more timely, efficient, and cost-effective than other approaches.

What do you think? How do you approach social media issues with your company or clients? What frameworks do you use for discussion?