SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY: CREATING ENGAGEMENT, INSIGHT, AND ACTION
ONLINE SHORT COURSE
Learn to navigate the perils of social media and leverage its promise within your organization.
6 weeks, excluding 1 week orientation.
6–8 hours of self-paced learning per week, entirely online.
Email: mitsloan@getsmarter.com
Call: +1 617 997 4979
ABOUT THIS COURSE
By enabling us to both consume and share content with a simple tap of a screen, social media has empowered people, and organizations, to shape public opinion and drive action like never before. This has given companies the opportunity to enhance their consumer loyalty and engagement, but has also raised questions around the influence social media may have on our behavior.
The Social Media Strategy: Creating Engagement, Insight, and Action online short course from the MIT Sloan School of Management is a definitive guide to harnessing social media effectively and ethically to achieve your organizational goals.
The program draws on evidence-based, cross-disciplinary research from Sinan Aral’s latest book, The Hype Machine, which investigates the ways in which social media affects our decision making and shapes the world we live in. Guided by industry experts, this program moves from theory into strategic application, providing you with the tools and frameworks to navigate the perils of social media and leverage its promise within your organization. In addition, the course will teach you to enhance your digital marketing strategy using powerful techniques and a deep understanding of the science behind social media.
“At MIT Sloan Executive Education, we are focused on bridging the energy, engagement, and idea flow of physical in-person teaching and learning into online experiences. We aim to positively modify individual and collective behaviors that participants will take back to their teams and propagate throughout their organizations.”
Paul McDonagh-Smith
Senior Lecturer (IT Group) and Digital Capability Leader, MIT Sloan School of Management
WHAT THIS PROGRAM COVERS
The course begins with a focus on the neurological and economic forces underpinning social media, as well as the technologies and trends that contribute to the ongoing production and development of social media, or the ‘Hype Machine’.
The program offers key tools for leveraging social media’s potential within your organization, and tactics to improve your social media strategy such as microtargeting, viral advertising, and influencer marketing. In addition to this, you’ll investigate ethical issues relating to social media and the impact the Hype Machine has on privacy and democracy. You’ll also explore evolving trends that may impact your strategy in the future.
A POWERFUL COLLABORATION
The MIT Sloan School of Management is collaborating with online education provider GetSmarter to create a new class of learning experience — one that is high-touch, intimate, and personalized for the working professional.
ABOUT MIT SLOAN
The MIT Sloan School of Management is one of the world’s leading business schools, emphasizing innovation in practice and research, with a mission to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world, and to generate ideas that advance management practice. The school’s focus on action learning means that students are able to apply concepts learned in the classroom to real-world business settings. Through its collaborative spirit, MIT Sloan welcomes and celebrates diverse viewpoints, creating an environment where new ideas grow and thrive.
WHAT IS MIT SLOAN EXECUTIVE EDUCATION?
MIT Sloan Executive Education offers nondegree executive programs led by MIT Sloan faculty to provide business professionals from around the world with a targeted and flexible means to advance their career development goals and position their organizations for future growth. By collaborating with GetSmarter, a leader in online education, MIT Sloan Executive Education is able to deliver its executive programs through a dynamic, interactive, digital learning platform.
ABOUT GETSMARTER
GetSmarter, a 2U, Inc. brand, collaborates with the world’s leading universities and institutions to select, design, and deliver premium online short courses with a data-driven focus on learning gain.
Technology meets academic rigor in GetSmarter’s people-mediated model, which enables lifelong learners across the globe to obtain industry-relevant skills that are recognized by the world’s most reputable academic institutions.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN
You’ll be welcomed to the program and begin connecting with fellow participants, while exploring the navigation and tools of your Online Campus. Be alerted to key milestones in the learning path, and review how your results will be calculated and distributed.
You’ll be required to complete your participant profile and submit a digital copy of your passport/identity document.
Please note that module titles and their contents are subject to change during course development.
Learn more about how social media influences the brain.
- Review the neurological structures that make the brain so responsive to social media
- Explain how the design of social media affects the brain and therefore behavior
- Determine how social influence and social signals change behavior
- Analyze how you can use the neuroscience of social media to create engagement, insight, and action
Discover how economic forces shape the Hype Machine.
- Describe how the structure of the attention economy impacts social media and behavior
- Review the strategic implications of direct, indirect, and local network effects
- Explain how interoperability impacts network effects and social media
- Articulate how organizations and individuals can leverage network effects and the attention economy to achieve engagement, insight, and action
Explore the anatomy of the Hype Machine.
- Recognize the three elements that make social media work
- Describe how the structure of the Hype Machine impacts behavior
- Articulate how social media is shaped by the levers of code, money, norms, and law
- Analyze how the anatomy of the Hype Machine shapes behavior
Explore how personalized persuasion techniques can be incorporated into marketing.
- Apply how optimization and marketing analytics can be used in marketing strategy
- Identify how microtargeting is used to create behavioral change
- Calculate return on investment for marketing
- Recommend improvements to an integrated social media marketing program
Learn how to apply the five tactics of the hypersocialization playbook to your context.
- Explain how social network targeting can be used to achieve behavior change
- Outline what makes referral marketing strategies successful
- Demonstrate how to use social advertising and viral design to accelerate behavior change
- Articulate how influencer marketing can be used to promote a message
- Apply the hypersocialization playbook to strategy
Explore future trends and ethical considerations for social media.
- Articulate the potential impact of future trends in social media on organizational strategy
- Investigate ethical issues in social media and their implications for society
- Recommend strategies that steer social media toward its promise, rather than its peril
WHO SHOULD TAKE THIS COURSE
The course is designed to provide business leaders and marketing professionals with an understanding of how social media affects the business, organization, or society in which they operate. The tools and frameworks taught in the course can be applied across a wide number of contexts to help professionals navigate the complexity of social media and leverage it to engage audiences and drive action.
THIS PROGRAM IS FOR YOU IF YOU WANT TO:
HARNESS SOCIAL MEDIA
Achieve strategic organizational objectives using MIT’s scientific approach to social media strategy.
UNDERSTAND NEW TRENDS
Explore the various factors impacting social media and how they can be used to drive engagement.
IMPROVE YOUR STRATEGY
Develop a playbook of tactics to enhance your marketing efforts in a hypersocialized world.
ABOUT THE CERTIFICATE
This program offers you the opportunity to earn a digital certificate of completion from one of the world’s leading business schools — the MIT Sloan School of Management. This program also counts toward an MIT Sloan Executive Certificate, which you can earn upon completion of four programs where at least three of the four come from your chosen certificate track and at least one is completed in person. Find full details here.
Completion is based on a series of practical online assignments. In order to be issued with a digital certificate, you’ll need to meet the requirements outlined in the course handbook. The handbook will be made available to you as soon as you begin the program.
Your certificate will be issued in your legal name and sent to you digitally upon successful completion of the program, as per the stipulated requirements.
WHO YOU’LL LEARN FROM
This subject matter expert from MIT Sloan guides the course design and appears in a number of program videos, along with a variety of industry professionals.
YOUR FACULTY DIRECTOR
Sinan Aral
David Austin Professor of Management, Marketing, IT and Data Science, MIT; Director, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy; Founding Partner, Manifest Capital
Author of the new book The Hype Machine, Aral explores how social media is disrupting our businesses, politics, and public health. He was the chief scientist at SocialAmp, one of the first social commerce analytics companies (until its sale to Merkle in 2012), and at Humin, a social platform that the Wall Street Journal called the first “social operating system” (until its sale to Tinder in 2016). He is currently a founding partner at Manifest Capital and on the advisory board of the Alan Turing Institute, Britain’s national institute for data science, in London. Aral has worked closely with Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Airbnb, Yahoo, Jet.com, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Oracle, SAP, and many other leading Fortune 500 firms on realizing business value from big data analytics, social media, and IT investments. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northwestern University, holds master’s degrees from the London School of Economics and Political Science and Harvard University, and received his PhD from MIT. You can find Aral on Twitter @sinanaral.
INDUSTRY EXPERTS
Adam Alter
Professor of Marketing, NYU Stern School of Business
Emily Falk
Professor of Communication, Psychology and Marketing, University of Pennsylvania
Renée Richardson Gosline
Senior Lecturer and Research Scientist, MIT Sloan School of Management
Iyad Rahwan
Founder and Director, Max-Planck Institute for Human Development
Jui Ramaprasad
Associate Professor, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland
Claudia Perlich
Adjunct Professor, NYU Stern School of Business; Adviser, Dstillery
Andre Tutundjian
Co-Founder and CEO, AlgoLift
Dmitry Yudovsky
Co-Founder and CTO, AlgoLift
Ian Somerhalder
Executive Producer, Kiss the Ground Movie
Alex Collmer
Founder and CEO, VidMob
Clint Watts
Distinguished Research Fellow, Foreign Policy Research Institute
Maria Ressa
CEO and Executive Editor, Rappler
HOW YOU’LL LEARN
Every course is broken down into manageable, weekly modules, designed to accelerate your learning process through diverse learning activities:
- Work through your downloadable and online instructional material
- Interact with your peers and learning facilitators through weekly class-wide forums and small group discussions
- Enjoy a wide range of interactive content, including video lectures, infographics, live polls, and more
- Investigate rich, real-world case studies
- Apply what you learn each week to quizzes and project submissions, culminating in a toolkit of functional and strategic social media tactics
YOUR SUCCESS TEAM
GetSmarter, with whom MIT Sloan is collaborating to deliver this online program, provides a personalized approach to online education that ensures you’re supported throughout your learning journey.
HEAD LEARNING FACILITATOR
A subject expert from GetSmarter, approved by the University, will guide you through your learning journey.
SUCCESS ADVISER
Your one-on-one support at GetSmarter, available during University hours (9a.m.–5p.m. EST) to address technical or administrative questions.
GLOBAL SUCCESS TEAM
This team from GetSmarter is available 24/7 to solve your tech-related queries and concerns.
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
BASIC REQUIREMENTS
In order to complete this program you’ll need a current email account and access to a computer and the internet, as well as a PDF Reader. You may need to view Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, and read and create documents in Microsoft Word or Excel.
BROWSER REQUIREMENTS
We recommend that you use Google Chrome as your internet browser when accessing the Online Campus. Although this is not a requirement, we have found that this browser performs best for ease of access to program material. This browser can be downloaded here.
ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
Certain courses may require additional software and resources. These additional software and resource requirements will be communicated to you upon registration and/or at the beginning of the program. Please note that Google, Vimeo, and YouTube may be used in our course delivery, and if these services are blocked in your jurisdiction, you may have difficulty in accessing program content. Please check with an Enrollment Adviser before registering for this program if you have any concerns about this affecting your experience with the Online Campus.
