Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/90487
THE TOP Suddenly, my plans have changed. I head over to hear the presentation sponsored by the department of journalism and communication. Ten minutes later, I'm checking my e-mail in the auditorium while I listen to a panel of war vets and journalists talk about their time in Iraq. I find this experience satisfy- ing, so I tweet back to the USU stu- dent who tweeted about the event: "Thanks for the heads-up. This is interesting stuff." As a business student in the social media age, I am fascinated by the immediacy—the real-time nature—of social media. The tech- nology has sped up communication between individuals and organiza- tions, and it has given students enhanced access to information about—and from—their schools. Social media has quickly become one of the most common methods students use to stay connected with their peers, their schools, and the world. In fact, in their 2012 study, Nicholas Capano, Johanna Deris, and Eric Desjardins of the Univer- sity of New Hampshire in Durham found that nearly all UNH students use at least one social media plat- form, with 96 percent of students using Facebook and 84 percent of students using YouTube. Although this study focused only on UNH, it is likely that other universities would see similar rates of social media usage among their student bodies. As part of my work as the stu- dent social media manager for the Huntsman School, I was respon- sible for benchmarking its social media efforts against those of other U.S. business schools. In March 2012, a colleague and I gathered social media data for 371 AACSB- 34 November/December 2012 BizEd 25 After gathering our data, we aggregated our individual measurements of each business school's social media performance. We then created the ranking below of the U.S. AACSB-member business schools that are making the most of social media channels: 1. Harvard Business School, Harvard University 2. The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania 3. Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley 4. Darden School of Business, University of Virginia 5. Columbia Business School, Columbia University 6. Fuqua School of Business, Duke University 7. Thunderbird School of Global Management, Thunderbird 8. College of Business Administration, Florida International University 9. Graduate School of Business, Stanford University 10. Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, Utah State University 11. Booth School of Business, University of Chicago 12. McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin 13. Mays Business School, Texas A&M 14. W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University 15. Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California 16. Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, Dartmouth College 17. Fox School of Business, Temple University 18. Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland 19. School of Management, Boston University 20. Michael G. Foster school of Business, University of Washington 21. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan 22. Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University 23. MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 24. S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University 25. Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University accredited business schools in the U.S. Our goal: to learn what the Huntsman School was doing well in the social media sphere and where it could improve. However, our data don't just provide the Huntsman School with an idea of where it stands among its peers. The data show which social media practices are most common among top-performing schools, as well as where many schools fall short. They also offer a picture of how—and how well— the community of business schools is using social media to market, to communicate, and to teach. Anatomy of a Social Media Profile To benchmark each business school's social media performance, we con- sidered the following questions: ■ Does the school have official profiles on Google Places, LinkedIn, and Google+? ■ How many Facebook fans does the school have? ■ What is the school's number of "people talking about this" on Facebook? Relatively new, the "talk- ing about this" feature counts the number of Facebook fans who take actions such as liking the page, com- menting on or sharing a post, or sending an RSVP to a posted event.