Chair, C.H. Sandage School of Business
Professor of Business Administration
Sam Walton Fellow
Graceland University, 1 University Place, Lamoni, IA 50140
Jeffery W. McElroy, Ed.D.
Social Media Marketing
Course Purpose
This course provides a comprehensive overview, with hands-on experience, of Social Media Marketing. The most basic objectives of the course are to provide students with a broad introduction to social media marketing concepts and techniques using the latest online tools combined with practical “real world” application. There will be an emphasis on strategic use of tools, effective design and contemporary marketing techniques. Students will build, implement and maintain real world marketing campaigns.
Learning Outcomes
Students should have a solid understanding of the role and the importance of social media in marketing programs as well as the latest social media on-line applications used to develop marketing campaigns and track results for “real” businesses. The learning outcomes will be driven by hands-on experience with actual companies.
Reflective Statement Interpreting Course Evaluations
Overall the student evaluations are quite positive (see course evaluation summaries). Many of the businesses also provided positive comments about the quality of the students and felt that the students really helped to improve their social media marketing efforts.
The Principal Financial and local business experiential-learning team projects continue to be popular with the students and will be continued for future classes. Due to the popularity and success of the real-world experiential learning projects, I am working to add other companies such as the Iowa Energy basketball team.
There are student suggestions for improving the class and one that I incorporated for Spring 2017 is less real-world projects. Having 3 large projects Spring 2016 seemed to be a little overwhelming and difficult to coordinate for the students. Spring 2017 had 2 large experiential learning projects which seems to work better.