Executives brush up on their social media
Digital literacy now required for doing business and building a career
When Anne Klein shut down its designer line in 2008, Eileen Mcmaster was among the fashion professionals there who found themselves without jobs. After years of working long hours, she took some time off, turning her attention to improving her health, becoming a Pilates instructor and wellness consultant along the way.
Now, with signs that the struggling economy is slightly improving, she is looking to get back into the fashion industry. To help strengthen her position in the job market, she returned to the classroom last year to develop expertise in social media that she can layer on top of her deep marketing and corporate communications experience.
“I didn’t have the social media savvy in the way I do in other areas of marketing,” said Mcmaster, 44, of North Babylon, N.Y., who signed up for the social media marketing boot camp online courses at Mediabistro. com.
“When I left fashion, social media wasn’t even something we were doing in the industry. Fast-forward four years, and if you are a brand and you are not on social media, you are missing a huge audience.”
For midcareer executives, particularly in the media and related industries, knowing how to use Twitter, update your timeline on Facebook, pin on Pinterest, check in on Foursquare and upload images on Instagram are among the digital skills that some employers expect people to have to land a job or to flourish in a current role.
“Six months ago, Pinterest wasn’t on everyone’s radar,” she said. “Because I am taking these courses, I am not behind.”
Pamela Tate, president and chief executive of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, based in Chicago, said digital literacy, including understanding social networking, is now a required skill.
“They are essential skills that are needed to operate in the world and in the workplace,” she said. “And people will either need to learn through formal training or through their networks or they will feel increasingly left out.”
For most people looking for a job, she said, it is vital that they understand how to use Linkedin and other social tools to network and present themselves online. “If you don’t have a Linkedin or Facebook account, then employers often don’t have a way to find out about you,” she said.
To help bridge the gap, major universities, community colleges and online educational businesses from Lynda.com to ed2go.com offer continuing education classes in digital media, including social media skills, web design, search optimization and web analytics.
The University of San Francisco has an Advanced Social Media certificate that can be earned in an eight-week online course. New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies offers courses where students can also earn certificates within its business programs.
Harvard’s Extension School has a social media marketing course for $1,900 aimed not at midcareer executives, but at younger marketers who need help learning how to integrate social media at their companies.
At Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs and a professor who has been teaching digital journalism and skills for more than 16 years, began teaching continuing education classes in social media in 2010.
With students, Sreenivasan said his goal is to “make them think really carefully about what they do and when they do it on social media.”
“We have to think about social media in a new strategic way,” he said.
“It is no longer something that we can ignore. It is not a place to just wish your friends happy birthday. It is a place of business. It is a place where your career will be enhanced or degraded, depending on your use of these tools and services.”
While the classes are meant for working journalists, people from many different fields have signed up.
In addition to the two courses offered for nondegree students last fall and spring, Sreenivasan and Ernest Sotomayor, assistant dean, career services and continuing education, organized a weekend of panels and workshops in late January for 500 people after a similar weekend conference approach drew 300 students last May.
Kate Uraneck, 53, a doctor and emergency disaster preparedness official for New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said she attended the weekend program to learn more about social networking tools. A graduate of Columbia’s journalism school, she heard about it through the school’s alumni network.
“Within my field of emergency preparedness, social media is taking on a more prominent role,” she said, noting how government and Red Cross officials turned to Twitter and Facebook to get the word out during hurricane Irene. “I wanted to get more knowledge about it.”
Uraneck emphasized that she does not have social media responsibilities as part of her job. She met with one of the social media doctors to learn more about how to use her personal account, @thedisasterist, more effectively.
One of her chief goals, she said with a laugh, was to better understand the role of the hashtag in the Twitter system.
She sat down with one of the most experienced volunteers: Serbino Sandifer-walker, a fellow alumna of Columbia’s journalism school who is a multimedia journalism professor at Texas Southern University in Houston.
Sandifer-walker said she was interested in not only learning about new platforms during the conference, but also seeing how Columbia’s journalism school approached teaching social media skills because a similar continuing education class is being explored at her university.
“We are looking at creating a course that would be good for seasoned professionals, people who want to develop skills to move their career to the next level,” she said. “For the program to be strong, we know that it will be important to keep up with all of the changes.”
Educators also say skills classes have to help translate what seems to be a different language — hashtags, mentions, heart.
For Uraneck, her advice on Twitter was straightforward: “Use it to inform, enlighten, bring value,” she said. “Engage.”