Cutting-edge course
MUN prof enjoys challenge of teaching online marketing
There’s no class that I teach from year to year that’s exactly the same. It is constantly evolving. — Lyle Wetsch, associate professor of business administration, MUN
Lyle Wetsch readily admits there are days he wished his teaching specialty did not focus on the everevolving field of online marketing.
“It’s one of the definite challenges,” said Wetsch of his area of expertise. He’s an associate professor at Memorial University’s business faculty.
“There’s days when I wished I taught ancient history and I could sort of go, ‘ OK, the siege of Carthage today.’ Blow the dust off the outline and away we go into class. Whereas teaching digital and social media or anything along those lines with technology, because it’s so rapidly changing, the content that you’re going to deliver in a class in order to have any value and effectiveness for the students has to be current, literally, of that day.”
However, with that challenge comes the thrill of tackling a subject that is not stagnant, and staying on top of what remains a relatively new avenue for marketing activities.
For example, information was presented in a recent class taught by Wetsch about a new social media channel that had only existed for two weeks up to then — Vine, a mobile device application launched by Twitter.
“While that’s a challenge, that’s also the nice part about it, because it is always new. It is always fresh. There’s no class that I teach from year to year that’s exactly the same. It is constantly evolving.”
Having taught at MUN for 10 years, Wetsch currently teaches digital marketing and personal and business branding through social media. His connection to those topics has history — Wetsch taught the first Internet marketing course in Queen’s University’s history as a master’s student at the Kingston, Ont., institution in 1998.
“I’ve been involved with teaching around Internet marketing, digital marketing, back from before when the questions were, ‘Well, will anyone ever really buy anything online?’ ‘ Do companies really need to have a website?’ ‘How important is that going to be for our business?’”
Of course, such questions have obvious answers today, as the vast majority of businesses and organizations look to the Internet for new ways to generate revenue and maximize exposure.
The digital marketing course Wetsch teaches focuses on the aspects of online marketing that fall outside of social media avenues, including pay-per-click advertising, mobile websites, website design, and search engine optimization. Students take part in a Google online marketing challenge for the course.
Social media open to all
Unlike the digital marketing course, Wetsch’s social media class is open to all MUN students.
“The reality is today, the vast majority of organizations are going to Google (search the name of) a prospective individual when they’re going to look at them as a job candidate, and over 70 per cent of companies have admitted to rejecting candidates on the basis of what they’ve seen online.”
Students are encouraged to evaluate their personal brand based on their goals, accomplishments and bragging points. They then focus their energies on generating social media accounts and improving existing ones.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re in medicine, kinesiology or business, you still need employment,” said Wetsch. “This is how people are recruiting.”
MUN used to offer one Internet marketing course, but Wetsch said that course’s responsibilities grew as advances in digital marketing became more evident.
“The content changes hour by hour,” he said, before offering an example though the slideshow presentations that accompany his lectures.
“We’ll upload slides, and the slides that the students have that we upload the night before, there’ll be a couple of slides that’ll be different by the time class rolls around, because things are constantly changing. There’s no need to keep an outline from last year, because it will not exist anymore.”
While there are textbook options in existence, Wetsch chooses not to use them for obvious reasons.
“By the time it gets through the production cycle, the content could be out of date. So we deal with mostly online resources — keeping things current with what’s happening out there and a lot of social media channel access in itself.”
While it takes a lot of work for Wetsch to stay up to date on what is happening in the online world relevant to what he teaches, such work complements his research and training interests.
“Because I’m researching and teaching in the same area, the work that I do to sort of emphasize one helps to support the other, as opposed to teaching one topic and researching something else. Then you’ve got twice the amount of preparation to do.”
Wetsch sees the potential for additional courses focused on online marketing — he said Facebook’s capabilities could be explored through 30 hours of classroom activity, and mobile marketing also shows potential as a the subject of a standalone course offering.