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March 03, 2006
The wonder years of social media
Jackie and I spent a good part of Thursday at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. It was the first visit for either of us to the much-revered school (and home to Freakonomics author Steven Levitt).
Professor Puneet Manchada had invited us to speak to his afternoon marketing strategy class.
Jackie polled the 65 class members who are in the second year of being a full-time MBA student (and are mostly 20-something) and uncovered a few, certainly non-scientific tidbits: No one could define social media. About 2-3 students said they had a blog. Just a handful said they read blogs regularly or download podcasts. About 4-5 students said they understood RSS.
If they're representative of the 20-something MySpace generation and its millions of followers, how is that a just a small percentage of smart and ambitious students in one of the world's top business schools understands social media and its applications? The best explanation seems to be that social media is still so new that it has yet to reach beyond the radar beyond of passionate early adopters.
One student's question summarized the attitude of some class attendees: "So who are these bloggers? Don't they have jobs?" That got a big laugh. I sometimes wonder that myself.
Puneet says he gives his class a hard time that he's hipper than they are about social media technology tools.
"And I'm old," he says.
Finally, a realm of new technology where the 40-and-older crowd isn't stereotyped as clueless.
Technorati Tags: University of Chicago, Social Media
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Being an MBA myself, this is not a bad thing. There's a common adage that once the MBA's go into something whole hog (pre-Internet bubble burst, Hedge Funds) something is amiss. The fact that Web 2.0 concepts are still not the apple of an MBA's eye for me represents that opportunity is still available.
I'm with "Ro" on that. Recently chatted with a local MBA prof. who commented, "This is an old school - in it's thinking. We're not ready to explore new ideas".
Levitt is actually not on the faculty of the business school.
The simple answer to your question is that MBA students at Chicago are not representative of the MySpace generation at all. Earlier in the quarter, Professor Manchanda had asked how many of his students were on MySpace or knew what it was, and maybe 2-3 hands went up. These people obviously don't have time to stay up to speed with what's been happening on the internet while they've been spending all their time studying, networking, and interviewing for jobs. The only way to make sense of MySpace to them was that it was a "LinkedIn" for 20-something artist types without jobs.
Similarly, at the University of Chicago Law School, a popular professor laces his lectures with references to recent films, and these law students can't follow because they don't have time to go to the movie theater. That doesn't mean movies aren't popular.
When somebody like Rupert Murdoch decides to bid half a billion dollars to buy MySpace, that seems like a pretty clear sign that this stuff is getting on the radar.
