Wednesday, October 17, 2012

The B-School Twitter-Free Zone

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MBA Express

Oct 17, 2012

This Week's Top Story

This Week's Top Story - The B-School Twitter-Free Zone

The B-School Twitter-Free Zone

Marketing professors at top business schools are, with few exceptions, Twitter-averse

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This week in MBA Express

Dear Reader:

What responsibility do business school faculty have to immerse themselves in the phenomenon they teach? Judging from some new research conducted by 2012 Fuqua grad Jeremy Edmunds, and reported by Francesca Di Meglio, their answer would be not much at all. Edmunds looked at the Twitter activity of tenure-track marketing faculty at top business schools and found that only 16 percent had ever tweeted. Even more amazing, only three faculty members accounted for nearly 95 percent of all the faculty tweeting. It's as if faculty who teach information technology had never used a computer, or engineering faculty never picked up a slide rule.

That so many marketing faculty can be personally unfamiliar with Twitter is deeply troubling, and suggests a faculty completely out of touch with at least some aspects of the modern world-the very world their students will inherit. Can you teach about social media, and teach it well, if your only experience of it is from the pages of a textbook? Yes, but they will be lessons uninformed by personal experience, something business schools as a rule rightly consider a critical part of the MBA curriculum-it's why they hire adjuncts with one foot still firmly planted in the business world.

When Jack Welch made his Twitter gaffe on Oct. 5-suggesting the Obama administration manipulated employment data to deflect attention from the president's poor debate performance-it might, in the right hands, have made an interesting "teachable moment." But judging from Edmunds' research I suspect for many MBAs sitting in social media classes it was something else entirely: an opportunity lost.

Louis Lavelle, Business Schools Editor, Bloomberg Businessweek

Louis Lavelle

Louis Lavelle
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