How About a Master’s Degree in Twitbook Arts, Crafts and Sciences?

March 10th, 2011

Via: Wall Street Journal:

Big consumer-products companies are going back to school.

Businesses including Sprint Nextel Corp., Levi Strauss & Co. and Mattel Inc. are sponsoring college classes and graduate-level research to get help with their online marketing from the young and hyperconnected. Sprint, for example, supplies a class at Boston’s Emerson College with smartphones and unlimited service in exchange for students working gratis on the company’s local Internet push.

Universities, in some cases, receive funding or proprietary consumer data from companies for their research. Students get experience they can display on their résumés, and add lively classes to the usual mix of lectures and written exams.

“We are helping students to go out and get hired,” says Randy Hlavac, an instructor at Northwestern University’s Medill School. “They’ve done the work.”

The partnerships are emerging as businesses are scurrying to bolster their ability to engage with their customers on the Web by using Facebook, Twitter and the like.

Of course, some parents may be surprised to learn their tuition dollars are helping to underwrite corporate marketing in addition to their children’s education.

Sprint provided students in an online marketing class at Emerson College with 10 smartphones with unlimited wireless access. In exchange, students blogged, tweeted, produced YouTube videos and posted Facebook updates about the launch of Sprint’s 4G network in Boston. “We’re teaming up with the class again this semester it worked so well,” says Sprint spokesman Mark Elliott.

2 Responses to “How About a Master’s Degree in Twitbook Arts, Crafts and Sciences?”

  1. quintanus says:

    Constantly uploading new photos of yourself is correlated with valuing physical appearance and shaky self esteem:
    http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-facebook-vanity-20110310,0,464632.story

  2. apethought says:

    This happened at my college maybe 4 years ago. The college got money from a major fashion company and in exchange someone from their legal team “assisted” a marketing class as they developed and deployed all over the campus a guerrilla marketing campaign about the scourge of counterfeit purses. When the story got out, students and profs freaked and the administration startd backpedaling pretty hard.

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