The Top 10 Colleges For Social Media Savvy
BOSTON (CBS) - Some colleges and universities are engaging, teaching and conducting research on social media better than others.
Boston-based Her Campus Media, publishers of an online magazine for women collegiates, has come up with a list of the top 10 social-media-savvy colleges and universities.
Lisa van der Pool of the Boston Business Journal reports
Her Campus was founded in 2009 by Harvard University graduates.
While the founders gave their alma mater a mention in the top 10, Harvard didn't take the top spot.
The magazine gave top honors to Drury University in Springfield, Mo., for its social media certification program.
Three Boston-area colleges were on the list: Emerson College, Harvard and Boston University.
Here's the complete list:
1. Drury University in Springfield, Missouri is small, but it's one of the few schools in the U.S. that offers a social media certification program.
2. Boston-based Emerson College has demonstrated over the past few years that it understands social media. The school offers a popular social media class and when it came time for president Jackie Leibergott to announce that she was stepping down, the hashtag #jackiessecret caught fire on Twitter, according to Her Campus.
3. Among Harvard University's social media claims to fame is that Professor Mikolai Jan Piskorski was one of the first social media researchers. He now teaches his own case studies at Harvard Business School.
4. The University of Kentucky actually revamped its English and Composition classes to include social media, noting that they want students "to have the social media skills necessary to function in today's workplace."
5. Johns Hopkins in Baltimore lands on the list because of its website, which links to every major social media site and also includes blogs from current students and admissions officers.
6. New York University ranks on this in part because four NYU students created the social media website Diaspora, which is billed as being like Facebook, but with better privacy settings.
7. Boston University has gone so far as to create its own social media world — BUniverse — where students can share videos, according to Her Campus.
8. Stanford University in Silicon Valley offers classes like Digital Media in Society, Virtual Communities and Social Media, and the Psychology of Social Media, to ensure students are prepped for work in the computer industry.
9. American University in Washington, D.C. has a Center for Social Media on Campus which "showcases and analyzes media for public knowledge and action."
10. Carnegie Mellon University not only offers social media classes, but it also has a dashboard that displays its Twitter, YouTube and Facebook feeds, as well as campus information.
