Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar · 2012 to 2016 · Undergraduate
Search, social, and the digital marketing mix, taught through cases and real clients.
19 students in 2014 and 14 in 2015
This was the first time the course was taught at CMU Qatar, and about half the students came from Information Systems and half from Business Administration. In 2014 students spent Thursdays working for real clients, from the university's own marketing office to a board game store in Pittsburgh, doing search engine optimization, social media campaigns, and user-generated content. In 2015 I rebuilt it as a case course in four modules, from the digital landscape through advertising and promotion, the other three P's, and how traditional firms make the move to digital. Students also ran a search and analytics audit for a small Doha business with Google Analytics and AdWords.
slides from the decks
I taught from
Spring 2015 · Mondays and Wednesdays
Scroll the schedule and the slides follow along: five from each session, picked from the decks I taught from.
What students hand in
In groups of two or three, students worked with the website of a small Doha dog-services business using Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and AdWords: understand the client's objectives and keywords, analyze traffic, propose search improvements, and plan a paid search campaign, in an 8 to 12 page report.
Using the Air France Internet Marketing case and its campaign data, groups identified the metrics that matter, judged which search publishers to fund or drop, and recommended keywords and an overall digital mix.
A reflection paper at the end of each of the four modules, two individual and two in groups.
Case discussion is the course, so participation was 30%, with short in-class and online quizzes for the other 10%.
A digital marketing case handed out 48 hours ahead, with analysis questions answered in the exam.
In 2014, groups worked all semester for a real organization, presenting three times: a search engine marketing plan, a social media campaign, and a user-generated content idea, graded on understanding of the client and quality of analysis.
What students built
Every project, by term.
In their words
4.06 out of 5 average teaching rating · 3 sections · 53 student responses · all evaluations
This is a great course to take because the topics are changing as we speak in class and we have seen how it is true.
I enjoyed the course very much, and found the cases chosen to be interesting and useful. I especially liked how interactive the classes were as opposed to being a traditional lecture type class.
I really enjoyed the course and I think that I learnt new things that are new and futuristic. Also I think that it helped in generating new unsolved questions that makes up an excellent research question.
Offerings
