Why Universities Need To Teach More than Internet Marketing

Posted on January 18, 2013 by David Cohen

Antony Pensebene published a post on the Saloon of Literature titled, "Dear Universities, Teach Internet Marketing".

This piece made me think about something I felt passionately about in the past, which is higher education. Higher education is something I strongly believe in when a person feels like it's going to help them achieve a bigger dream or goal in life.

I posted the work Anthony published on Inbound.org, under the community section because I felt like it would be valuable for people to hear what the marketing community has to say about the idea of higher education stepping up to instruct people in contemporary marketing.

One of the commenters in the Inbound.org thread is somebody who was an intern where I was the marketing director. I know he's currently in a good position at a paid search agency and hopefully doing well. When he was in college he worked at what could be considered a full time job, at a tech/ed startup.

His college experience gave him the opportunity to learn the best way, actually doing the work -- working with people of varying skill level and emotional intelligence, but in an environment that was trying to be a 'real' business.

I don't know exactly what he learned there, but I know he had an overall good learning experience, all while he was earning his undergrad totally debt free. Maybe parents and leaders could help kids create a plan to earn a debt-free degree? Or at least get close to debt-free. I know it sounds crazy when we're talking about college, but it makes me sad to see bright and energetic people with raw talent feel held back in life because they are stressed over monthly student loan payments.

Why are colleges trying to produce factory workers in the 21st century?

The article has good thinking. But currently, the traditional college model is still operating in the way that was designed to produce factory workers and white collar workers -- people who stayed with the same company for a lifetime and rode into the sunset of life with a crappy gold watch and a lot of regrets.

I think those days are gone and never coming back. And I believe this because of the way I see young people (Millennials) giving their time to help their communities, to volunteer, and to serve other people. This is a beautiful thing that's happening in our world, so I feel like people who run colleges should start thinking about the people that are trusting them to help light the path to their future.

I'd love to see colleges offer marketing courses, but don't just let irrelevant professors teach them. People like you should be involved with teaching college-level marketing courses. The people actually doing the work, the people whose jobs might be on the line if they don't perform or can't quantify their work, they should help write the curriculum by telling their stories.

Do you have a team of people making the business you started successful? Great, then colleges should let you get involved with educating people if you have the heart to do it. If you have business experience and have learned from failures and successes, the doors of America's universities should be open to you.

I see younger people handling work pressures and performing in ways I never would have been able to when I was their age. It's impressive but it's also a responsibility for those who are actually running colleges (the professors?) to have some empathy towards the weaknesses and the strengths of the generation of people who are trusting them.

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  • http://recalibrate.co/ Ryan McLaughlin

    The point you make about debt-free benefits is spot on. I’m a recent grad that went to school without having to worry about tuition. It allowed me to be entrepreneurial and focus on internet marketing while studying an unrelated subject (finance). I don’t think that same freedom is provided to someone that has a ton of pressure and less ability to experiment with this new field.

    Business colleges don’t even attempt to teach internet marketing / business. It is going to require a fundamental shift in how these schools hire, create curriculum, and even admit students.

    It’s up to us to prove ourselves as a professional field that’s here to stay. It’s up to us to convince these universities that we should be involved in the curriculum. It’s our responsibility to be the champions of this movement and ensure the future of marketing education.

    • http://www.davidmcohen.com/ David Cohen

      Alright, I’m going to name drop for a moment, but there’s a point to this… a few weeks ago I was out with Rand Fishkin and Wil Reynolds. It was a great evening, but I was getting a bored with the SEO talk, so I brought up SEOmoz’s funding because I actually wanted to hear Rand talk about Brad Feld from Foundry Group (Oh, and this led to a crazy/amazing idea that’s actually being executed this fall. And I think Brad might be @FAKEGRIMLOCK, but that’s just a guess.).

      In the course of our conversation I started wondering if the fact that Brad doesn’t have to worry about money, in the context of personal finances, and clearly doesn’t stress about ‘fame’, if this frees up his mind to just do what he loves and what he’s really strong at.

      All this to say, I feel like the more we can free ourselves from dealing with things like debt, unhealthy relationships, and ego, the easier it might be to solve problems for people and to accomplish the types of things a constrained mind says is impossible.

  • http://www.alessiomadeyski.com/ Alessio Madeyski

    Hey David! thanks for this!
    I’m really passionate about education myself. Have you ever read “Stop Stealing Dreams” by Seth Godin? It’s a free ebook you can find in his site about the status quo in education and the whole manifesto is a way to start discussing on what we should do to change a school that is totally out of his time.

    I’m translating the whole manifesto in italian (I asked Seth Godin , and he granted the permission) with the hope to start a discussion even in my country. I’m 29yo and since I started working I realize how much the school is not able to do for you.

    Thanks again for this, education is a really important problem, more than we realize actually. I think it should be part of every company too, not only schools. Every manager should teach something, and to me teach something means to trigger passion towards something. As I wrote in my post, I’m seeing too many ghosts around, I need to see people who are alive.

    • http://www.davidmcohen.com/ David Cohen

      I remember awhile ago you telling me about how you got Godin to get on board with you translating his book into Italian.

      I agree with you about your point that managers should be teaching as well. Teaching is something I wish I could be better at, and teaching is definitely something I’m mindful of as I have young but extremely talented and passionate people under my care.

      About a month ago I told my team that my #1 goal for them is that they learn and grow. I know I won’t always do a great job teaching but it’s my own personal goal to get better at teaching and creating context for all of my colleagues.

  • Iain

    It’s this sort of piece that makes me proud Scotland offers free Higher Education – as a right – to all Scottish students.

    • http://www.davidmcohen.com/ David Cohen

      I’ve had several people from across the globe tell me the exact same thing, so thank you for that. You seem grateful for this, which is the same tone I have heard from people in South America, to Europe, to Asia — all grateful for the help and support. This is very encouraging to hear. Thanks.

  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmanion/ Jason Manion

    I wonder who you’re talking about? ;)

    As you might guess, I totally agree with the ideas you’re talking about here. I had the great privilege of learning marketing and business in a real-world environment from real-world professionals (including yourself), and that taught me so much more than any of the business/marketing classes I was taking at the time. Or maybe it was the combination of taking classes while being in a real-world work environment.

    Either way, the classes on their own wouldn’t have provided a huge value, because they offered old information and theories from a different era. While some of the concepts are timeless and true, they were just concepts. And most of the practicals in the courses I took were outdated even then, and are even more so now.

    And the whole debt-free element has been an amazing bonus as well.

    • http://www.davidmcohen.com/ David Cohen

      Yeah not surprised you agree with the premise. Really glad you shared more about your time when we sort of worked together.

      I think you’re right on about higher education being late to anything related to marketing, especially so-called digital marketing. In the current state, colleges can’t keep up with the pace and rate of change happening in everything digital marketing related.

      It can take two years to develop and publish a set of college curriculum. Is SEO anything like it was 2 years ago? In some ways, it’s not. Of course you have to have a product that works and a brand that keeps its promises to people, but the internet is still a few years away of entering ‘adulthood’ if you think about it in terms of people — the internet only went mainstream like 19 years ago, it’s still fairly new and immature.

  • http://twitter.com/cstechjoel Joel K

    Finally, some time to respond to this properly.

    I’ll start by telling a personal story: In university, I realized early on that the business theory I was learning wasn’t going to pan out in reality. I learned it because I was simultaneously working at an oil and gas company and saw the internal chaos there and how little order there actually was to business.

    So the best choice I ever made in University was to join a group called SIFE: Students in Free Enterprise. The entire mandate of the club is to empower students to carry out projects that create social, economic or financial impacts in their communities. This was a club all about DOING – not about theory, not about text books and tests. I launched heavy into the group and headed up a team that worked with businesses on generational differences in the workplace (specifically millennials) and I learned more about business from THAT experience than any class I ever took.

    But I think part of what makes bringing this “experiential learning” into Universities is that everyone’s experiences are different. Bring a failed entrepreneur into the classroom and he’ll have a WAY different perspective on what’s important for business success than a successful project manager. This rich diversity of experiences can certainly help inform students that all is not cut and dry, but it can also send mixed messages (think how much people within our own industry disagree on what’s important or “best practice”).

    So rather than bringing people in to teach (which I still think is a good idea) – why not send students out to DO?

    • http://www.davidmcohen.com/ David Cohen

      Thanks, Joel for sharing your story, greatly appreciate that. And I wholeheartedly agree with you about creating a way for students to gain experiential learning at the college level.

      I think it was October 31st when we had a conversation on the phone about business stuff and problems you wanted to solve. The thing I remember most about that conversation is the type of questions you asked.

      After we talked I was thinking that only people who ask those kinds of questions have had experiences in business that would give them enough of a knowledge-base to ask those types of questions.

      And sometimes that’s what it’s about — not knowing all the answers, but knowing how to ask the right questions, to the right people, at the right time. But then it’s up to the person to make the right decision from that point.

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  • http://twitter.com/stephbeadell Stephanie Beadell

    I totally agree, David. I’ve had the privilege of experiencing both scenarios. My undergraduate coursework was like what you described: academics trying to make me an advertising underling. My graduate coursework, however, was much different. There, I had a wonderful mix of academics and business executives guiding my education. I loved it, and I agree with you that we need more professional marketers in our classrooms.

    Adding to your point, I think we need to be careful that we teach marketing theory and not just marketing skills. The most valuable classes I took weren’t the ones that taught me how to write press releases. They were the ones where my writing was critiqued, where we spent hours examining a single survey measure, where I worked in teams, and where I learned how to really read the news. Sure we can teach Google Analytics, but it’s meaningless unless students have solid foundation in statistics. They need to be able to interpret data, not just report it. Same goes for content strategy; I think it means more when students understand both persuasive writing and the psychology of reading.

    I know you’re not advocating for professional-only education, but I’ve seen a lot of people do so. I think the best program would incorporate professors who built foundations writing, math, and critical thinking skills and relevant business professionals who showed students how to apply them.

    • http://www.davidmcohen.com/ David Cohen

      Right, colleges shouldn’t toss out their tenured professors, but they should invite more people from the business world to invest in the lives of students, especially undergrads.

      I’m with you on the statistic stuff. When I was in more traditional marketing I always had a legit stats and data company take care of things like market surveys. I’ve never taken a stats course, so there’s no way I’d ever consider writing the survey questions or analyze the results.