[MUSIC] Hello and welcome to the Social Marketing Specialization course developed by Northwestern University and Coursera. This five MOOC specialization is designed to give you the hands on experiences and expertise to develop profitable social marketing programs for your organization, regardless of its size. This program is based on a similar marketing program used today by the graduate and undergraduate students in the Northwestern Medel Integrated Marketing Communications, or IMC program. Over the last five years, our students have developed marketing programs for organizations ranging from start ups to large multinational corporations, for profit, not for profit, and governmental entities in markets ranging from global to the hyper-local. It is a course that will give you the skills, tools, and expertise to impact any market you want to develop. My name is Randy Hlavac. For the last nine years, I have been the instructor of the undergraduate and graduate Digital, Social and Mobile Marketing courses in the North Western Medill IMC program. Also, I am the author of the new book, Social IMC, Social Strategies with Bottom-Line ROI, or return on investment. This MOOC specialization is built around the contents of this book. While you don't need to purchase it, if you want more details or a written book to help you build your social strategies, this one's for you. Many of our speakers have written great books in their area of expertise. These, and other important books, can be found in our bookstore. You will find they represent a wide range of important specializations you need to build effective social marketing programs. Today, your prospects and customers are using social media to engage with each other to discuss personal and business topics. To succeed in social, you need to focus your resources in three related areas. First, you need to build your professional persona to connect with the markets you want to develop. Second, you need to manage your organizational persona. A recent study revealed medium sized organizations will have over 158 social phasings. You need the tools to monitor these social conversations, and the hands on experience to shape your teams' professional personas. Finally, you need the right social strategies to profitably grow your organization. As you will learn in this course, there are different social strategies. We will teach you how to match the right strategy with the different markets you want to develop. Our goal is to provide you with the hands on knowledge, skills, tools, and capabilities to begin growing your social marketing program starting with this MOOC. MOOC 1 will give you an overview of social and the frameworks you need to build successful social strategy. MOOC 2 is designed to give you the information, insights, and tools you need to listen to social conversations important to your organization. You'll receive free tools to immediately begin developing your social marketing programs, and you'll see how real-time social data is used to drive crisis management in real time marketing war rooms. MOOC 3 focuses on the engagement marketing and the nurture marketing strategies. MOOC 4 focuses on different types of content, how to use social networking sites to advertise to key markets, and the social IMC marketing strategy. This strategy has you building private virtual communities to create holistic, two way engagements. The final MOOC is on the business of social. We will start with the discussion on the legal considerations you need to build social marketing programs. We will follow it with an analysis of how you can measure, justify, and manage these programs. Our goal is to give you an in-depth education, heavily focused on hands-on experiences, and an examination of actual social programs, to let you determine the best ways to grow your organization. One of the most important things I learned In developing my Social, Digital, and Mobile marketing class was the importance of knowing the experts in key social fields. We are bringing this important lesson to you in this MOOC specialization. Every MOOC, starting with this one, will feature an array of knowledge experts in fields you need to understand. Many will be providing you with free tools and their expertise to help you build successful programs. In addition, each of these experts are people you need to follow on Social, and use as you develop your social programs. In each of our MOOCs, you'll find two social marketing toolkits, one for the participants who want to take the MOOC for free, and another for the participants who are paying for the individual MOOC, or have paid for the MOOC specialization. The paid member tool kit will have longer review periods, tools available only to the paid members, and special videos, eBooks and other content to better develop their social programs. Regardless of which way you choose to participate, both tool kits will give you the knowledge, skills, and information you need to be successful in this course. Finally, I want to leave you with something I say in every one of my classes. Have fun. Social is a great way to network, share, and build meaningful relationships with each other and with the markets you want to develop. We will show you the best ways to create this engagement, and we want you to use that knowledge every day to be a success. [MUSIC]
