Beedie School of Business maintains top Klout score

Jun 07, 2012

For the second year in a row, SFU’s Beedie School of Business is enjoying some serious Klout on social media.

Tweeting since early 2010, Simon Fraser University’s business school (@SFUBeedie) has been rated as the most influential Canadian business school by a prominent social media metric known as Klout. The metric website measures influence by using data from selected media channels, such as Twitter followers and unique mentions and Facebook comments and likes.

With a Klout score of 46, the Beedie School has edged out business schools at the University of Toronto (44), University of Western Ontario (43), and Concordia University (41).

The Beedie School has used Twitter, Facebook, and other social media as a means to stay connected with the Beedie community—including current students, faculty, staff, alumni, industry and community partners, university partners, and employers. It has used Twitter specifically to follow and learn what they are up to, to disseminate school news and research, and to further communicate with its community.

The school’s social media strategy benefits from a number of influential users from the Beedie community. They include dean Daniel Shapiro (@SFUBeedieDean), Canada’s first business school dean to be on Twitter, who shares business and economic research and opinions via the medium.

Another prominent faculty tweeter is Ian McCarthy (@Toffeemen68), Professor and Canada Research Chair in Technology and Operations Management at SFU. McCarthy, who has over 10,200 Twitter followers, was recently named to OnlineMBA’s international list of the “50 Business Professors You Should Follow on Twitter.”

The school’s burgeoning social media environment also benefits from award-winning faculty research.

New marketing research from marketing professor Leyland Pitt, focused on the relationship between luxury wine branding and social media, has been awarded the Outstanding Paper prize for 2012 by the Emerald Literati Network.

The article, entitled “Luxury wine brand visibility in social media:  An exploratory study” and published in International Journal of Wine Business Research, garnered the top billing as part of the Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2012.

Last fall, the management journal Business Horizons and Elsevier awarded Beedie School researchers Jan Kietzmann, Kristopher Hermkens, Ian McCarthy, and Bruno Silvestre with the Best Article Award for 2011 for their paper, “Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media.”

This past year, the Beedie School also launched the popular undergraduate class Social Media and Business at the SFU Surrey campus – taught by Assistant Professor Kietzmann and instructor Ashish Gurung.

Related articles:

  1. Academic award toasts SFU branding research
  2. The School of Social Media
  3. Students engage community with social media
  4. Beedie prof. selected to prestigious Twitter “must follow” list
  5. Social media research wins 2011 Best Article Award
  6. Vancouver Canucks give MBA social media project warm reception
  7. AACSB BizEd Magazine profiles Beedie Mobile: What’s App-enin’ At B-Schools

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