Real Money in Class to Study the Impact of Web Campaigns
A platform needs to be developed by creating a website, launching paid online campaigns to study the effects, and above all, managing an actual budget (€150 per group). This is the class requirement for students of Web and Social Analytics, a graduate course offered at Bocconi, in order to learn how to use digital metrics for social media and search engines and improve communication strategies.
Divided into several work teams, students are left free to create and develop their own websites, although they have to start from a common architecture. The only rule: the website has to be linked to travel and tourism. A wide variety of sites were thus born. Each had to define a positioning strategy and, through promotion tools available from Google and Facebook, each team had to devise a campaign with the aim of maximizing clicks in ten days. Through web and social analytics, teams constantly monitored and adjusted their respective campaigns, thus learning the strategic use of online metrics.
What is peculiar about this kind of in-class team work is that this was not a simulation, but the real world: "The 107 students who participated, half of whom international students, were given real money: each team received a 150-euro budget, a hundred to be spent on Google Ads and fifty on Facebook Promotions. The purpose was in fact to make graduate students work in a real business environment, by reaching actual users, trying to engage with them with meaningful content and campaigns, and measuring user reaction to changes in these two elements in real time," the head of the course, Armando Cirrincione, SDA Professor of Marketing and Sales, explains.
The learning method used, quite different from the usual frontal classroom lesson, was appreciated by students. Giacomo Barone, a second-year student of the MSc in Marketing Management, together with his team's colleagues used the budget to create and develop a fun fake-news blog called "People Going to Places" [Gente che va in posti]: "We got more than 45,000 impressions, and blog articles were read almost 5,000 times," says the grad student. "It was really learning by doing: the fact of having to develop a real blog from scratch taught us a lot. We were able to see how these things work." And, speaking of the fake news that they have made up and packaged with such finesse, he adds: "We only had a small budget. One can only imagine the effects that fake news can have on people when far bigger budgets are used."
"InfluenzaMI", a guide to lifestyle, food and entertaining things to do in Milan that adopted the perspective of social influencers, was instead born out of the team led by Niccolò Bienati, a second-year student of the MSc in Economics and Management of Innovation and Technology: "We wanted web users to take a look at Milan through the eyes of influential bloggers, by doing interviews with people like Lucia Peraldo Matton or Enoblogger," the grad student explains. "Usually team work is more abstract, but this time we had to work side by side for two months, with an editorial plan to be implemented and deadlines to be met. The result of two weeks of online presence of the site were 6,000 unique visitors." Niccolò and his teammates, just like Giacomo's, would like to further develop their project and turn it into an actual business.
A new teaching method, which, as Cirrincione fondly reiterates, has produced excellent results: "During the planning stage and the subsequent campaign optimization stage, graduate students were also monitored by the Zenith media agency of the Publicis Group. In fact, the students did so well that, after seeing the results they achieved, the advertising company has expressed its willingness to recruit them."