New media on the move: higher ed stepping up offerings in social media.

• Author: Dano, Mike
• Position: EDUCATION REPORT

YOU CAN STILL DUNK IN THE DARK."

For those who don't readily recall this game-changing ragline: Third quarter.

Super Bowl XLVII.

Power outage.

Lights our for 34 minutes. Bur the social media ream on hand--including copywriters, a strategist and artists ready to pounce--behind that beloved American cookie brand, Oreo, seized the moment to reach our to an already captive audience.

And so they tweeted: "Power our? No problem," with a modest image of a single Oreo and the caption: "You can still dunk in the dark." More than 15,000 retweets later and 20,000 likes on Facebook, the spomaneous ad spot was the real winner of the night.

"The new-world order of communications today incorporates the whole of the way people are interacting with brands right now," said Sarah Hofsrerter, president of digital marketing agency 360i, which ha ndled game-day tweeting for Oreo, in a 2013 Wired magazine interview.

Social Schooling Two yea rs later, the business world and academia are jumping on board and online.

"It's Nor Just for Fun: You Can Now Major in Social Media," proclaimed one headline. "College Students to Tweet Even More in Class as Social Media Becomes a Major," read another.

The institution stirring all the interest was Newberry College in Newberry, S.C., which in 2012 became one of the first colleges in the nation to offer both a major and minor in social media.

Not surprisingly, the news generated plenty of caustic commentary on college students gaining credit for frittering away their education on Facebook, Twiner and other networking plarforms.

"I felt there was a real need for this," said Tania Sosiak, associate professor of graphic design and social media at Newberry.

She said Newberry currently counts around two dozen students either majoring or minoring in social media, and the college expects that number to eventually level off at around 40.

But why did ewberry offer a social media major in the first place, opening itself to such criticism?

"Social media now really incorporates every industry.

No industry is really free of that. It's everywhere," Sosiak said, noting that she doesn't reach how to post to Facebook but instead how to use it to reach a goal. "They all know how to use social media," Sosiak said of her students, "but they don't know how to use it to develop a brand or promote something. Just because you own a hammer doesn't mean you're a carpenter."

In 2012, a social media major in Sourh Carolina made national headlines.

Today...