Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

How you've described your tentative focus idea seems more like a senior project where you determine the current state of the art. Think deeply on just what interests you about the topic. Where could you extend the frontier of knowledge?

Social Media Marketing is such a broad topic that you are guaranteed to fall short of your objective if you don't narrow the topic significantly. Pick a geography and pick a company or two (in the same industry?), and analyze what they have done in SMM and how/what worked (and what didn't work).

Because studies at doctorate level are all about learning more and more about less and less, you need to be FAR more granular than you're proposing. I agree with the comments above: social media marketing is too broad (it's also disconnected from "Internet marketing" as such). How will you getting your Ph.D help marketers as a whole? More importantly, how will you getting this qualification help specific groups of marketers?

you have talked about studying problems related to social media. This could include problems caused by social media as well as problems exposed by social media. one way to narrow your focus could be to explore the personal involvement of chief executive officers in responding to problems exposed by social media.

In other words, his social media merely delegated to the marketing department, or is it becoming a way to flatten the organization and help senior executives identify and quickly solve problems?