Placing a hand in the fire: assessing the impact of a YouTube experiential learning project on viral marketing knowledge acquisition

The goal of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of an experiential learning social media project that was integrated into a graduate marketing class. As part of the semester-long project, students were required to work within a team and create a spoof video, which was posted on YouTube. Students’ success was partially determined by the number of views made of the particular video. After reviewing the results obtained by a semistructured survey, the research indicates that the inclusion of an experiential project into the core curriculum was associated with student motivation, engagement, team management, and communication skills. Furthermore, this integration promoted learning of technical and theoretical knowledge related to consumer-generated advertisements and virtual viral marketing. Results and implications are discussed.