“We kept talking about how this was important and we really didn’t have enough material to satisfy the needs of students,” Kozinets said. “And so in 2018, I proposed to the school that we have a full length course on, on influencers.”
The course was held for the first time last spring, and already Kozinets has had to modify the syllabus to keep up with the ever-evolving social media landscape.
“Last year, we didn’t even mention TikTok,” Kozinets said. “Now, TikTok is a part of almost every conversation that we have and so the ground has shifted.”
To Kozinets’ knowledge, his course is among the first to teach students how to manage brands and campaigns from the social media perspective.
The class is less intense when it comes to enrollment than Reach — students taking the class encompass a wide range from those studying public relations to those who are curious about influencer marketing to those already working in the space.
Cosette Rinab, 20, a TikTok influencer with more than 1.6 million followers on the app, said she’s already applying lessons learned in Influencer Relations to her career.
“I’m still processing how a college campus offers this kind of course,” she said.
Rinab said she initially didn’t even think she’d get a spot in the class, knowing how many people on USC’s campus were vying to get into what she called the most coveted class.
“It’s so competitive, everyone wants to be in this class,” Rinab, who is also a former president of Reach, said. “It was also the talk around campus. Everyone was like, ‘I want to get into the influencer class!’”
Beyond USC
For Kozinets, the next step for the ever-evolving Influencer Relations course is writing a textbook so that other schools and professors can be privy to the knowledge of social media marketing as demand for the specific education grows.
“We’re trying to systematize this knowledge so that other people can teach courses in it,” Kozinets said.
Along with continuing to help its members grow their brands, Reach will also be taking on a new project: opening chapters at other schools.
As influencer circles grow on college campuses in California and across the nation, Benhamou said the group has been contacted by other students who want to expand Reach on to their campuses so they can reap the same networking and learning opportunities as the students of USC.
“They’re really interested in what we do and I don’t really know how they heard about us, but that’s great either way,” Benhamou said.
Reach founder Markian Benhamou, who is now a full-time social media content creator, is proud of what he’s built at the school.
“It’s awesome that the club is still alive even though I’m gone,” he said after the February meeting.
Like many alumni of Reach, he still comes back to visit and share what he’s learned running his own content creation group SMILE.
But while he is no longer enrolled at USC, he said it’s exciting that his younger sister Kalina has taken up the helm of Reach and is continuing his mission of meeting the demand for education and information in the influencing world.
“All of our alumni members still have a very strong presence in what we do and help collaborate with everything that we do. And that’s one of the biggest things that I value from Reach on top of everything — that we learn and teach each other,” Kalina Benhamou said.
