Articulo_6-EN-Education_for_the

All organizations, both public and private, were faced with the need to adapt to a type of public that had not existed until then (Herreros Laviña, 2013). These users looked for a P2P1 relationship, from equal to equal, based on personal commu-nication in which they felt that someone was listening (Redondo and Rojas, 2013). The new market, in which very different types of stakeholders2 converged, required that these transactional relationships in connection with brands took place in the same channels in which the interested parties were found: social media and 2.0 platforms. Companies with more or less success began a process of transformation that exceeded the limits of external and internal communication (Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger, 2008) in order to revolutionise the business model (Rodríguez Fernández, 2013) as well as the very notion of the marketing concept. In this context, organizations have become aware of the importance of being part of the virtual communities that surround their brands, and the discipline of community management has emerged, which is in charge of the creation, monitoring, management and analysis of social networks composed of these users (Moreno, 2014).

Professionals such as social media strategists or community managers, among others, appear to satisfy the needs of brands in designing their communication strategies in social networks, or in implementing actions and managing con-versations, respectively (Mejía, 2014). Now that we are in the beginning stage of this situation, the lack of experts covering these new vacancies in communications departments is resulting in many companies having to look for profiles such as those of journalists, publicists, and specialists in corporate communication or marketing, to give a few examples. Many others leave the management of their social media in the hands of interns; these internship positions are usually occu-pied by students of Journalism, Advertising and Public Relations, Audiovisual Communication, Marketing and Computer Engineering. However, in a short period of time, the concept of community management as a key element in the digital communication of institutions has resulted in the professionalization of the sector, and the demand for true experts in the management of social networks has started (Domingo, 2016). Thus, a multitude of courses, postgraduate degrees, and master’s degrees have appeared in order to promote the professional training of these new communication professionals (Barrios Rubio and Zambrano Ayala, 2014).

At the same time, the university as a social institution has entered into a process of transformation that has continued to this day. On one hand, Spanish universities are immersed in a process of adaptation in order to be aligned with Europe pol-icy within the framework of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) (Rué, 2007). On the other hand, higher education must satisfy new labour demands in the field of communication, as these professions require human capital with special-ized knowledge (Universia, 2013). Moreover, the university as an institution faces new challenges regarding its teaching methodologies, as current generations of students, being digital natives, demand educational models that place them at the centre of a more open learning process (Adaime, Binder and Piscitelli, 2010) focused on the development of instrumen-

1 The abbreviation P2P refers to the peer-to-peer concept, or peer-to-peer network, which indicates computer networks where there are no permanent PC clients and servers but a set of nodes that act in the same way, or in other words, that work as both clients and servers with regard to the remaining nodes in those networks (Steinmetz and Wehrle, 2005).The use of this term has recently transcended the field of digital communication to include the tendency of users or consumers to trust in and be influenced more by the messages, recommendations and opinions that come from their peers or equals (within social networks) rather than by the messages emitted from companies and brands (Mootee, 2007).

2 Here we use the term stakeholder in the broad sense of the word proposed by Ed Freeman in 1983, which includes all groups and/or individuals upon which an organization depends for its survival, in addition to all of those groups and/or individuals who may affect, or who are affected by, the achievement of the objectives of that organization (IESE, 2009).