The 2009 Financial Times global business school rankings are in and Melbourne Business School has jumped 23 places to be ranked 52nd in the world (details on this page).

MBS’ Dean John Seybolt discusses this and a presents a more detailed analysis of the results on the MBS website while Andrew Trounson discusses the effects of regional competition among Asian and Australian business schools in The Australian’s Higher Education section.

A few days ago CNET’s Caroline McCarthy wrote an interesting article on social media’s hidden bubble. She contends that, while there are many good social media strategists out there, there are also many bad ones who are ready to give poor advice to companies interested in –  but clueless about – developing a social media presence. The coming US recession, she says, is good in that it will burst the social media bubble and will help wipe the bad ones away

She makes a good point and you don’t have to look too far to find examples of social media missteps from around the world. You won’t find too many missteps made my Australian companies, though – but that’s because most of them aren’t doing social media at all so they have nothing to mess up! The biggest disaster story from last year, for example, was the brouhaha over people from National Australia Bank posting promotional comments on popular Australian sports blogs. Some people insisted that was equivalent to corporate spamming though, really, it wasn’t such a big deal.

So, if you want to cover your social media butt during the economic downturn, here a few way to tell whether your social media ‘expert’ is any good or not:

• ‘Top 25 Ways to Tell if Your Social Media Expert is a Carpetbagger’ by Beth Harte and Geoff Livingston

Meanwhile, if you’re a social media expert and are considering a social media project offered by company:

• ‘20 Signs You Don’t Want That Social Media Project’ by Chris Applegate

Both of those are worth reading, regardless of whether you are, or whether you are hiring, a social media strategist. [Via Laurel Papworth’s blog]

The BBC has just announced plans to launch a new weekly show, called Your World News, that will feature the best of user-submitted news content (mainly photos and videos):

Thousands of videos, pictures and emails are sent in to the BBC every week and we are now choosing the best ones to make it onto a new show called Your World News.

So what do you have to do to make it on the programme? Quite simply, get out there and send us what’s happening in your world.

I hope that, like CNN’s iReport, they also make this content available on the web once the show has been broadcast.

This new initiative sounds really exciting and here’s hoping it’s a big success.