This paper shows how innovative social marketing techniques were used to successfully recruit students to a new business Masters programme at the London Business School. The challenge was to reach a demographic that the School had not catered for before, as well as maintain the prestige of the brand. The strategy was to spread the word and position the new programme through seeded online debate, which in turn grew awareness virtually through social networking and interest groups. Various media were used to back up the online debate, from blogging, online PR posts and targeted email marketing among others. As a result, Serious Ideas were 125 per cent over their conversion target to deliver 100 students to the programme for September 2009 and produced a revenue stream of £2,190,000