Every semester, my UNI Digital Advertising students work very hard on a massive project: To develop a professional brand based on their personal interests using social media.
Unfortunately, after the Spring semester in 2015 I neglected to post a "roundup" article on all of my student work that semester. After multiple requests from students, I am finally posting this now!
With that said, let's take a moment to praise their work and note a few special honors.
The Big Picture
It's always astounding to me what my classes can accomplish in little under three months. By measuring our activity and engagement on social media, we can quickly evaluate our performance with quantitative metrics.
From January through April 2015, my 47 #unidigadv students accomplished the following:
- Posted a total of 7,733 tweets on Twitter
- Gained a total of 6,799 followers on Twitter
- Earned an average score of 46 on Klout
- Added 3,792 connections on LinkedIn
- Published 477 blog posts on Blogger or WordPress blogs
- Earned a record-breaking 91,763 pageviews on their blogs
TWITTER
Most Prolific
Tweeting is one of those things that seems very easy at first glance - until you do it every day in support of a professional brand. Here are the top five #unidigadv Tweeps by Tweet volume (Note: I only counted original tweets for this - retweets did not count!):
- Patricia Zubrod @TrishZubrod - 326 Tweets
- Nick Nielsen @12nnielsen - 311 Tweets
- Morganne Murphy @trekkintraveler - 184 Tweets
- Casey Roegner @StayIowan - 172 Tweets
- Kara Schemmel @glutenisnotme - 158 Tweets
Most Followers Gained
If you want to wield influence on Twitter, you need followers. Here are the students who added the most followers during the semester.
- Emily Nibaur @GrabUrPopcorn - added 367 followers
- Danyang Wang @AuroraDreammask - added 261 followers
- Taylor Conger @_FEMvertising - added 257 followers
- Autumn Alitz @autsblog - added 162 followers
- Melissa Wulfekuhle - @nutrifit2015 - added 161 followers
Most Klout
Klout measures your social media influence. It is a decent measure of engagement over all of the social channels we utilized in class. Here are the highest scorers:
- Daniel Vorwerk - Klout score: 64
- Keevin O'Rourke - Klout score: 60
LINKEDIN
Most Connections Gained
When job hunting, who you know is often as important as who you are. Here are the class members who gained the most connections on LinkedIn during this project:
- Tucker Collins +282 connections
- Tony McDermott +169 connections
- (tie) Scout Morehouse +158 connections
Sean Ford +158 connections
- Morganne Murphy +157 connections
Working to build a high quality Linkedin Profile can help you stand out to potential employers. The following students all had excellent quality profiles:
Most Recommended
These three students had the greatest number of recommendations by others on LinkedIn:
BLOGS
The real content was being generated on student blogs, where students developed unique and original posts related to their professional brand. They then attempted to organically attract an audience of readers - a difficult challenge!
Most Visited Blogs
We had EIGHT students who earned over 2,000 pageviews to their blog during the course of the semester - they did a fantastic job attracting and engaging their visitors. Browse through their blogs and see what they came up with:
Most Viral Blog Post
Mandy's personal brand was called
The Busyy Beauty and focused on health and beauty tips for those on a busy schedule. Her blog received fairly decent traffic - around 1,000 pageviews - that is, up until April 6, 2015. Close to the end of the project, she tried something a little different and more personal in nature - a list article about the life lessons she learned in college.
Perhaps due to the time of year - as many across the country were preparing to graduate high school or college - Mandy's post went viral. Big time. In the course of seven days following the publication of her blog post, her blog received 29,132 pageviews!
Second Runner up:
Andrew blogged all semester about the automotive enthusiast world - but only garnered a few hundred pageviews. The week before the project was due he wrote an lengthy opinion piece on his favorite 4 cylinder engine: the Mitsubishi 4g63. Sharing it with a few Facebook groups of passionate gearheads earned Andrew over 6,500 pageviews in less than a week!
Best Interviews
Nick landed some serious interviews for his blog on social media and celebrity culture with Youtube personalities Kingsley and Misty Kingma. With millions of subscribers between them, it demonstrates the strength of Nick's personal brand that he was able to earn exclusive personal interviews with them.
Best Entrepreneur Blogs
Keevin O'Rourke - The Startup Students
Michael Caraway - How 'Bout Now (HBN)
Keevin and Michael are entrepreneurs who are themselves involved in a startup. They both wrote blogs targeting student entrepreneurs to give advice, tips, and helpful perspective to those considering starting their own business as a student. Their blogs were both well-designed and well-written - providing great content that was a pleasure to read.
Best Advertising Blog
Taylor Conger - Think Like a Girl
Taylor wanted to empower women by critically examining "femvertising" - advertising that is targeted to women. Her writeups on women's issues and brands that try (successfully or unsuccessfully) to connect with women through their advertising were both cogent and timely.
