This week is our Spring Break at the University of Louisville – it is amazing with how fast this semester has gone by! Guess this happens when you are busy with research, classes, and consulting! 🙂 With this in mind, I took this opportunity to travel back to SLO to visit Mom, Dad, and Karla.  From baking cookies to spending time in warm weather to walks to coffee shops, it has been a very relaxing and enjoyable time with my family.

One of the many gifts I got on my way out to CA – classic!

One of the things I had the chance to do also was guest lecture for Mom’s class – yes, Mom is the original Dr. Freberg. 🙂 While Mom teaching neuroscience and intro to psychology classes, there is definitely a crossover between PR and Psychology.  In fact, one of our founders of modern day PR was Edward Bernays, who was the nephew of Sigmund Freud.  Small world! 🙂

I talked with Mom’s students today about the growing presence and influence social media has for online reputation management.  I discussed how monitoring is becoming more apparent not only among universities (looking at the various services they hire to monitor what athletes, students, faculty, and others say about the university) to brands and employers screening potential candidates.

This was the same lecture I gave my students in my social media class – I believe this is one subject that all students, no matter the major, needs to be exposed to.  I had several students come up to me after class saying they want to create a blog to take ownership of their online persona and even become more active on sites like LinkedIn.  I also got a lot of interest among the students for the site SimpleWash as well to clean up their profiles on Facebook and Twitter.

Mom in her office at Cal Poly – very decorative and cool!

It was a fun day spending time with Mom in her natural habitat – she is an excellent professor and one of my role models for me as a professor.  Both Mom and Dad have been actively engaged in the classroom and research (both in psychology and marketing), and I feel that I have grown a lot as a professor from learning from both of them. 🙂  It was great to learn from the original Dr. Freberg!

Hope you all are having a great day!

Best Wishes,

Karen


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