Having experts come to classes today, especially in social media, is crucial. This has been one of the things I have tried to do with my social media class at the University of Louisville. We have had experts coming in on a range of different topics from athletics, academics, non-profits, news, and research. All of these up to this point have been in person, but we had our very first Skype presentation in class today with Dennis Yu of Blitzmetrics. He has contributed to many of the more influential social media blogs (including AllFacebook) and has presented and worked all over the world in the area of data analytics and analysis for social media. I had the opportunity to chat with Dennis for a blog post feature on what is a social media professor with my fellow UofL colleague, Dr. Scott Sanders, Assistant Professor in Social Media.
I’ve known Dennis about a little over a year and it has been fun chatting with him over the years about social media, emerging technologies, and data analytics. He and his team come to Louisville on a regular basis for business so it is great to catch up and hear what is going on in terms of trends in the industry. Partnership and having a bridge with leaders like Dennis in the profession is essential for professors today. We need to make sure to bring the experts to our classes for our students so they know more about what are the expectations are out in the workforce and what skills and work experience they need to have. I reached out to Dennis a while ago about possibly coming in for a guest talk to my social media class, and he said yes, which I was very excited about!
Picture of Dennis Yu speaking to#Freberg13 (photo by Diana Riesenberg)
Yesterday, Dennis came and spoke to our class via Skype, which was pretty cool! Some of my students have never had a guest lecture conducted via Skype, so this was new to them. What was great about Dennis and his presentation was he was able to share his screen with the students and walk them through the various developer and administration pages of Facebook, and really look at the data that is there. Essentially, Facebook and many other social media platforms are databases filled with information. Dennis was able to share with the students some tricks, best practices, and tips on what they could do not only for their social media campaign proposal for class, but also how they could get a job with some of these skills.
Several students were inspired to write blog posts about Dennis and his presentation to the class. Maggie discussed the implications of having a social media class could help out with their job prospects and James did a great job in capturing the overall essence and main points Dennis shared with the class. Liz focused her post about what Dennis talked about the power and art of vitality when it came to social media content. On the other hand, Devin wrote about how they tried out some of the tips and tricks that were shown to the class afterwords, and wrote about his insights and reactions on his post. Rachel also shared her thoughts about how easy and affordable it is to create ads for Facebook and how this could be effective for social media practices.
Overall, this was a guest talk that the students not only were amazed with, but were inspired. My students walked out of class inspired, motivated, and excited to learn more about data analysis and analytics based on what Dennis shared with them. If you are interested in seeing what the class was talking about via social media from the presentation, you may want to check out this Storify. Major thanks to both my students Diana and Rachel for taking photos of the presentation and sharing them with the class on Twitter. 🙂
Special thanks to Dennis for taking the time to speak to my social media class – really appreciate it! You really inspired my students to continue being students of social media and gave them motivation to explore the area of data analytics more. Thanks again!
Hope you all are having a great day!
Best Wishes,
Karen
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