I thought I'd make a few observations about personal branding and about how Sloan-C might capitalize on findings that seem to be coming over the transom. First, over the last two semesters, I've given my MBA students an assignment to improve their "personal brands" as a semester long exercise. What is a "personal brand" anyway? -- well, it is just YOU. What you say, what you know, what you want to do and have done, shared with the world. People see it as using social media to let everyone know about you. Some say you should associate a logo with yourself. Don't know about that - I'll just stay "John Bourne." Of course, Facebook is the favorite form of social media with a large fraction of America on Facebook (according to Time magazine this week).
I really didn't know how this teaching experiment on personal branding would work out at the outset. At the end of these two semesters, I'd say it was a real success. Several students have told me that the exercise made a large difference in their lives, getting them jobs, for example. What did they do in the class? (.. and what can your students do?). Mostly they twittered, put up linkedIn profiles and Facebook pages, created blogs, shared on Slideshare, used DIgg and other social media tools. They worked the tools during the semester and reported quantitative and qualitative results. A real art form evolved over time. Bottom line - it worked for at least half of the students - increased contacts, job offers, new knowledge and the like. Basically a good and surprising thing.
Now, my question is whether improving the personal brand experiment would work in your courses -- perhaps the Hawthorne effect will overcome these initial results? I might ask in this blog for replies from those who have done a similar thing? What would happen if Sloan-C members began to expand their brands? Would the method result in Adjuncts getting better and more jobs teaching online, would more members get better jobs, - what would happen? How could we measure the impact?
social media in teaching
Hi John,
Could you share the specifics about how the assignment was worked into class content? I'm using Twitter for the first time in class and the students are very concerned with specifics, like how many posts they must do. It probably comes from the way we do forums in Moodle and the precision about amounts in this online art history course. But it's not the point in Twitter, where the conversation flows through our classroom (Moodle) Twitter widget and disappears after about a week.
By the way, I'm finding the browser, Flock, to be very useful in congregating all my social media sites on one site, open with my draggable content to friends from various sites. So I can drag a YouTube video to a Twitter friend easily, etc.
Cathy Cheal
Oakland University
Metrics
What I did was to measure the numbr of posts to the wiki with their progress each week. If something was done - that counted, otherwise nothing. Outcomes are what I was really after rather than a specific number, however. So, I ws impressed with students who clearly achieved an outcome (e.g. a new job, a new this, a new that...) that could be clearly shown to come from their social networking activities. As you know, students often will post stuff to a certain level, if you specify that level. I simply analyzed the data for posting at the middle and end of the class.
In terms of content, the assignment was one of two that lasted the entire semester. We worked it in between the "lectures/discussions" and often had a debrief on what students had done.
BTW, the class was in Second Life and Elluminate.
Cathy - thanks for the Flock reference -- I'll look it up.
Very interesting topic, John.