E-marketing classroom project creates social-media buzz

Bacile

As an electronic-marketing instructor for the College of Business, Todd Bacile studies and teaches the best way to promote and engage others through tweets, posts, comments and shares. But the first week of the fall semester, Bacile became his own social-media teaching lesson when his guest post on a popular, syndicated blog went viral.

The blog showcased how Bacile uses scores from Klout, a controversial tool to assess social-media influence, as the final determination of a student’s class project grade. The project, dubbed “The Klout Challenge,” is 10 percent of a student’s final grade.

“The blog post definitely hit a chord with readers from around the world, many of whom seemed shocked that these social-influence measures are going mainstream,” said Mark Schaefer, a well-known social-media marketing guru who runs the popular blog {grow} that hosted Bacile’s narrative. “Todd’s post is among the top 10 posts of the year on my blog.”

From the original blog alone, Bacile’s Klout project description was shared on either Facebook, Google+, Twitter or LinkedIn more than 2,000 times in one week. A great number of those posts were shared again, and again, organically moving across social networks.

“It has been overwhelming,” said Bacile, a marketing doctoral candidate, “exciting, exhilarating, time-consuming.” That’s because to do social media right, the experts say, you have to engage your audience, continue the conversation, thank them for the many mentions across social-media channels.

Bacile stayed connected to the burgeoning discussion, camping out in his office and responding nonstop to the seemingly everlasting reaction, including more than 800 tweets. “After I did about 100, I couldn’t keep up. I made an admirable effort,” he said.

Bacile expected feedback but not to this extent. News of Bacile’s project prompted stories in U.S. News and World Report, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus  blog and Inside Higher Ed among others.

“Most people seem to either love or hate Klout so the notion of assigning a portion of a student’s grade to their respective Klout score may cause some to react … what’s a good word to use here … fretfully,” Bacile wrote in his blog. “Yet, as an educator teaching electronic marketing at the collegiate level, I owe it to my students to introduce them to every and any concept that will help them land an internship or full-time job.”

Despite an obvious outcry of dissent, many firms are using Klout scores to assess whether job applicants really know how to create engaging social-media content. Students in Bacile’s spring class improved their average Klout score to 43.1 from a beginning 19.3. The highest score was 58. Klout has since updated its algorithm, but at the time publicized 20 as the typical score, Bacile said.

Tessa Revolinksi, a recent marketing graduate working in health communications for a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention contractor in Atlanta, is thankful she opted for Bacile’s elective class. “I would highly recommend this class for students who are interested in learning more about social media and gaining experience they can actually put on their resume,” she said.

A 2012 College of Business Teaching Assistant Award winner, Bacile will teach the undergraduate class again this spring.

Bacile’s dissertation committee chair is Professor Charlie Hofacker, editor of the Journal of Interactive Marketing, a prestigious journal in the area of digital marketing. 

“To me the most interesting thing about the assignment is that while Todd allowed the students to opt out of the Klout assignment with a traditional written assignment, all but two opted in,” Hofacker said.  “We need to find ways to reach students in their world, and since the students of today are ‘digital natives,’ not digital immigrants like people my age, their world is a digital world.”

Michael Brady, chair of the Department of Marketing, said Bacile’s use of Klout reflects the discipline’s move away from lectures, or ‘sage on the stage’ teaching, and toward more experiential or hands-on learning.

Bacile spent the first few weeks of the fall semester inundated with interview requests and feedback – positive and negative – on his Klout score class challenge. He made a presentation on the subject at a fall Academy of Marketing Science world conference in Atlanta to rave reviews from the marketing faculty in attendance. As soon as life returned to the normal frenzy of a doctoral student working on a dissertation while teaching and researching, Bacile started working on itemizing his hour-by-hour, day-by-day whirlwind of a week to use as a lesson in his future electronic-marketing classes.

“The irony is that the blog post proved exactly what Todd is trying to teach,” Schaefer said. “The ability to create social media content that is shared and creates a reaction is a legitimate source of influence on the web today. Todd just proved that!”