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How Colleges Use Kids’ Social Media Feeds

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Learn how what you post can hurt -- and help -- the admissions process. Advice from Common Sense Media editors.

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Syracuse University Professor Corey Takahashi offers his commentary on the challenge of teaching students who, instead of wanting to be writers or filmmakers, aspire to be online "influencers."

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

And some college professors are struggling to keep up with what their students already know. Corey Takahashi teaches multimedia storytelling at Syracuse University in New York, and he says that teaching has been as much a learning experience for him as for his students.

COREY TAKAHASHI: One of my intro courses focuses on storytelling for different fields of communication, from journalism to advertising and PR to fiction. Typically, undergrads drop by during my office hours with questions about becoming writers, broadcasters and filmmakers. Last semester, for the first time, I had a wave of first-year undergrads wanting to become influencers. Social media influencers use online platforms, like YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat, to build a personal connection with an audience. They market themselves, their expertise or ideas and often products or brands. A quarter of my class said this is what they wanted to do now or later as a career. One of the students is already successful. I know her as the punctual front-row freshman Margot De Riemer. On YouTube and other social media, she's Margot Lee.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

MARGOT DE RIEMER: What's up, you guys? It's Margot. I wanted to show you my school morning routine here at college. So if you're interested, keep watching.

TAKAHASHI: Margot posts simple, slice-of-life videos. She started my class with around 50,000 YouTube subscribers. By the end of this semester, she had 100,000. She's not the Kardashian sisters in terms of the size of her audience. Yet Margot also has attracted advertisers and brands to sponsor some of her posts on YouTube and Instagram because she seems more authentic to other teens than a pitch person on TV. It's word-of-mouth marketing from a peer to peer.

DE RIEMER: If I see a product on my Facebook feed or if I see a product linked in one of my favorite YouTuber's bios, then I'm going to click on that and potentially buy that.

TAKAHASHI: For instance, here's a video sponsored by an app.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

DE RIEMER: Also when you're in college, you'll know that getting a package is, like, the best thing ever. So I wanted to show you a way that you can shop a smart way. I downloaded the app called Wish, and it has absolutely saved me. It is...

TAKAHASHI: Margot has learned on her own to create these videos and to negotiate with companies who want to sponsor her.

DE RIEMER: I get to be a business person. I get to be an entrepreneur and I get to be a writer and a creative director and all of that.

TAKAHASHI: Which raises the question of why Margot needs college at all. I mean, with exponential changes in media and technology, it's increasingly tough for universities to keep up. Leaving school to pursue a career in social media has crossed Margot's mind.

DE RIEMER: There's definitely a desire to just move to Los Angeles and live by myself and work with different YouTubers and collaborate and travel the world. But I would never just drop my education for social media.

TAKAHASHI: Because who knows how long social media influencer will be around as a job or how long she'll last as one? Margot says she wants to learn more about storytelling, developing a point of view and critical thinking skills, skills which can be applied to any media career. That's what I'm here for. And guess how I found out Margot enjoyed the semester in my class - through one of her YouTube posts.

(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)

DE RIEMER: Just finished our class of my favorite class this semester. The professors and the TA's were so good.

TAKAHASHI: I guess something's working. For NPR News, I'm Corey Takahashi in Syracuse, N.Y.

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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Using Social Media, Students Aspire To Become 'Influencers'

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Syracuse University Professor Corey Takahashi offers his commentary on the challenge of teaching students who, instead of wanting to be writers or filmmakers, aspire to be online "influencers."

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Article- "The Case Against Personal Brands"

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Article- "The Case Against Personal Brands"

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Sheryl Sandberg, noted author and Facebook's Chief Operating Officer, was recently asked how business people should manage their personal brands.

Her answer was unexpected.

"You don't have a brand," she responded during the question and answer session at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in May 2017.

"I get this question a lot, and I shudder every time. Crest has a brand. Perrier has a brand. People are not that simple. When we are packaged, we're ineffective and inauthentic."

What we each have is a voice, she added, which can be complex, contradictory and sometimes wrong. Her advice? "Don't package yourself." Just speak honestly, factually and from your own experience.

"Crest has a brand. Perrier has a brand. People are not that simple," says Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (Credit: Getty Images)

Sandberg is one of the most powerful figures in social media, and it's social media that's has helped make the idea of personal branding so ubiquitous. So, has this phenomenon had its day? Sandberg may be ahead of the curve in rejecting the idea as absurd and dehumanising.
Self and self-promotion
The concept of building a personal brand dates back decades. In 1997, Fast Company published an article titled "The Brand Called You" that popularised the concept, arguing that it wasn't just CEOs or celebrities that needed to carefully craft their image. It was everyone.

The rise of self-promotion and branding partnerships on social media means that it's now second nature for people to build a personal brand: to put some thought into the image they project online and the impression it gives to friends, clients, colleagues and even potential employers or sponsors.

That emphasis on presenting a strong public image is especially pronounced in these uncertain economic times; a growing, fiercely competitive "gig economy" has made digital profiles a crucial part of grabbing work opportunities. Freelancing has risen by 43% in the UK since 2008, according to an IPSE survey, and a report by the software company Intuit predicted that 40% of the United States workforce would be made up by independent workers by 2020.
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"Personal branding is now being taught in Kazakhstan, Egypt and even Cambodia. All around the world, job counsellors are telling people to come up with three to four words that reflect their authentic self," according to Ilana Gershon, an associate anthropology professor at Indiana University Bloomington.

Traditional branding paints a picture of products that are flawless and consistent - think of famous brand slogans from "Never knowingly undersold" to "The best a man can get." Humans don't work that way, as Sandberg acknowledged. We are complicated and fallible. There's a risk that creating a "perfect" personal brand comes with enormous pressure to live up to it.

Social media's made it easy for people to curate and share aspects of their life which are in keeping with the image they'd like to project (Credit: Getty Images)

There has always been some unease with the idea that humans can be packaged, and personal brands often come under fire for being artificial portrayals of self-indulgent people. In 2012, the satirical online newspaper The Onion mocked the trend with the headline "' I Am A Brand,' Pathetic Man Says."

The story goes on to describe "a sad, pathetic local web developer" who "sees his worthless daily blog posts, endless Facebook status updates, and aggravating Foursquare check-ins as 'extensions of his brand name.'" The point the writer is making: no-one cares that much about the message we're trying to project. We'll be valued at work by doing a good job, not by attempting to project a consistently perfect image.

Self-promotion can also be exhausting.

"When people are trying to create a personal brand... they must be always on," says Ilana Gershon, author of Down and Out in the New Economy. This might mean updating social media feeds several times a day with carefully curated content, palatable to the people they may want to socialise or work with.

This, she says, "introduces a new way of constantly policing yourself. It forces you to be far more instrumental about your personal life, seeing yourself as a perpetually performing for a business-driven gaze."

Competition to outperform rivals is made more acute by the fact that it's relatively cheap to buy artificially generated Facebook likes, Instagram followers, Twitter retweets, and all the other metrics of social-media success.

The British author Ella Woodward, who runs the healthy-eating blog Deliciously Ella and has more than a million Instagram followers, has spoken about her social-media burnout in interviews. "It's easy when you work in a digital world that doesn't stop, to never stop," she told the marketing magazine Campaign, "and therefore share every aspect of your life. You can get quite exposed, and the bigger you are, the more you're going to attract criticism."

Against this backdrop, Sandberg's opinion of personal branding could signal the death knell of the concept.
Communicating 'you'
Others, however, believe the idea has merit.

Jennifer Holloway, a personal-branding consultant who lives in the Yorkshire Dales, says the criticism is based on a misunderstanding. "It's not fakery," she says of creating a personal branding strategy. "It's 'What brand am I already?'"

Holloway sees the process in practical terms. People form an idea of you based on what you say, how you act and what you look like, anyway. Why not spend some time thinking about your best qualities and idiosyncrasies, so that your online profiles are warm, genuine and positive, and you have a clear answer to questions like, "What do you do?"

Her key advice: "Do not try to second guess, 'What kind of person would this employer like and how do I become that?' Don't expect to have a personal brand that everybody loves. It's about subtlety and authenticity." She also advises against going overboard, saying that it's better to stick to one social-media platform and do it well than to stretch yourself too thin.

It's easy to start sharing every aspect of your life, but beware of over-exposure, says Ella Mills, author and founder of Deliciously Ella (Credit: Getty Images)

Molly Crist and Katerina Clauhs Dhand have figured out how to strike this balance. Two millennial-age sisters from Philadelphia in the US who launched a boutique travel company, Onward Travel, in 2014, they share some of Sheryl Sandberg's scepticism about personal branding while realising that they can't avoid it completely.

Visitors to the website can watch a video of the sisters eating pho, drinking margaritas, and describing their upbringing on a farm in Pennsylvania, where their mother and grandmother had been running cookery classes since the early 1990s. "It could be much more polished," Dhand says, "but it shows who we are, it's a little silly. I hope it communicates that we're real people and that inspires trust."

Crist acknowledges that "it's important to communicate our story and ourselves to our customers," but says it's not worthwhile to push the personal branding past a certain point. For example, Onward Travel is on the usual social media platforms, but, Crist explains, "it's not our number one priority. We have learned that they take an incredible amount of time and thought to manage, and neither of us are overly inclined to share online in the first place."

She's glad that, unlike some influencers or life coaches who are reliant on self-promotion, "we are ultimately selling a guided tour, we're not selling ourselves."

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Building a personal brand has become common practice in the business world - but what if you want to get ahead without curating and sharing a particular version of yourself?