Presenting At Champlain College: My Alma Mater

Last week I headed back East to my last home, Burlington, Vermont for a reunion with my best girlfriends from college. However, a visit back to B-town isn’t complete without visiting my Alma Mater, Champlain College.

I was asked to speak in Elaine Young’s Marketing 250 classes. She was a favorite professor of mine so on Friday morning, I happily obliged. The topic: blogging and transparency. Perfect, right?

As I stepped onto the picturesque campus on the hill, overlooking Lake Champlain draped by the Adirondack mountains a wave of nostalgia washed over me. I hadn’t been back to visit since I graduated almost two years ago. Even the class was held in a classroom I’ve had many classes in.

The class started with Elaine talking about Twitter, Google Analytics, Feedburner, Lijit (of course) and the students thoughts about participating in #u30pro the night prior (small world, I was tickled by this, go David). Their homework includes tweeting.

Elaine (and many other professors at Champlain) assign students real companies to work directly with the entire semester. Tasks include creating a company blog, newsletters through Constant Contact and presenting proactive, actionable business direction for the company at the end of the semester.

After critiquing their newsletters, I spoke about blogging for your company, personal brand, using Twitter, how to start blogging and that they shouldn’t give up or underestimate the power of social media. I encouraged each of them to keep going with blogging reflecting on my internship and blogging journey and how it’s always a work in progress. Throughout the class students were tweeting about the presentation and asking questions.

One of the students, Jake Ziemlak, even blogged about me and my presentation. Check out his great synopsis here.

Elaine also wrote a post how it all comes full circle. Elaine was teaching me about Google Alerts, blogging and Twitter over three years ago. It was all applicable and she helped shot put my interest in social media. She’s even featured in Business Week on “Teaching The Facebook Generation.” She was teaching Twitter and blogging before it was trendy in colleges.

Nancy Kerr, my favorite Public Relations professor and adviser throughout college stopped by to listen

Bottom line, it was like coming full circle. I saw myself in the face of every one of those eager students. They’re thirsty to learn and were paying attention to tools that are real time – here and now. I’m sure it will be the first of many more visits and presentations.

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