Kardi Somerfield named as a social media superstar!

Senior Marketing Lecturer, Kardi Somerfield, has had the honour of being named one of Higher Education’s top 10 social media superstars by digital agency Jisc.

The competition celebrates the excellent social media work being done in Higher Education (HE) by sector professionals and how they are using innovative ways of including social media in their teaching.

After a colleague recommended that Kardi enter, she was chosen alongside fellow professionals as a fantastic example of how social media can be used in HE.

Kardi uses Twitter in several ways to help her students to keep up with advertising and marketing practice. The AdStudent Picks list is a set of accounts for students to follow. It keeps students up to date with the trade press and breaking campaigns, whilst building familiarity with agencies, clients and issues.

Kardi promotes the use of #AdStudents, to highlight posts from the advertising student community across the three years of study and beyond to alumni.

She said: “The particular benefits of using Twitter this way are that the students begin to understand the research capabilities of this platform, and also acquire the good habit of including bite-size industry content in their daily media consumption. This addresses the specific challenge of the way digital natives selectively process information.

“I’m delighted to make this top ten particularly because my students will benefit from the prize – we’re getting a visit from specialists from DigiLab with some cool tech to experience.”

Kardi’s use of social media has resulted in the launch of a ‘student takeover’ of the University social media accounts. Final year students will be given the experience of working in the digital team, as well as being matched with skilled practitioners who will continue to mentor them into their first roles in industry.

Read the full article in the THE