Margaret Wallace (COM’89), who teaches Promoting Content Online, has her students research metrics for different media to identify how they can better target promotion for their projects.

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COM Class Teaches Students How to Promote Their Content Online

Empowering students to put themselves out there amidst a changing digital landscape

A group of Boston University students gathered on Monday and Wednesday afternoons for several weeks this summer to discuss their personal business ventures. These included a radio show, a shampoo brand, a dating site–style app for buying cars, a specialty coffee brand, a TikTok account, and a content creation studio.

In the College of Communication class Promoting Your Content Online, they were learning how to promote their personal ventures with creative content across various platforms and finalizing their strategic plans.

The class material changes in real time, with discussions on current media, case studies, and resources, and every week a student presented on a specific platform, creator, influencer, or campaign.

Tami Nguyen (COM’18, COM’25) presented on Joon Lee, a former BU student who was laid off from his job as a sports journalist at ESPN and now works as a freelance journalist, posting his sports commentary on YouTube, TikTok, and X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. 

Lee, who has around 20,000 followers on YouTube and TikTok—and gets many more views and likes—is a prime example of how students can use online platforms to support their careers, even if they’re waiting to land their next official (paid) gig.

Nguyen, who has been working on building her personal brand @bostontamcam on Instagram and TikTok, says she’s learned from Lee to be yourself, be nimble, and be consistent. “Try everything,” she says. “I don’t think the internet is that serious.”

Nguyen’s presentation prompted class instructor Margaret Wallace (COM’89) to lead an impromptu discussion on noncompetition clauses in creative industries, advising her students on how to negotiate. 

Wallace, a COM associate professor of the practice of media innovation, is in her third year teaching the course, which she says is difficult to plan for because it changes all the time to keep up with breaking trends. So she follows her student Nguyen’s advice—she’s nimble, always adapting to what her students want to discuss and what’s new. But it’s not all about likes and followers.

“I just want them to really see how social networks and online content are part of an ecosystem that they can leverage for whatever they’re doing or working on or whatever their creative aspirations are,” Wallace says. “I really want them to leave with a holistic sense of where online content fits in with what they do and who they are and what they want to express—more than just, this is how to game the TikTok algorithm.”

Brennah McKinsey (COM’25) says she didn’t initially know she’d be working on one personal project throughout the class, but when she found out, she knew she wanted to promote her campus radio show.

McKinsey’s show Out Loud, which airs on WTBU, highlights queer artists, many local to Boston. She typically spends one week’s episode focusing on an artist’s journey and discography, discussing their coming out story and experiences within the music industry. The following week, she interviews someone local to Boston and talks to them about their identity and what the queer community means to them.

She says she’d never thought about taking the show outside of BU or looking for a larger audience, but the class changed that for her.

Professor Wallace “is passionate about our passions, and so she really does motivate us to think bigger and think without limits,” McKinsey says. “She was the one who…asked me first if I wanted to take it to a station and make it something.”

So McKinsey decided to run with that. So for her final project she created an archive of what she’s done with the show, which she can eventually pitch to other radio stations. She says the class helped her realize that she can advocate for herself and promote herself as a professional.

“Learning how to promote your own content is applicable to other areas of your life, and that was kind of what pushed me to take the class,” McKinsey notes. “The foundation of it is just growing a sense of confidence within yourself and what you have to offer—and that could be content, that could be your portfolio, that could be you as an individual.”

Over the time she’s taught Promoting Your Content Online, Wallace says, she’s seen students’ ideas become more ambitious and developed—and she’s kept up with past students who are still using what they learned in her class after graduating.

For Steven Li (CAS’26), the class has offered a chance to set ambitious goals. Li got into specialty coffee when he was looking for a way to distract himself after his dog died. He quickly became fascinated with roasting, cupping, tasting, and packaging coffee beans—but he found that information on how to get involved with those things wasn’t easy to come by.

“What I’m doing right now is sharing this knowledge about specialty coffee, because coffee is quite a mystery to people who don’t understand it,” Li says. “I want to share what I find interesting.”

While he has yet to select a name for his business, Li says the class encouraged him to start sharing Instagram stories educating his followers about specialty coffee. Since doing so, he’s seen a big increase in the number of people reading his stories, and he’s planning to make video content explaining his process.

For his final class project, the computer science major created a website. With Wallace’s advice, Li is using artificial intelligence to help him code a website from scratch, and he hopes that by bringing people to his site he’ll be able to hire a team to help him run his business long-term.

For Wallace, it doesn’t matter what ventures her students bring to the class. She’s excited about their passions and helping them see that they can get started on their own.

With her background in game design, she’s always trying to gamify things, she says, another lesson students say they’ve taken away from the class. They made their presentations interactive, with quizzes and tests, which Wallace joined in on, and while students were in small groups for discussion, she’d throw in “wildcards”—new challenges for them to discuss.

At one point in class, screens around the classroom projected a question: “The future of the internet?”

And that’s a big one. But the subtext makes it more pointed—how will you keep your brand current when the internet can do more?

Wallace doesn’t promise to teach her students every single way they can create and promote their content online—that would be next to impossible. What she does instead is teach them how to think about their audiences and their content and encourage their creativity, so as the internet goes on changing, they go on adapting.

“Where there’s a screen, there’s the possibility to reach people through multiple channels. And so that, to me, is just something I want everyone to come away with,” Wallace says. “If you’re a creator and you’re inspired, just put your stuff out there and don’t be afraid…just throw it out there and connect with your audience, connect with people.”