Karen Freberg

Educator · Strategic communications and social media

Dr. Karen Freberg is a Professor of Strategic Communications at the University of Louisville. She is the author of Social Media for Strategic Communications (SAGE) and serves as the director of The Bird’s Nest, the university’s first student-run strategic communications agency. Through The Bird’s Nest, students work with real clients on real campaigns that have measurable business impact, moving beyond theoretical case studies to live, paid work.

Dennis has written about Karen as the social media professor who trains other professors, writes the textbooks, and still practices. They have shared stages, including a panel at Loyola University Chicago, which Karen described as a wonderful session with an excellent conversation. Their collaboration is rooted in a shared belief that students learn best by shipping work that someone actually paid for and cares about. This approach reflects a broader shift in education where building agents and strategic campaigns has become an organizer’s and communicator’s job, not just a programmer’s.

Karen is part of the first sixty names on Dennis’s People & pets list, a ranking he uses to select the individuals he honors. She is also featured in the Money Tree network, a collection of professionals Dennis builds with. In Dennis’s library, there are 12 photos of Karen, documenting their time together. The pictures live in a named Google Photos cluster, and Dennis will come back to narrate the frames.

Photos with Karen Freberg

This page is part of how Dennis Yu honors the people he builds with — real pages that link real work, so the people he believes in rank on their own names. Meet the rest →