The cover of the Summer 2010 MSU Alumni Magazine features the icons of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, StumbleUpon, RSS feed and the Spartan helmet along with the headline “Social Media: MSU Rides the New Media Wave.”
Wow! This is a long way from when my husband Mitch first spoke to me next to the old manual typewriters in the editorial offices of the State News, the student newspaper at Michigan State University.
Mitch was a junior in ROTC majoring in political science and I a freshman. I got my B.A. in Journalism in three years while he got a year’s deferment from active military duty to earn an M.A. in Communications from MSU.
A few months later we were off to Ft. Knox, Kentucky, the subject of my novel MRS. LIEUTENANT (which includes flashback scenes at MSU). And, in a small world way, that novel brought me to social media and everything my company Miller Mosaic Power Marketing has done since.
Scott Westerman (@MSUScottW on Twitter), who is executive director of the MSU Alumni Association, is quoted in the magazine issue on the subject of monitoring your brand, a topic that especially interests me:
“You have to listen to people, act quickly to solve problems, and be transparent about what you are doing. There is a risk involved. I can give you examples of companies that blew it when they scoffed at complaints instead of handling it right. You can’t control communication in a top-down, one-way manner. You have to engage people in a two-way conversation.”
Before MSU Westerman was a group vice president at Comcast, where he used Twitter to help Comcast’s customer service reputation. Now he’s using social media for a variety of alumni projects and is also using the expertise of MSU’s College of Communication Arts and Sciences. He says:
“At the end of the day, you have to find new ways to add value to the world. It’s about the friendships and relationships that you have gained.”
MSU journalism alumna Rachel Wilkerson, ’08, who blogs at www.sheddingit.com, has this piece of advice attributed to her: “It’s not ‘plastics,’ as Benjamin [in the movie THE GRADUATE] was advised in 1967. It’s the modern equivalent — ‘get a blog.”’
And whether a college student should have a blog is actually the subject of the fourth post in the new social media blog series that Yael K. Miller and I are writing for eBranding.me (see the first three posts at http://budurl.com/dreamjobseries).
(c) 2010 Miller Mosaic, LLC
Phyllis Zimbler Miller earned her B.A. in Journalism from MSU in 1969 and her M.B.A. in Finance from Wharton in 1980. Her company Miller Mosaic Power Marketing helps clients use social media to attract more business. Read more about the novel MRS. LIEUTENANT at www.mrslieutenant.com
