Hello! I hail from exciting and thrilling Salem, Ore. My road to this class, much like everyone else, has had its bumps and turns and there doesn’t seem to be a life GPS. I graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in broadcast journalism, which I put to use as a producer at the Eugene CBS affiliate, KVAL TV, for about three years. I have also served in the Oregon Army National Guard as a public affairs specialist for 14 years. Sprinkle in all-expense-paid trips to New Orleans to document relief efforts following Hurricane Katrina, a deployment to Iraq and most recently a tour to Afghanistan, and you’ve got a brief rundown of the last decade or so.
Some additional insight into my life today – I’m working on seven years of marriage to my best friend. We have two daughters and a third mystery child on the way. I also just started work at LT Public Relations in Portland.
I never saw myself going to graduate school but when I looked into the Strategic Communications program it felt like a great fit and has lined up perfectly since. I’m excited about this course because there doesn’t seem to be any better time than now to analyze digital media and how it impacts our lives. I used to despise Twitter and all the hashtag talk as well as the superficial direction most communication seemed like it was heading. As a big distopian fiction fan, I see much of Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World and even the film Gattaca’s sterile and detached societies converging. Sadly, it seems futile to try and completely avoid it if we want to communicate effectively. Strategic communications to me is sending a well-crafted message to a specific target audience through the best medium. If you want to fish, go where the fish are and use the right bait. So, now I find myself using Twitter extensively at my office to engage and communicate with clients, potential clients and industry leaders. I hope this course will help me hone a discerning view of the various media and how to use them as communication tools rather than a replacement for communication.
Kevin,
Excellent point. It behooves us to put aside our personal biases and just use the best tool for the job. I must admit I’m curious, though: do you use Twitter outside of work, or can you see yourself ever using it for personal reasons?
As an aside, with your background in television and interest in films, I highly recommend Network if you haven’t already seen it.
I do have a personal handle but don’t use it nearly as much now that I Tweet so much for work. It’s one of those dilemmas of too much office Tweeting leaves me less than interested in constant engagement on it personally. I find Facebook to be my go-to platform for staying connected. With family and now school, these is a point where I need to put down the phone and engage with my 3-D friends and family rather than just my virtual ones.
Oh… and I have not seen the Network, but am completely in love with Newsroom on HBO.
Kevin — I also went through a period of despising Twitter, at the risk of ignoring its rich potentials for our field and being consigned to the museum of communications dinosaurs.
The strategy I found for reconciling myself to it is to make it a tool for discovering content on subject matters that I have strong personal affinity for so that I’m motivated to regularly open the champagne bottle (Does anyone else notice that when loading the mobile app, it makes this popping sound like a bottle cork coming off?) It worked, although I know I still probably wasn’t optimizing this medium.
Grace, I got into Twitter mostly using it as an aggregate of news content rather than a social platform. Most of the people I know on Twitter either use it in place of text messaging (which requires plenty of data on the old smart phone) or just regurgitate other material. Not finding a real connection personally as I am professionally.