Snowy days give me time to blog

Now that my first round of exams are for the most part completed, I have finally had time to post pictures to share with friends and family of the past few weeks! Because meetings and academics are taking up the majority of my time, there are a few categories of photos.

Mizzou Basketball

The Big 12 conference games have been over the past few weeks--including games against Texas Tech, University of Colorado at Boulder, Oklahoma and Baylor.

At the Oklahoma game, I caught my first ever T-4-3 (three point shot) shirt from the cheerleaders! I am a little kid when it comes to being fascinated by free things (and buffets, as Shaina would add). The boy in front of me was part of the Antlers, a cheering section of boys with crude humor. He whisked the shirt away once I had a hand on it, and forcibly returned it to me after the section cheered "Give it to the girl."

Is this how I envisioned catching the shirt? No. Would I have preferred to get it myself without this argument? Yes. But am I happy with the result? Yes.

Emily, me and Jen at the blackout game against Boulder!

Since my father had not been to Mizzou since we moved me in August of 2009, he came to visit campus and go to the basketball game with me!

It was amusing sitting on the adult side of games where you can...

• 1. See things like this: The Antlers holding up a banner of a Baylor basketball player's mugshot, and proceeding to have it confiscated
• 2. Sit down the entire game. Oh how it will feel to be an alumni.

Laura's father coincidentally came in for the Baylor game, so we had a nice meal at the Shack at the MU Student Center and walked to the game! Here's my dad, me, Laura and Mr. Davison

RAMS

My sorority placed 2nd overall in Rockin' Against Multiple Sclerosis, a campus (dominantly Greek) fundraiser for M.S. by canning and through Rock It, a dance and lip-sync competition. Our theme was Grease, as shown by the backdrop below. Congratulations ladies!

Visiting University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This past weekend, I drove three girls down to U of I to visit our respective friends and high school acquaintances. I stayed with Meredith, and was able to entertain myself making plans with friends while she was in meetings all of Saturday!

I stopped by their Phi Mu house, pictured below, and hung out with Shaina's twin Ariel and some girls in their chapter! They even gave extra t-shirts :)

Below is Jacqui, Meredith, me and Kate at Cly's!

St. Luke's Dinner Dance

Immediately upon my return from Champaign, I headed over to the St. Luke's Greek Orthodox Church dinner dance! Parishioners tend to bring friends and community members here, so below I am pictured with Coach Mike Anderson of the men's basketball team!!

Yianni, Gregg, me and Becca--some of Mizzou OCF

Off to finish up some work, hope you enjoyed the photos!

USA Today College

The other day, a blog post I wrote for USA Today College was published online at this link. I was very happy to see it eliciting a response from public forums, as well as direct a lot more traffic toward my blog and Twitter.

Besides comments, I completely underestimated the amount of people that read this site. Here's a screenshot I took of how 90 people "liked" the article and 65 retweeted it in just three days!

Here are some of their Tweets and commentary!

It's cool to firsthand experience the effects of social media, when I'm the one responding to comments/Tweets and more. I look forward to future posts and media experiences!

News rants of the day

Arizona Lawmakers Push New Round of Immigration Restrictions- Does it disturb anyone else that one of our 50 states thinks it has the power to restrict non-citizens from any rights..in our ENTIRE COUNTRY? The state of Arizona poorly reflects the rest of the U.S. by doing this. While illegal immigration is an issue, we don't need to start tackling it by barring them of any rights they have as humans.

The New York Times article states, "Illegal immigrants would be barred from driving in the state, enrolling in school or receiving most public benefits. Their children would receive special birth certificates that would make clear that the state does not consider them Arizona citizens."

Illegal immigrants should not be alienated. Saying that they are not Arizona citizens, by the transitive property, says they are not U.S. citizens. This is not true if a baby is born in the U.S., even if a child's parents were illegal. I think the U.S. needs to take more action on this issue nationally, and not let one state on the border dictate and set a standard for the nation's immigration rulings.

Secret Society of Women- I read about this today in Glamour magazine. Broadcast journalist and former co-host of The View, Lisa Ling started this website for women. It allows them to "divulge our deepest secrets about how we look, what we fear, what we regret, what we aspire to do, or whatever else we've been keeping inside of us."

Websites like this make me happy that people can happily take advantage of the internet's existence. I'm appreciative of women who participate in such forums and provide hope to others who might not have an outlet to release their thoughts.

Legal Fight Over Facebook Continues- This makes me laugh after learning a lot about this issue in the Social Network. The article talks about the Winkelvoss brothers' lawsuit against Mark Zuckerburg, claiming Facebook was their idea.

Most overrated college choice: Your major

Check out my USA Today COLLEGE blog post here!

News of the week

Live from the University of Illinois- here are my discoveries from the week! I got to U of I yesterday evening and had dinner with some of Meredith's friends, and am off to have lunch with various GBN people throughout the day.

Naturally, I had to catch up on Google Reader, where I found these shocking articles of the week:

Wild Brad Chase: Tweets spark campuswide search for Brad Pitt-

Disclaimer: THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED. Read this article to get the full story, but it started with Shaina and I sitting on the deck at the back of my sorority house. We both saw some Tweets that said BRAD PITT IS HERE?! Within 10 minutes of those, three groups of girls left "Greektown" and when I asked where they were going, they said they were looking for Brad Pitt. And they weren't kidding.

Even J-School Buzz (a forum type site for journalism majors) investigated such, and tweeted that Brad Pitt was in between the Student Center and Greektown. After this, I had to go see what was going on, so Shaina and I walked to the student center to go to the Maneater (newspaper) office. Not much to my surprise, journalism students were guarding every door of the student center. Girls were running all over campus to find him, literally, pacing down the street.

This was by far the worst, with a huge crowd of students thinking Brad Pitt had just driven by in a white Sedan. What were they going to do if it actually was Brad Pitt? I don't know....tweet about it more? A variety of rumors were spread...one that he was here with Oprah, one that he was making a donation to his fraternity house for their philanthropy, and my favorite, that he was being 'interviewed' to be the Grand Marshall for the centennial Homecoming (even though he never graduated Mizzou).

This experience definitely taught Mizzou, once again, how quickly things spread over social media and how you need to find an accurate source for things. Just like earlier this year when a shooting two counties away and a man coming to the hospital signified from Twitter that four people had been shot in a university parking garage, we need to be careful what we Tweet, post as statuses and insinuate, because a campus can easily go crazy.

Confession: A Roman Catholic App- This happened earlier last week, and I'm sure you've heard about it by now, but is an iPhone application with guidelines for confession. Although it's not supposed to replace confession, I think some people will take that the wrong way. And what I dislike most about it...you have to PAY for these confession guidelines. Really Catholic church?

Highland Park man charged with Taliban weapons deal- People never think things like this happen in the Chicago suburbs. But they do.

Connections can make a difference when times get tough- Another reminder about how we constantly need to be networking, or our lives will fail and we won't have jobs.

Giordanos Files for Bankruptcy- Although this is mostly for real estate since Giordanos owes 45.7 million to the bank, this is still disappointing news. Restaurants will be staying open, but I'm in awe.

I hope you enjoyed my commentary for the day and enjoy the lovely weather this weekend!

TIME articles of the day

After coming across TIME.com on Twitter, I found a plethora of interesting stories--two specific, well-written Facebook articles.

Misery has more company than you think, especially on Facebook

Facebook and Love: Why women are attracted to guys who play hard to get

I highly recommend these articles for the statistics included, psychological information and studies cited. They discuss reciprocation, self-esteem and relate to college students, so check them out!

Interesting articles

I think I become more of a journalism freak by the day.

Now that the majority of my classes do not allow the use of laptops, I write my notes in spiral notebooks. The downfalls of this include having to decipher my horribly illegible handwriting, and not getting to check my e-mail and news alerts the moment they come. So today, I successfully left my computer home all morning (instead of checking my e-mail during passing periods) and have now spent an hour and a half reading news and replying to e-mails. That's the result of full focus on the task at hand instead of instant responses.

Because I'm not in class where I can show the person next to me the interesting articles I find on my GoogleReader, but rather sitting at my desk alone, I feel the need to share them on this blog to react! I hope you enjoy my favorite news articles of the day and realize the effects as much as I do enough to be so shocked!

Oscars launches live streaming to attract younger viewers

Many get antidepressants for no psychiatric reason

Betting on news, AOL is buying The Huffington Post

Why I don't have a smartphone

Remember when as children, people in my generation had delegated times to go on the computer? Half-hour time allotments to check e-mail, play games online and then sign off? Wow, has that idea disappeared.

Not only do we no longer allot our time properly on the computer, but now there's smartphones. The BlackBerry, Droid and iPhone have taken over our society. Upon entering any social situation in college, rather than starting conversation with each other, people just look at their phones. If a dinner conversation dies, rather than starting another one, each person takes out his or her phone to send a text message, reply to an e-mail, play a game or utilize an "App" like Angrybirds to distract themselves. It's too awkward to just talk, right? Why would we do that?

This New York Times article I found today highlights this point, adding more of a business and professional standpoint to the idea. I think it's equally applicable to college students, as we feel an inherent need to be connected to what's going on around campus, in our hometowns, with our friends and in the world at large at any given point in time. The author writes, "Employees are using their smartphones and other devices to connect with corporate e-mail, applications and data wherever they happen to be — whether at home, on the go or even on vacation." He is right.

We are educated that we need to know what is going on in the world. Current events quizzes are given, and professors lead conversations in class that we are expected to keep up in. But with so much going on in the world, how do we find the balance of how to stay involved without technology informing us of it?

John Lilly, the former chief executive of Mozilla (like Firefox, the internet browser), "recently pondered publicly what it meant to be so connected and decided to initiate a temporary reprieve. ...Mr Lilly is by choice and necessity a power user of multiple gadgets and social media. As he prepared for his new role as a venture partner at Greylock Partners, the Silicon Valley investment firm, he announced on his blog that he was taking time "to be a little more generative, to think bigger, more original thoughts. He said he would turn off Google Reader, Twitter and Facebook. 'I'm really excited to have a bit of time to start 2011 to slow down, try to think longer term, and to slow down my clock,' he wrote."

According to the New York Times article, once he began this resolution, he could not figure out how to disengage, and admitted that he didn't want to. As I have the same routine daily of checking Google Reader, Facebook and Twitter, I pondered how this is different from overall awareness of current events. I realized, instead of reading a continuous feed of news, we learn everyone in our 'network''s commentary on the news. Immediately. Retweets, "like"s and replies have created a world of constant opinion, so why discuss our opinion aloud when it's already written down?

People have become more expressive through words on the Internet instead of in person. They have thoughts, hopes and complaints that they would never say aloud, but write in a text, Tweet or Facebook post any day. Therefore, one of my goals is to "disengage" more from the Facebook/Twitter side of things and ask people what they think and how they feel, rather than comment on what they write on the internet. We as a society have become so impatient because we cannot wait to ask people what they think, we demand immediate response. Is this possible? Probably not. But usage can definitely be decreased to focus on qualitative conversation. Let's learn from this article to stray away from constantly checking Facebook statuses and Tweets on phones, and pay attention to the conversation in front of us.

How to properly listen in the social media world

As a strategic communication student, I have been referred to the publication Advertising Age by many professors. The other day, I stumbled across this article titled "Six things you need to know about social listening." Written by Kyle Monson, it reviews monitoring yourself on the internet with the various social media sites and discusses the various types of listening. Check it out below!

Social media monitoring and social listening have been buzzwords for a while now, so every brand with a digital presence should already be engaged in it. But there are different levels for different size organizations, different digital competencies, and different budgets. To break it down:

1. Basic keyword tracking—through Google Alerts, Twitter Search, or whatever else—is the baseline level of monitoring, but is certainly sufficient for smaller brands without a huge Web presence.
2. Advanced tracking involves a paid tool like Radian6 that really lets you dive into the real-time stream and extract meaningful context from deep rivers of data.
3. For lack of a better term (help me coin one!), "Super-advanced tracking" puts the Radian6 dashboard in front of what we call a SME, or "subject-matter expert."

I insist on this advanced level of listening for the campaigns I work with. It's far too tempting to hand the social monitoring responsibilities over to an intern, who might not be able to provide proper insight into the community and its niche celebrities, activists, and journalists.

The central dilemma and promise of social listening is the ability to separate small amounts of signal from huge amounts of noise, and then parse that signal for meaning. Radian6 and its ilk do a good job of filtering out the noise, but it's on the human user to make sense of what gets through. Reliably interpreting what people are really saying is hard enough in real life, it's harder still on the Internet, and it's almost impossible when you're overhearing the conversations of a group to which you don't yourself belong. Furthermore, the intelligence you glean from listening and the actions you take will change based on whom is doing the listening—so put the intern somewhere else, and find a SME to do your social listening.

Which brings us to the next question: Why are you listening and tracking? Is it because an article said you should? Is it because social media monitoring is a service you can charge your clients for? Or is it because listening is essential to your brand, and campaign goals and actions?

I'd break our goals into three parts, and suggest that a truly integrated social media campaign should be doing all three.

Listening for intelligence is the easiest, and should be part of your campaign's discovery process—you're tapping into the world's biggest focus group. There are dangers in relying too much on the info you collect from social media, but it's a useful way to quickly gauge the attitudes and opinions of your brand's loudest advocates and detractors. The other aspect of listening for intelligence is gathering metrics—are you driving earned media? Is the audience responding the way you intended?

Listening for intelligence is often not done in real time, and may not need to be. A weekly or even monthly report of what people are saying about your brand could be totally sufficient, if you are using the data to set long-term strategies instead of short-term responses.

Listening for customer service is the next level. Everyone talks about this like it's an amazing feat of social media dexterity. Whatever. Without the right strategy, proactive customer service reachout can do more harm than good (and it often does—think of the hapless corporate social media rep who thinks I'm inviting him to contact me when I tweet that his company should DIAF).

Instead, develop a customer service campaign that will improve your customers' experience with your brand. Helping, providing meaningful answers, and resolving issues are good. Intrusions, meaningless apologies, or—worse yet—antagonizing will likely blow up in your face.

Listening for action: Here's where this stuff gets fun. Listening for action means you're not just monitoring conversations, you're responding to them—and you're not just responding to conversations, you're getting involved in them. This is, to put it mildly, hard, especially with big brands. You need an expert using Radian6, making real-time recommendations; you need the involvement and approval of the brand's PR and legal teams; you need content producers involved and prepared for rapid-response briefs; you might even want real-time paid media to amplify the conversation to a broader audience. There are lots of stakeholders and lots of walls and silos to break down, and then there is the difficulty of getting recognized as a participant in a tight-knit online community that probably doesn't welcome brand participation.

It's difficult, but listening for action is essential, because it ties your social media strategy to the brand's overall attributes and campaign goals. It's an opportunity to not just monitor but affect perceptions and sentiment on a large scale.

Strategic Communication

Some Mizzou journalism students recently started a website called J-School Buzz, a forum to report commentary and provide updates about the Missouri School of Journalism. I first heard about it when they followed me on Twitter, and a Facebook page was also created to advertise the site.

The J-School seniors that run it are intelligent and witty people, with tags for the various emphasis areas and other topics about news on campus and how it was reported, J-School relationships and plugs, as well as "Starving Journalist," information about where you can get free food on campus. The current series being produced is on stereotypes of the different sequences of the Journalism School- broadcast, print/digital, photojournalism, convergence, magazine and strategic communication. It explores what the general population thinks of each emphasis area and considers its accuracy.

Yesterday, this article was posted titled "StratCommers are not all cop-outs." As a strategic communication student who contemplated a lot about which emphasis area to choose, this post hit home. Forty percent of the J-School is made up of strategic communication students, and some people hold this viewpoint because they will switch to Strat Comm after not enjoying the nature of reporting that the other sequences emphasize. While I love interviewing and reporting and miss doing so much of it after being a Strat Comm major, I also love public relations. The author of the post stresses how "it's not all analyzing ads," it's more than that. Working with clients and applying planning skills and more of a marketing side is integrated into Strategic Communication, which is what I enjoy learning about. Thus, I was thankful to relate to this post.

What I love about this website is that while utilizing sarcasm and, it refutes gossip, stereotypes and accurately reports on the news. Instead of just making a claim, the writers still back it up with journalistic evidence because that's what the school teaches us to apply. In the following story, a student who had embarrassing posters posted about her around campus mentions that the campus police were launching an investigation. The blogger writing the story called MUPD to confirm that this was true. Regardless of the purpose, J-School students are still producing solid journalism. And that's why I love being a student here.

Stressed students hit emotional low

The Chicago Tribune published this story, "More college freshmen feeling overwhelmed, survey finds," January 27.

Its significant finding, as apparent by the headline, was that "this year's college freshmen report feeling higher levels of emotional and financial stress than their predecessors did." .... "Half of current first-year students, 51.9 percent, rated their emotional health above average or higher, down from 55.3 percent last year."

"Just 45.9 percent of women in the class described themselves as emotionally strong, compared with 59.1 percent of men."

THAT IS A HUGE PROBLEM. Girls in today's society, especially in college, are now requiring attention to make them happy. Our age is so used to receiving attention on social networking that when they attend college and try making new friends at school the real way or meeting boys, not only can they not do it, but they cannot be confident. It scares me.

Another article I plan on writing about soon is the recent study that college students go away learning a lot less scholastically than in the future. I think this directly correlates with new college students experiencing higher levels of emotional stress, because when you can't get what you want without trying, people get upset. Being a college student in today's world means independence; it's taught that you value being carefree, yourself and that people will appreciate that. I hate to break it to you, but everything's not handed to you. It takes time and energy to deal with your finances, make your own schedule and create friendships that aren't in a forced environment.

I hope people realize from this study that rather than moping on their lives and being depressed, we as a society should do something to change it. Colleges bringing in motivational speakers on how to deal with freshmen year could be one step. Therefore, I hope we educate students on independence, the purpose of school, work and being an adult to produce a happier society.

Winter Break #2: three snow days in a row!

It's probably the nicest thing ever to have a second winter break. But not at home where relaxation is different. A winter break at college with all of your college friends, where you are all snowed in together.

It started with about a 2-inch sheet of ice on Monday. Many students commented that we "ice-skated" to class, as shoes slid down any tiny hill. On the way to my 9 a.m. class, I saw six people fall before I got out of Greektown (where I live on campus). The conditions were dangerous and below is the house parking lot.

I scraped the ice off of my car before the snow came to avoid future scraping troubles, and here is how it appeared through the driver's seat window!
The University of Missouri is very hesitant to cancelling school, so it was a huge shocker when classes were called off for Tuesday "in anticipation" of a snowstorm. In fact, it didn't begin snowing until around 4 a.m. on Tuesday morning, and this is what it looked like when I woke up (at noon). The snow totaled 17.7 inches by the end of the "blizzard," and to a Chicagoan or someone on the east coast, that might not seem like much. But Missouri was in a "state of emergency" and the National Guard was called in. There is no budget for more plows or salt. So it is definitely an experience to watch a disaster happen that while in larger cities can be easily taken care of, it cannot be the case here.

By Tuesday evening, the streets had somewhat been plowed, but since Missouri isn't accustomed to plowing like Chicago, they put a barrier of snow in the middle of the street. This is Maryland/Tiger Avenue. The city of Columbia only has 18 snow plows for a town of 100,000 people and many streets (more than Jefferson City, who has more plows than us). Therefore, it was nice that something was taken away from the last snowstorm and the streets were plowed less than 72 hours after it snowed!

Kathryn, me, Talia, Shaina and Laura meeting up to reduce everyone's cabin fever
Playing Catchphrase!
Snow day #2: Wednesday. After sitting inside all of Monday and Tuesday, it was finally time to brave the weather and take a walk. Amy and I walked around campus, and surprisingly enough, saw many other small groups of friends doing the same. Everyone was so sick of their own homes and being locked in that they were bonding over the need to get out.

It was adorable. Normally during the winter, people refuse to go on walks or be outside because "it's too cold." But regardless of the almost negative weather, everyone was happy. There was nothing TO stress about. We had the opportunity to pause life for three straight days and ignore every meeting, appointment or class that was scheduled. So it made me very joyous to see that many students on the MU campus going on walks and enjoying time with their friends--because that's hard to plan during the semester.

Here's me and my car as we start the walk!
A hole by Memorial Union

At the Heidelberg with Emilia and Alex for a late-night hang-out...on a weeknight!

Snow day #3: Shaina and Amy picked up Kate, Kathryn to buy supplies and bake at Respect! Upon arriving at Hyvee, we saw in the parking spot next to us that one car pulled a little too far forward. Look at all that snow!
Here's the five of us in the Respect kitchen where we made Tollhouse cookies and brownies! Although we were missing Laura, it was nice to catch up and relax stress-free!

Essentially, the last three days has been a nice break from the norm and its own winter break in Columbia on campus! I got ahead on work, was productive with homework, scrapbooking and television, and now get to enjoy the WEEKEND! I hope the snow hasn't been quite as bed wherever you are and if it was, that you enjoyed this little vacation!

Before the storm

Before Missouri shut down because of snow, the Phi Mu executive board took a trip to Maryville, Mo. for Officer Training at Northwest Missouri State University! Since Maryville is four hours from Columbia, we left last Friday and stayed in Kansas City for the evening.

Because we were on the Missouri side, we got to explore some of (what I think are) Missouri's greatest shopping centers and plazas and went to Zona Rosa! With seven sorority girls and our chapter advisor, our first stop after dinner was Forever 21. As you can see, we all purchased something :).

Our treasurer, risk manager, chapter advisor, PR chair, assistant membership, me, Phi director, president, assistant membership and social chair at Northwest Missouri State! It was a great opportunity to discuss ideas and exchange stories with other chapters and their positions and I enjoyed the advice and guidance.

I am obsessed with the sky. "You could have a horrible piece of art, and if it has a beautiful sky, Katie loves it!" Kate said. Missouri does have some good sunsets, and here's one of them!
When I got back on Saturday night, I had to go to the free Afroman concert at the Blue Note! But you don't go to Afroman because he is a good rapper or to listen to him. You just go because it's something to do! So it was a pretty comedic experience.

Look forward to some upcoming photos from the snow/ice storm!

Some remain good-hearted in the snow

Crazy news of the day: Chicago residents who were forced to abandon their cars on Lake Shore Drive will be able to get them back at no charge! See article here.

I'm glad that a snowstorm, blizzard, snow-nami, snowpocalypse or whatever the midwest chooses to call it, has brought a kind and relaxed spirit to people everywhere....except the people plowing the snow.