Consensus: YES! It may be required for some positions soon!
What kind of technology and computer programs do you use in the workplace?
Excel, web design, coding.Do whatever you can with a computer, every job that you take you will think I never thought I would be doing this!
What was the transition like between graduating and getting on a career path?
Ryan: I was lucky because I had an internship. Your life after graduation begins before you graduate. Have a couple different plans, and hopefully one of them will work out.
Sarah: Maintaining the relationships you make at school will help, using any kind of network that you can.
Ryan: Use your opportunities to better yourself. Ask what you can do. Make sure your employer just knows that you’re a good employee.
Ashlyn: You’re going to have to do things you don’t want to do. You’re not going to start out making the money you want to make, I’m still not making the kind of money I want to make.
Ashlie: (The career path) sounds really glitzy and glamorous, but it’s not.
Eric: Take the upper level classes, that is where you get more meat and more substance. I use what I learned in Public Relations everyday, you never know what you will pick up!
How did you go about finding internships? How helpful did you find them?
Sarah: I highly recommend reaching out to Joe Browning. I hounded him about interning for him. I arranged my schedule so I could work for him. I showed him my writing and I was like I will be here in the fall whether you like it or not.
Consensus: Internships are worth it, pursue them and be persistent!
How do you balance family life and professional life?
Ashlie: I have a four year old and a two year old. I work full time and so does my husband. You just figure out a way to make it work. I have a huge support system around me.
Ryan: I definitely agree that you have to have a support system. Without my mom, I don’t know what we would do. You make it work, if something happens you make the best of it.
Ashlyn: I don’t even have time to date. I’ve just been so focused on my career, it hasn’t bothered me.
Looking back, would you still have taken the time off before entering graduate school or entered straight after undergraduate school?
Panelist consensus: The time off helps to prepare you for the work load. Too much time off makes it harder to get back into the swing of the school schedule.
What was something that you did that got you in the door or really impressed your supervisor?
Ashlyn: Personality, confidence, and knowing what you want to do. They want somebody that wants the job and can get the job the done. You have to be 150 percent I think.
Ashlie: Express that you know their company, stalk them online.
Eric: One of the weirdest interviews I had was a graduate school interview, when they asked me what questions I had and they wanted to base the interview of that. That is something to be prepared for.
Panel one has officially kicked off! The panelists are: Sarah Briney, Ashlyn Burke, Ashlie Lanning, Ryan Koresko, and Eric Sneeden. A huge thank you to the panelists for coming back to share their knowledge!
So far Ms. Chin and Dr. Weber have gotten the first shout outs! Ashlyn Burke reminded us of Dr. Weber’s warning that most COM majors don’t have jobs that work 9 to 5 shifts. Sarah Briney credited Ms. Chin for the helpful knowledge she gained in Public Relations to Ms. Chin’s classes.
Were any of you totally sure of what you wanted to do?
Ashlyn Burke: I expect my career not to be boring, but I’m still not sure I want to do.
Sarah Briney: I never thought I would be working in market research. Went back to school for teaching and realized that wasn’t for me either.
Ryan Koresko: I’m still doing a similar job to what I thought I would, I think you just have to be focused but have some breathing room so that if something else comes you could go in that direction to.
How has social media changed your career?
Ashlie Lanning: Well it is my career. It means I’m always on. There’s definitely a shift towards “Real Time Marketing.”
Ashlyn Burke: Make sure that there’s nothing on social media that can harm your career. I can not tell you the impact it has.
Ryan Koresko: It’s just not acceptable to wait anymore, from a news perspective. You have to get the information out as it is happening.
Happy Spring Break! Many students have spent the last couple months (or longer) trying to figure out where their Spring Break time is best spent. If you’re like me, this preparation may have involved a thorough internet search to find the perfect hotel for your week off. An increasing number of hotel chains have discovered the perks of social media use and are developing ways to satisfy the needs and wants of their customers on an increasingly personal level.
Social media sites such as Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook Places, allow a user to “check in” or log their current location. While some companies may be skeptical about the relevance of such tools to the business that they do, the hotel industry has discovered that these services create a greater feeling of inclusion and personalization to their guests. Now hotels can invite guests to “check in” both literally and virtually, completely committing to their stay. Another added benefit of location-based check-in tools is the ability to track and incentivize a guest’s stay. Hotels participating in incentive programs for social media have been known to use a variety of rewards to reach out to their social media circle; examples include anything from a discounted meal in the hotel restaurant to late checkout times for the final night of your stay. Some hotels have gone so far as to collaborate with airlines or credit card companies to create an unofficial “rewards program”; offering discounts and frequent flier miles for using your American Express card or staying at the Hilton.
Of course with programs such as these, there can (and will) arise questions of security and privacy. Many savvy social media users are hesitant to place their exact location online. The flip side of this is that many users don’t want the world to know where they are NOT (for instance at home…protecting their belongings). While safety and security concerns are understandable, potential thieves and “bad guys” are not the only party with a vested interest in your location and personal information. Some of the aforementioned hotels have begun tracking mentions of their brand to create a more customized experience. For instance, say you book a night at a Marriott and tweet about how excited you are to stay there for your anniversary. With the use of these tools it’s not unlikely that you will open the door to find a chilled bottle of Champagne with a note from the staff wishing you a “Happy Anniversary”. Or, on a creepier note, a woman on the local radio the other day described checking into a hotel to find a wrapped dog bone and a note saying “Snickers misses you”, a response to her Facebook status the day before where she stated that she “ hate(s) to leave Snickers (her dog) at home when she goes on vacation”… To me, this was a little bit too personalized.
As is typical with this type of marketing, it is necessary to find a happy medium between discovering a guest’s needs and invading their privacy. How far is too far and is there such thing as too personal? While this may not be a topic that concerns you too much while lounging on the beach in Florida or soaking up the culture in a foreign country, it’s important to keep in mind that while logging your location, you may be signing up for more than you recognize. So what do you think? Will you be
“checking in” before you checkout this Spring Break?
Beginning March 1st, Google will be implementing a new privacy policy which will affect all of its products/services offered in order to gain a better perspective of their consumers and give them a more personalized experience. With the new privacy policy, Google will be able to gain more access to personal information by pulling material from all Google-operated services/products, such as E-mail, and using that information to create personalized advertisements to the user. This idea is similar to the one discussed in our earlier blog post titled “Not to Burst Your Bubble….”. With a better understanding of their users, Google will better be able to sell advertising, which in fact, is a main source of revenue for the company. Also, advertisers will be willing to spend more money with Google, if Google is bringing them more customers.
This privacy policy change has certainly upset a number of people, but it might be safe to say none like Microsoft, a competitor of Google’s. Within recent weeks, Microsoft has released a number of advertisements via print and YouTube blatantly attacking Google and its new privacy policy. With the headline, “Have you Been Scroogled?”, and the advertisements tearing the privacy policy to shreds, it’s hard for one to not compare these advertising campaigns to those of the presidential elections. It is unclear what the purpose of the advertisement is until the very last couple of seconds in which the Microsoft Outlook logo is revealed. There is even a website dedicated to the campaign. Upon visiting, the user is given the option to sign a petition against Google and the option to try Microsoft Outlook. The irony behind this whole situation is prevalent in several ways. First, Microsoft is placing these anti-Google advertisements on YouTube. Second, when searching for “Microsoft anti-Google ads” through the Google search engine, the websites provided where splattered with banner/marginal ads for Microsoft. When performing this same search through Bing (a search engine owned by Microsoft), the websites provided had shown ads sponsored by Google. This pattern resembles the concept of a “strange loop” within the Coordinated Management of Meaning theory. According to Littlejohn (1999, in Theories of Human Communication), these occur when “the rules of interpretation change from one point in the loop to another, causing a paradox, or strange loop, in which each contexts disconfirms the other”.
As of now, a little less than 10,000 people have signed the petition, which is only a small fraction of the G-mail users, and the YouTube advertisement have received far more “dislikes” than “likes”. Maybe this strategy isn’t as successful as Microsoft had hoped it would be. With Google being the most popular search engine, it is going to take more than that to persuade its users to up and switch to Microsoft. What does this say about Microsoft as a company? Will this be the new advertising technique of the future? Will we no longer see companies like Coke and Pepsi beating around the bush but rather taking deliberate stabs at one another? Only time will tell, but it will be interesting to see where the rest of Microsoft’s campaigning takes us.
IMC Hawks Blog 