social media – Page 15 – Andrew Careaga

At Missouri S&T we have so many things to be thankful for, we need a big canvas to express our gratitude.

So when our marketing and communications team decided to ask our students, faculty and staff to put into written words what they’re thankful for, we did what any marketer would do. We made the logo bigger. Much bigger.

Students, faculty and staff alike shared their thankfulness on this 3-D S&T logo, changing its canvas from white to Miner green. Photo by Sam O’Keefe/Missouri S&T

This larger-than-life, three-dimensional version of the “S&T” part of our university logo became the canvas for more than 500 expressions of thanksgiving. The video below (and here) tells the story.

How this project came to be is a story in and of itself. Our marketing and communications team wanted to continue a new tradition of promoting a spirit of gratitude during this time of year. (Last year, we had students write down their expressions of gratitude on smaller, more personalized canvases.) This year, we wanted to go big. Hence, the logo. Cut to precision by technicians in our campus’s High Pressure Waterjet Laboratory, sanded to perfection by a staff member over a weekend, and painted by students from our Kummer Student Design Center, the logo — made from blue foam board, stacked and glued together — became the work of art you see here. Then we took it around campus with a fistful of green Sharpees and asked anyone we could find to sign the logo. (We also incorporated this activity into an annual story-gathering event we call the “casting call,” where some 50 students chatted with us about life at S&T.) In the end, we had over 500 written comments on the logo.

We went live with our story (A larger-than-life way to give thanks) on Thursday and will begin pushing the #ThankfulMiners hashtag on social media in hopes of hearing from other students, alumni, faculty and others who have a reason to give thanks. (Our sports teams are known as the Miners.)

Speaking of reasons to give thanks, I must give credit to our marketing and communications team for their creativity, resourcefulness, hard work and persistence to turn this concept into a reality. For all of that, I’m a very thankful Miner.

In the spirit of the Halloween season, I’m reposting something from a year ago. Enjoy.

With Halloween approaching, we’ll soon see kids (and more than a few adults) dressed up as their favorite scary creatures. All manner of make-believe zombies, vampires and ghosts will come knocking on our doors.

Fortunately, Halloween happens just one night a year. And it’s all in fun. Those ghouls and monsters aren’t real.

What IS real, unfortunately, are the social media manifestations of these nightmarish archetypes. As this Steamfeed Media post points out, for some social media users, every day is Fright Night.

Steamfeed’s Carrie Keenan describes the three most common types of social media spooks:

The zombie. Known by their mindless auto-tweets and RSS feeds, these mindless creatures are easy to spot. “Hold onto your brains when you see them coming and run!”
The ghost. “A ghost user is one who creates a business account because they ‘should’ be involved in social media,” Keenan writes. “They soon disappear into the internet ether never to be seen again.”
The vampire. These blood-sucking creatures “take your hard work and give themselves credit,” scraping content from your blog or website and passing it off as their own.

There may be more fiends out there, but these are three common ones in social media.

It’s okay to pretend to be one of these on Halloween. Just remember to be a real human the rest of the year. The same goes for your social media identity.

Photo of ComicCon 2013 Zombie Walk by Hooman.