ACE Update – January 2017
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One of my favorite memories of ACE traces back perhaps to about 1990 when our Illinois members hosted a North Central Region conference in Champaign-Urbana. Anita Povich was a key leader of the planning team and all of us got into the spirit of the occasion. A theme, "On the Horizon," permitted featuring this prairie region of the Midwest and helped give a forward-looking thrust to the program. I remember attending an evening planetarium show about prairie skies. We hoped the visiting ACE members enjoyed this conference and I recall how the planning and hosting activities added teamwork and ACE spirit here.
My involvement in ACE was primarily to learn more and get to know personally many of those professionals in the organization from around the country who were tops in the field of communications. I would read about what these men and women were doing in their particular state, or on the national level, in our ACE publications. I was “awe struck” then, and still am by these many communication trail blazers! I did learn from them and they did help me do a better job! Even now, after 26 years in retirement, I still get a thrill when reading or hearing about them. And getting to know many of them personally was a major highlight in my career.- Janet Rodekohr, Retiree Director
A quick overview of online resources, many of them free, for creative professionals looking to advance their professional development.The ACE Writing Learning Community Presents: The Art of the Profile: Setting the Scene
This webinar is aimed at ACE (Association for Communication Excellence) members, but is free and open to all.
The webinar will be presented by Victor Villegas, ACE Professional Development director and Technology & Media Support coordinator for Oregon State University Extension.
Some of the best writing starts with good painting. Painting “word pictures,” that is. Courtney Leeper, writer for The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, will share her approach to turning any story into a “people” story and drawing in readers with scene setters. Examples will include the 2016 ACE Gold Awards in Writing for Magazines (“The Fruits of Their Labor”) and Writing Within a Specialized Publication (Beyond the Numbers, the Noble Foundation 2014 annual report).The ACE Research and Learning Community has started a series of monthly podcasts featuring interviews with faculty and professionals interested in agricultural communications education and research.
News podcasts introduce agricultural communication faculty
In this qualitative case study, McDonald’s social media video campaign, “Our Food, Your Questions” was analyzed to determine how a specific corporation provided content to meet consumers’ demand for food-based information. Findings suggest user-generated information helped develop the content for the social media campaign in terms of video topics and specific content addressed. The authors provide recommendations as to how multimedia content should be incorporated in campaigns to better facilitate communication.
In August 2014, Toledo, Ohio, experienced a dangerous algae bloom that led to a citywide water ban. News media coverage of the incident was widespread, as was social media conversation. To better understand the dynamics of the conversation—especially as it pertained to agriculture— researchers used a social media analysis platform to identify high-influence Twitter users who participated in the water-quality discussions both before and after the ban.
Researchers revealed a dearth of agriculture-related content and also identified three categories of Twitter users in the conversation, including news sources, activists, and agriculture advocates. Identifying these users allows practitioners to monitor influential accounts for emerging issues and to engage with authoritative users in their geographic regions. You can read the article here.
Send submissions, upcoming webinars and ideas to forbes@purdue.edu.
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