Monsanto makes for a gracious host

This past weekend, I met with the other National Agricultural Communicators of Tomorrow officers in St. Louis, Mo., for our fall board meeting. We come from across the nation - California, Missouri, Florida and Oklahoma. Monsanto allowed us to visit their world headquarters and provided a conference room for our business meeting.

It was the perfect atmosphere for us to cover what we needed - from the Critique and Contest to the new Web site, and we even discussed podcasts and fundraising. I'd like to offer a giant "THANK YOU" to Monsanto for their hospitality. We received breakfast, a mid-morning snack and lunch. Yum!

Lunch is what I'd like to discuss as related to social media. Monsanto created a new social media team within their public affairs department, and we talked a lot about this during lunch. This is a fairly new team - I believe one gentleman started working strictly on social media in July, and now it's a team of three. They have a Twitter page and are out in the blogosphere. Obviously, this is the direction media is going. All of this Web 2.0 stuff is being noticed by top companies. Don't you think companies like Monsanto, IBM or the National Pork Board would simply ignore this if it didn't matter?

I learned a lot about Monsanto during our visit, and it's definitely a company for which you should want to work. I could tell the employees loved what they did and believed in what they were working to accomplish. Their passion was contagious! All of the officers agreed visiting with them made us excited to graduate and pursue our careers.

Thank you to Megan, Katie, Kathleen and Ben! I enjoyed every second!

Blogging for financial support

I went home this weekend for my cousin's wedding, and as I walked into my bedroom, one of the many things sitting on my bed was OSU's latest edition of STATE magazine. I was pretty excited to sit down and look through it. The layouts are interesting and the stories are usually pretty good.

Well, toward the back of the magazine, there's an advertisement for the OSU Foundation. It is advertising a student-written blog. According to the ad copy, this sophomore OSU student will post once a week, talking about how the scholarship money is helping him, how it's being put to good use, etc.

This is a neat idea for OSU to gain more financial support. The OSU Foundation is exploring and using all available tools. Every single avenue should be used to reach your target audience. Hats off to the OSU Foundation for doing exactly that!!