Comedian and Last Comic Standing (NBC) semi-finalist Tracey Ashley joined MSU students and East Lansing residents alike at the Union on the evening of Saturday, April 10^th. Following young comedians Felicia Gillespie and Ryan McKernan, Ashley performed for an hour and half to a full crowd in the main room of the Union. Ashley sat down with TBG’s own Alyssa Firth for a one on one interview after the show.

Firth: How did you like the audience?

Tracey Ashley: The audience was fantastic. They were great. They got everything, they were on top of it. They knew when to laugh. So obviously you guys get a lot of comedy here, so it was fun. This was a fun show.

Firth: Do you tend to get stuck up crowds once in awhile?

TA: Oh yeah. It’s not even that they’re stuck up sometimes. They might just be too young. We did a show last night and it was little sibs weekend so they had all their brothers and sisters, and like the youngest was eleven years old. You know, I’m talking politics, I’m talking about marriage, all kinds of things. I felt bad, so I did a joke for her so she could feel comfortable. It was just like a little kid joke, you know? They were fine, but there were some things I said and they were really like “Aww!” but they really thought, they took it literally. And their hearts were broken and I was like, “Come on you guys, just join reality.” But they were okay. But tonight was fantastic.

Firth: What did you think of the opening acts?

TA: They’re great. The young lady, Felicia Gillespie, she travels with me and she’s an up and coming star and you’ll hear her name a lot and I’m sure she’s going to be doing a lot of colleges. So I like her brand of humor a lot. And I like the young man, I think his name was Ryan, he was excellent. And you can tell he’s been doing this quite a bit, coming out here. And I like the twist with the guitar at the end. So it made for a, we had a variety show kind of tonight. So it made it, I thought it was great. It was a good build up.

Firth: Do you go to a lot of college campuses?

TA: I do a lot of college campuses. It’s funny that I didn’t do this school. A few years ago, I did a bunch of schools in Michigan. I started up in Sault St. Marie and I worked my way all the way back. I did big schools, small schools, but I never made it here because I think I was booked somewhere, so it was great to come back up here. We’ve done three schools in Michigan this week.

Firth: Well we’re glad to have you here!

TA: Thank you! Thank you!

Firth: How long have you been telling jokes?

TA: I’ve been doing comedy now for a total of 10 years, but not ten years straight doing comedy. I had a day job. I worked in advertising sales. I sold for a radio station that used to broadcast the Minnesota Vikings, so I sold there. I worked at a hip hop station for awhile and then when I decided to do comedy, I left the station and started doing temp work, so I could do a temp job and then go on the road. It wasn’t till I was able to get an agent and a manager that I could do it full time. Then I did Last Comic Standing and a lot of college students watch that. That ended up getting me on a lot of conferences, so since then I’ve been doing a lot of colleges and clubs.

Firth: Were you funny growing up?

TA: It’s so funny, cause in school I was funny. My family didn’t know cause, you know, I was raised by preachers, so at home I had to be contained and be on my best behavior. They would be shocked because they would get these phone calls from school, like, “Your niece won’t shut up in class.” I had one teacher, my professor, science professor, he threw me out of class and I wasn’t even talking. I said, “I wasn’t even talking!” and he said, “Well if you weren’t, you were gonna.” That’s how bad I was! He threw me out and I turned around and I just started acting out, like, “I’ma get you. I’ma get you!” and all the students were laughing. I just always liked to make people laugh, so it was something that I knew that I always wanted to and I couldn’t wait for the opportunity.

“Where U at?” Social media wise, probably wasting time on Twitter, if you’re not a Luddite. But there’s another U on Twitter these days and it’s good ole’ MSU, your friendly university.

The MSU Union has a very large Twitter presence (photo credit: Emily Lawler).

MSU has 119 recognized Twitter feeds belonging to colleges, student groups, schools, buildings and other entities. In theory, each feed is “specialized” — relating to a specific interest of a specific campus demographic. But it turns out that the less specific Twitter feeds may be the most successful.

According to Rachael Zylstra, an electronic media communications specialist with University Relations, there are two official campus-wide Twitter feeds run by University Relations: michiganstateu and MSUnews. The rest fall into “niche” categories that appeal to people of different majors, interests and locations.

But it turns out that some of those niches are more specialized than others.

“Have you seen the renovation at Brody yet? Check it out on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsv03LU4vdk Really cool stuff!”

You’d expect that tweet to come from a Brody resident, or maybe a residence hall’s Twitter feed. But that tweet was from the MSUUnion, and so are a whole lot of other ones.

When compared with the 16 Twitter accounts representing either colleges or buildings at MSU and all the ReTweets or @ messages in the month of March, the Union was at the center of all the activity. The most other feeds mentioned it, and it mentioned the most other feeds.

This represents how the 16 colleges and buildings on campus have connected through @ messages and ReTweets on Twitter. Bigger nodes indicate more connectivity, and bigger lines indicate more tweets between specific actors (graphic credit: Zachary P. Neal).

“I’m a little amazed by the diagram,” said Kat Cooper, who runs the Union feed singlehandedly.

Cooper works for Auxiliary Resources, a Department of the Division of Residential and Hospitality Services. When the feed started a year and a half ago, she said she wanted it to be a virtual place to get information.

“A student union is really the living room of a campus,” said Cooper. “It’s where you get info and go to events and communicate with other students. Our mission with a twitter feed is to create that sense as well.”

Being a generalist has served the Union well. It boasts 1,686 followers, more than either of the official general MSU Twitter feeds or any specialist college.

“I knew that we were among one of the more popular feeds aside from athletics, but I guess the connectivity I was unaware of,” said Cooper.

But in the world of Twitter as with business, networks are key. According to those who study networks, MSUUnion isn’t just popular. It holds a lot of power.

Imagine you’re a dude with a bunch of dude friends and one cousin that’s a Victoria’s Secret model.

That’s what Ron Burt, a business professor at University of Chicago, termed an “open triangle” relationship; you know your dude friend and you know your cousin, but they don’t know each other. That puts you in a position of being able to demand free drinks at your buddy’s parties or his physics notes from last semester in exchange for introducing him to your cousin.

It’s not that the Union is in the market for free drinks, but it has become a central actor in the whole MSU Twitter scene, giving it a lot of social capital. Since the Union interacts with the Breslin Center, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources and Olin and none of those interact with each other, you want the Union as your friend. That way you can be virtually “introduced” to all of those other feeds through ReTweets and @ messages.

Graphic credit: Brianna Ritivoy

But for some university entities, Twitter is less of a networking tool than a Public Relations (PR) mechanism. Wharton Center, for instance, has incorporated their Twitter account into their main website and also had it broadcast to two electronic billboards.

“It’s certainly become a very valuable resource to communicate with patrons but also a good way to spread our name across the country,” said Victor Hamburger, director of marketing at Wharton Center.

But he says there’s a lot of value in the personal connection with patrons messaging the center as well. According to Stanford Sociologist Mark Granovetter, that’s the best kind of connections to have: a mix of strong (personal messages) and weak (everybody on the highway sees Tweets on a billboard).

Communication Arts & Sciences (CAS) is at the center of a “twitter triangle” between the Union, Physical Plant and College of Social Science, and all four entities are strongly connected.

The reason CAS is central in the “strong” Twitter actors may be its combined use of Twitter as a tool for personal connection and PR. According to the college’s Communications Manager, Kirsten Khire, the college has made strong connections with individual students and alumni via Twitter. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have another purpose.

“I see value in the Public Relations sense, because we’re obviously having great conversations with our target audience on all kinds of topics,” said Khire.

The Communication Arts & Sciences Twitter feed is essentially playing both specialist and generalist in trying to find, @ message and link to the broadest variety of things that are of interest to its target audience of its students and alumni.

“There’s still some criteria there,” said Khire. She said the feed mainly ReTweets things “related to our college or related to our audiences.”

Some feeds are expanding into contests and questions that make interaction with users a stronger prospect. And according to Khire, Twitter isn’t in anybody’s job description. University entities usually have Twitter accounts because somebody took it upon themselves.

“It [Twitter] is important, especially with the college demographic,” said Zylstra of university Twitter feeds. And she’s part of a four-person social media team with University Relations — Twitter is in her job description.

Like anything, the more time a person puts into Twitter, the more they get out of it. Excepting star power (this means you, MSU_Basketball), the more a person generates content and @ messages and ReTweets, the more followers they have. And the more followers, the more “open triangles” and important connections.

So next time you’re messing around on Twitter during class, remember that the connections you’re making —  weak and strong –might be important. They may lead to a job. And directly or indirectly, Twitter can lead to jobs or connections you’ve never had. Maybe it’s time to re-think whether or not social networking is “wasting time.”