About

Melissa Cheater
Social Web Strategist; Web Communications at the Richard Ivey School of Business

At 25, Melissa is a borderline “millennial” with experience in web dating back to the late 1990’s. She combines an entrepreneurial spirit with a passion for communication technologies and online behaviours to provide marketing and best practice insight into the new world of communications.  Melissa brings experience from both the private and public sectors to the table, and has worked within organizations as well as an established marketing consultant with Academica Group Inc.  She focused the final years of her degree on online social networking and its implications, and went forward to break new ground alongside Academica Group’s Social Media & Web Innovation team.  Their work with social networks and higher education marketing has been discussed nationally in publications such as Maclean’s magazine and others.  Melissa is currently a web specialist at the Richard Ivey School of Business, at the University of Western Ontario (where she graduated with a BA in Media Studies in 2006).

Melissa maintains an independent blog at www.melissacheater.com and can be reached via Twitter (@mmbc) or LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/melissacheater).

Extended Biography

Honours BA specializing in Media & Public Interest
Faculty of Information & Media Studies, University of Western Ontario

Current Position:
Web Communications Specialist,
Richard Ivey School of Business (University of Western Ontario) as of Spring 2009.

Background:
I’ve been active in web design and marketing since the age of 14 – starting with free hosts and notepad. Since then I have worked in both proprietary and open source content management systems, as well as on large-scale sites in both Dreamweaver and FrontPage.

I have worked across government, commercial and non-profit sites, and have spent the last three years focused on social media and higher education web design and marketing.

Between 2005 and 2007, I worked closely with the Anonequity/On the ID Trail, a national SSHRCC project bringing together technology, law and sociology minds to focus on identity and privacy online.  I also had the opportunity to work one-on-one with Dr. Burkell at the Faculty of Information & Media Studies, UWO, and take a focused study of social network theory.

Personal:
I live in London, Ontario but am originally from Corner Brook, Newfoundland.  I have been in London since my undergraduate degree at UWO and am very happy to be back on campus working with UWO’s Richard Ivey School of Business.

I have a maltese x shih tzu named Turk Turkleton, after the TV show scrubs, and have been waging an endless war against dishes in my kitchen for the last 6 years.  I love to read but often have to make due with reading feeds on my blackberry on the bus to and from campus.