Excitement!

Everyone is very excited about Halloween quickly approaching and I'm excited about it as well but what I really can't wait for is Thanksgiving! This Thanksgiving my roommates and I have decided to host a Thanksgiving dinner for all of our families.  It will be the first time that any of us have ever cooked a whole Thanksgiving dinner on our own.  We have all taken little responsibilites with the meal here and there with our own families but this year we are on our own.  We are combining everyone's traditions as well.  Some people have noodles at their dinner and different types of deserts than the rest of us so we are planning to combine it all.  It is going to be a very large dinner. With 6 of us currently living in the house that includes a lot of family members/boyfriends.  Our rough estimate as of right now is that there will be 24 people attending.  I have no idea where they are all going to sit and absolutely no idea how we are going to prepare enough food for that many people but I know at the end of the night we will be happy that we did it and gave back to our families and it will definitely be something that we will bond over.  I'm also looking forward to our families getting to know each other better.  Over the past 4 years they have met mostly on move in day passing in the halls and whatever they here about one another from the roommates.  But after 4 years of living with these amazing people we feel like family and want to show our parents just how strong of a family we are especially since this will be our last year all together.    So as much as I'm excited for Halloween you can see why Thanksgiving is going to be one to remember this year :)

Real-Time Job Description

In the Real-Time Marketing and PR book the author talks about a Real-Time Communication Job Description.  We searched online for communication job descriptions to see how similar they were to the one in the book.  A lot of the job descriptions online are not very specific to what the job should entail.  I think the reason for this is because companies often see their PR department as something of a side note or a part of the company that they might not exactly need. Because the job is often under appreciated the company doesn't always know what they should be looking for in a communications department employee.  I think that one of the most important aspects of the job description that most companies leave out is to watch for rogue sites that pop up.  It is very important to know what is going on in your market.  If you want to be the top company in your area you have no exactly what your competition is and what they are doing at all times.  The second  most important I think is to respond to customers in the channel that they contact you.  This can really keep your company on top of things.  Your customers want results and they want them fast.  They will be impressed if you are up on your social media and can contact them through their favorite media.  All in all companies need to realize how important their PR team is and how beneficial a good PR practitioner can be to their business.

Fall Break

This weekend was a great escape from school.  I was starting to feel super overwhelmed with all of the things that were going on in my classes and then the blessed fall break arrived.  I went away with my mom, aunt and cousin this weekend to Ashtabula county.  The weather was perfect for this fall weekend.  My family and I stayed in a cabin at a national park and we visited some of the covered bridges and went to a working farm.  Everything that we ate this weekend was grown fresh on the farm.  I had never had milk straight from a cow before and I will admit I was a little skeptical about it but I tried it and by the end of the weekend I loved it.  It tasted so fresh and creamy.  I wish I could drink it all the time.  The farm had so many cats and other animals.  It was so nice to go around and see all of the fresh vegetables and people really living off the land.  At the end of the weekend we drove across the Pennsylvania state line and went to a spill way which is a small section off of a lake where giant carp gather.  I had never seen anything like it.  There were so many fish and they were swimming basically on top of each other.  Overall it was a great weekend. Below is a video of the spillway! Enjoy!

Retweeting

In class we have learned the benefit of retweeting posts on Twitter.  In fact we spent a whole class period just going through Twitter looking for social media type information that we can retweet to share with our own Twitter followers.  We searched for social media type topics.  Twitter makes it really easy to do this because you can search topics by their hashtags.  I was able to put social media in the search bar and every tweet that a user wrote about social media would pop up.  The whole purpose of retweeting is to spread the word on the information that other users are putting out.  People that follow me on Twitter may have never read the tweets that I retweet if I had never reposted them.  Like for instance my roommates are pharmacy majors and even though they are interested in some of the articles that I would post especially articles involving social media because you don't have to be a PR major to enjoy learning new things about your social media.  So retweeting benefits the user that wrote the article as well as the other followers who may have never had a chance to read the article before.

Textbooks vs. PR Books

In Social Media class we are reading books that are very much unlike textbooks.  I find that in all of my other classes I read a highly overpriced textbook filled with lots of words whose meanings sometimes get lost in my head and the concepts are hardly ever explained well.  With the books we are reading in Social Media I am interested in the topics.  I hardly ever find myself drifting off of the subject and becoming bored while I read.  The concepts are very easy to apply to real life as well because they give concrete examples that anyone can understand.  I think that I learn more in this class because of how interesting the content and reading are to me.  (Maybe I'm bias because I love social media) But I really wish that other classes could find a way to make the information more exciting and keep the students interested in what was going on in the class.  I realize not all subject are easy to make exciting.  Like for instance my accounting class.  But if we were reading more books like this than our horrid textbook maybe I wouldn't find myself daydreaming as much as I do these days!

Homecoming Weekend

Homecoming weekend is always my favorite time of year! This year was no exception.  Our house was full of friends that graduated last year coming in and out and staying the night.  It was so nice to see everyone! I also love sleeping in a house full of friends that I haven't seen in awhile! The balloon glow was great! It is always one of my favorite things to go to.  And Saturday night the Beagle was really packed and exciting! I'm sad that the weekend is over.  I don't want to go back to reality after having such a great weekend and I it was hard to say goodbye to everyone that had come to stay.  Especially with this being senior year.  We are all going to be spread out everywhere pretty soon so it was nice to take the weekend to spend it with everyone.  Hope everyone else had as great a homecoming weekend as I did!

PRSSA Video

For social media I made a video about the Ohio Northern's PRSSA group.  I made the PRSSA Video using imovie on my computer.  I just wanted to showcase different pictures that would be a good representation of the PRSSA group.  I hope that everyone enjoys the video!