My Favorite College Memories

In eight short days, I will be receiving my diploma from Ohio Northern University and beginning the next chapter in my life. ONU has provided me with an abundance of memories and knowledge that I will never forget. For my last required blog post, I decided to take a trip down memory lane to recap some of the great times I had as a polar bear in the past four years.



1. The Armory. My first two years in Ada, the Armory was open and that establishment provided me with many fun nights. The Armory had a huge dance floor and often had live bands. I remember sneaking in most of the time so I did not have to pay the five dollars for cover (#cheap). I will never forget the nights I had at the Armory dancing the night away with my closest friends.


2. SAAC Dances. Where do I even begin to describe the wonderful times at SAAC dances? Let’s just say, the volleyball team knows how to have a good time. The food was always delicious and I remember plopping a ridiculous amount of cheesy potatoes on my plate. If you want to see a picture of me in my prime, just look at a picture of me from any SAAC dance.


3. Volleyball. Deciding to play volleyball in college was one of the best decisions I have made in my lifetime. My teammates are the best and made my four years of collegiate volleyball very enjoyable. Being able to experience the final four my sophomore year is one of my greatest memories. Go Bears!


4. 218 E. University Ave. Living off campus my senior year was incredible. I felt so free and like a big girl living on my own. The parties and small gatherings we threw at our house were always so much fun and I will definitely miss this house.


5. The Beagle. I can’t talk about my favorite memories of Ada without mentioning the Beagle! The Beagle is where I have spent every single weekend of my junior and senior year. The Beagle was always followed by a trip to McDonalds, which was just as fun. One of the things I will miss most about Ada is being able to walk everywhere and the Beagle was definitely a good walking distance from my house.


I hope my readers and fellow Polar Bears enjoyed this post. To my graduating seniors, I will miss you all so much as we go different ways in our life. To the juniors, make the most of your last year in Ada because your college career will be done before you know it! Peace out Ada.

Lessons from Professional Bloggers

This week, I read Chapter Seven of Paul Gillin's The New Influencers. The section that really stuck out to me was entitled, "PR pro as blogger." I am new to the blogging world and probably would never have created a blog had I not taken social media at ONU. I thought if I had a blog, no one would read my posts anyways and I would be wasting my time. However, as I enter the real world in two short weeks, I realize my blog could be more important than I think. 

Andy Abramson is a PR professional who understands the blogosphere well. Abramson sees four basic benefits in blogs for his business: being quoted in the media, making new contacts, generating speaking engagements and bringing in business. Each blogger requires a custom pitch and vigorous follow-up. Since I am applying for various public relations and public outreach positions, I realize that keeping my blog will be beneficial to my professional and social world. 

Renee Blodgett is another top blogger in her profession. Blodgett's blog, Down the Avenue, is a smart, savvy, hip and very in tune with the culture of the Silicon Valley. She writes about her professional and personal experiences, and fiction. Blodgett's advice is that bloggers still need to have a message, blogs can't just be conversations. I took time to check out her blog and I was very impressed. I loved how she wrote about a wide range of topics, such as bin Laden's death, the ultimate women's expo, book releases, the galaxy, etc. Blodgett included many pictures, videos, slideshows and her favorite quotes, which I really enjoyed. Blodgett's blog can definitely serve as my 'mentor' blog when I enter the professional world. 

Reading this section in Paul Gillin's book inspired me to keep up with my blog after my social media course is over and I am no longer required to write three times a day. I hope I can find a job where I can utilize my blog to better the company. 

‘Dang it feels good to be a... SENIOR!’

This week was filled with fun and exciting activities. On Wednesday, the Dicke College of Business Administration held a senior luncheon with Dean Fenton for all students graduating in May. The luncheon was at one of the conference rooms in The Inn at Ohio Northern University. The food included some of my favorites: chicken alfredo, lasagna, spaghetti and meatballs, and breadsticks filled with cheese. Of course, I had a little bit of each main course. After the students ate, Dean Fenton spoke a few nice words with us and congratulated us on graduating. The Dean invited two past alumni to give us graduates some advice about job hunting and giving back to the university. The luncheon was a good time with some delicious food and great information.



Wednesday night the Senior Send-Off was held at the Lima Civic Center. My friends and I were really excited to attend this event. We had a little celebration before the vans were to pick us up from McIntosh Center at 5:15 p.m. We planned on getting on that first round of buses and vans, and we actually sprinted to Mac from our house to ensure we got on those vehicles. My friends and I got there at 5:12 p.m. sharp; and the big bus and vans were already gone. So what do we decide to do with our spare time until the next round comes back in 45 minutes? Go have a beer (or three) at the Inn bar.


I was having a blast at the Inn, but the buses and vans came back to Mac to take us to Lima. I made a new friend on the ride and sang my heart out for everyone in the van. Once we arrived at the Civic Center, I could not believe my eyes of how many pizza boxes and wings were in front of me. I loaded up my plate with four slices of peperoni and cheese pizza and about six mild wings. Once I finished eating, I played the various casino games and won nothing. That’s just my luck. The raffle prizes were announced last and again, I won nothing. But, I had a really awesome time with my fellow graduating seniors and P5’s and I’m glad I got to experience the Senior Send-Off.


In conclusion, I find that being a senior is great fun and I’m really going to miss all the good times I have been experiencing as of recently.

Another Event Increases Internet Traffic

Last week, I blogged about how the Royal Wedding dominated the social media world. This week, we have another huge event significantly increasing Internet traffic. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about – Osama bin Laden’s death.

I enjoyed finding statistics from the social media sites for the wedding of Kate and William, so I decided to write a similar blog as I did in week eight. But this time is a way different occurrence. Instead of celebrating a wedding, America is celebrating a death. I found an interesting article written by CNN staff writer, David Goldman, which deals with Twitter, Google, News sites and the death of bin Laden.

On Sunday night during the news event’s peak, Twitter users were posting 5,106 tweets per second. This traffic on Twitter is the second-highest volume of tweets in Twitter’s history. The first is when Japan brought in the 2011 New Year, tallying 6,939 tweets per second. From 10:45 p.m. to 2:20 a.m. Eastern Time on Monday, the average of tweets reached 3,000 per second. This represented the highest sustained rate of tweets per second in Twitter’s lifetime. Another interesting fact is that before the White House told the news media that bin Laden had been killed, a former Secretary of Defense posted the word on his Twitter:

“So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot Damn.”

Google Trends ranked the keywords “Osama bin Laden dead” as “volcanic,” the top level Google assigns for a trending topic. Osama bin Laden’s story resulted in a peak of more than 4.1 million page views per second on news websites supported and tracked by content delivery network Akamai, which delivers about 20% of the Internet’s content. Akamai supports nytimes.com, reuters.com, bbc.com and usatoday.com. Osama’s death brought roughly 2.5 million page views per second on those pages. However, this story did not rank in the company’s top 10 news events for the highest page-view peaks. The Royal Wedding ranked sixth on Akamai’s list with 5.4 million page views per second.

I (unlike most people) did see the news on bin Laden’s death first on the television while watching Dateline NBC. However, my friends and thousands of others across the world heard the news first on Twitter or Facebook.

Run for the Roses

Yesterday, I ran in the Third Annual Run for the Roses at Ohio Northern University’s Dial-Roberson Stadium. This was my third year competing in the 5K part of the event, and I finished in 103^rd place with a time of 26 minutes and five seconds. I was proud of myself for being able to keep a decent pace the whole time, as I had not been working out like I used to last year and the weekends festivities were a little out of hand). However, I was more proud of myself for running and donating money to a good cause.

Run for the Roses is a race in loving memory of Angela Badertscher and in honor of Kim Badertscher, both of whom attended ONU and were diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis. Kim graduated from the ONU Athletic Training program then became a clinical outreach Athletic Trainer for the university. Angela lost her battle with Cystic Fibrosis about three years ago at the young age of 27.

The race is entitled Run for the Roses because children with Cystic Fibrosis often call the condition “65 Roses.” Last year, the event was able to raise $9,500 in the Badertscher’s name to a Cystic Fibrosis Organization of their choice. This year, the goal was to be able to donate over $10,000.

The ONU Athletic Training program did a great job with planning and organizing the race. I really hope they reach over $10,000 this year, and I am glad I was able to support the cause.

Where everyone should be: Twitter.

This week, my social media class received a Twitter assignment that involved following two people and two organizations on Twitter, and then we had to compare and contrast how they utilize the social media site. I followed and paid close attention to Geoff Livingston, Brian Solis, Lima News and the Cincinnati Enquirer on Twitter for one week.



I chose Lima News and the Cincinnati Enquirer because I thought comparing and contrasting two newspapers in different areas of the same state would be interesting. The Lima News description stated they are a daily newspaper covering nine counties in northwest Ohio and included the Lima News’s website. The Cincinnati Enquirer had a more simple statement, “auto news feed from Cincinnati.Com. Therefore, I thought the two Twitter profiles were going to be different from each other. The Cincinnati Enquirer’s picture was a cartoon boy holding a newspaper, while Lima News’s profile picture was more professional – a symbol of a blue and white torch. The Lima News has 14,701 tweets and has 600 followers. The Cincinnati Enquirer has twice as many tweets at 29,645 and has 4,367 followers.


The Cincinnati Enquirer’s Twitter is very simple to follow. All they do is put the title of the most recent news article as the status with the web address to access the full article following. The Cincinnati Enquirer has a new tweet basically every hour. Here are a couple examples of what the enquirer’s tweets look like: "Bengals Draft Class 2011 http://bit.ly/kGYqWq". "April rain falls a few drops short of record http://bit.ly/jRnj3K." This is a very easy method for the newspaper and doesn’t take up much of the employee’s time. The Cincinnati Enquirer never used a hash tag, at least not this past week. Most of their headlines on Twitter were about car crashes, the Bengals, the Reds, shootings and other violence, robberies, the Flying Pig Marathon and several pictures from high school proms. The Lima News Twitter operated in the same format; recent headlines with the website to the story. However, these stories were greatly different than the Cincinnati Enquirer stories. Also, the Lima News updated their Twitter posts far less than the Enquirer. Sometimes the Lima News went 7 hours without a new story. Like Cincinnati, Lima had tweets about automobile accidents, prom photos and weather updates. But Lima News had way more tweets about specific events, different high school sports games, kids winning contests and citizens being honored for various things. I was interested to see that ONU was mentioned on April 26th about police making arrests in dorm thefts. ONU was mentioned this past week several times. Lima News did not use hash tags. I think they both should rethink their ways of utilizing Twitter because people can go to their newspaper home page and see the exact same stories. However, it is an easy way for people to pick and choose what stories they would like to read.


Geoff Livingston goes by @geoffliving on his Twitter. He has 11,862 followers and 38,845 tweets. Geoff is the co-founder of Zoetica and the author of two books. Brian Solis only has 10,133 tweets, but has 90,274 followers. He is the author of Engage! Solis sometimes tweets up to 6 times in one hour of the day, and is constantly on Twitter. I believe the only time Solis is not on Twitter is when he is asleep. Livingston is the same way, however a couple times he tweeted 10 or more times in the same hour.


Geoff Livingston sparingly uses hash tags, however in almost every post, he uses the shout out (@person’s name). This is an example of what many of his tweets look like: "@kanter @katyaN4G yes, @kamichat and i were honored to put in extra time over that weekend on the Gaga project." Livingston used his has tags numerous times for #SOBcon, which must have been a conference that recently took place in Chicago. He also uses many bit addresses that take users to articles on e-mail marketing, blog posts and online business techniques. Livingston seems very personable and keeping up with him was a difficult task. Brian Solis sparingly used hash tags either, but he did use them for generic terms, such as #love, #graphic and #Engage. Most of tweets were also about social media marketing and he included links to different articles. Solis is also a fan of the shout outs. Here is an example of his tweet: "RT @WOMMA: Free chapters of @briansolis and @duncanjwatts' books to download. Win signed copies! http://ht.ly/4Gwfh." Both Solis and Livingston were always telling people how it was nice to meet them and thanking people for various things, like reading their books. More recently, Solis was discussing paid celebrity tweets, which I found very interesting.


In conclusion, the two organizations and two people I followed were very similar to one another. I wish one of my selected four would have used hash tags more because I need to learn how to correctly use hash tags. However, I enjoyed this assignment and I’m glad I got my Twitter back!

Buyer Personas at ONU

For week eight, our only reading assignment was to read Chapter 10 of The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Scott. Chapter 10 was entitled, “You Are What You Publish: Building Your Marketing and PR Plan.”  This is a very important aspect for any business, whether you sell products or offer services. One of the most essential things to remember for a marketing or PR plan is to focus your complete attention on the buyers. For my analysis, I wanted to discuss buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a representative of what type of buyer organizations have identified as having a specific interest in the company or product. Building buyer personas are the single most vital step in creating the plan. Scott has a very interesting example in his book. A college website usually identifies five different buyer personas: young alumni, older alumni, the high school student who is considering college, the parents of the prospective student and current students. Therefore, a well-executed college site should target these five distinct buyer personas.

I took a look at ONU’s website to see if we were able to target the five different personas. On our home page, we are able to reach five personas with a drop down tab named, “Information for you.” The choices visitors to the website can select are: current students, faculty and staff, prospective students, parents and family, and alumni. I think our website does a fantastic job of reaching people are who invested in ONU or want to become a part of our Polar Bear family. This was done because ONU was able to get to know as much as they could about the particular group of people. For example, under the parents and family section, ONU realized they are a huge part of the decision process and often pay the bills. Therefore, the section includes a letter from Dr. Baker regarding tuition and our transition to semesters. Also, there is a link to sign up for the e-mail newsletter, Northern Express.

The buyer persona profile gives companies a chance to emphasize with target buyers and see the product or service through the buyer’s eyes. When customers encounter your website, you want the customers to think this organization understands me and my needs. ONU’s website does a great job of displaying different web content that will fit everyone’s specific wants and needs.