Fumbling Through College

This week the book talks about the seven steps to the perfect measurement program. Measurement is important because you need to grow as a business, and to grow as a business you need to figure out what you're doing wrong and figure out what you're doing right. There is one step I see to be the most important when going through this process. The first step is to define goals and objectives. You must create goals because in any part of life, you need to be working toward an objective. This is because if you are working to get to an objective or a certain level, you are more likely to succeed. You will be more driven and care even more.

I'm sure everyone here knows what a geotag is on Snapchat. If you do not, It is a custom sticker for Snapchat that can be accessed when you are in a certain area or in a certain area during a certain time. As of a couple months ago, now you can actually create your own geotag right on Snapchat. Before if you wanted to create a geotag, you had to have the skills to actually create one, and then send it to Snapchat for it to be approved. Now you can actually create a custom tag and then pay for it right there on the app. These custom geotags can be very useful for things such as sports games or weddings, but you'll most likely see them during a sorority event. Have you used a custom geotag?

Alright let's be honest, Halloween is in the top three for best holidays of the year. Only competing with groundhogs day and of course Leif Erikson day. Halloween is one of the best holidays because you can do so many fun activities involving it. Going to the pumpkin patch is probably the best first date idea ever, let me explain why. It is usually cheap, so you can easily pay for your date. The main reason it is the best first date is that you don't even need to think about a second date idea. You just picked out some pumpkins, and obviously, they're gonna need carved! Let me know what you think!

This week we learned all about review websites such as Google and Yelp. There are some great tips on how to use these review sites. One good tip is to not take reviews to heart. People who leave reviews are usually the unhappy customers. The happy customers do not usually leave customers. Another tip that seems to pop up often is to reverse engineer what good companies are doing. I think a huge theme in social media is to figure out what the great companies do and make it your own. Don't copy it but use the skeleton of what other companies do.

This week I made a video of fun things to do in Ada. My favorite thing to do is to watch TV, movies, and play video games. I used an app called Magisto to make the video. I thought the app was easy to use but did not let me customize my video how I wanted to. You can find the link to my video here .

It's around this time in the semester when it feels like you're going to drown in your schoolwork. Your days are filled with homework, projects, presentations, and exams. It can seem like a lot to take on but I have ten study tips that should help you. 10. Start studying a couple days before the exam 9. Schedule your week and figure out when to do what 8. Go to the library to do work 7. Make flashcards 6. Don't bring your phone 5. Listen to some good studying music 4. Work with classmates 3. Ask for help if you don't understand something 2. Give yourself breaks 1. Don't stress too much

I'm sure you all have heard of Pinterest. Now I know most of you are probably thinking that Pinterest is where white girls get ideas for decorating or what to cook. While most of you are probably right, there are also many other great ways to utilize Pinterest. Pinterest is basically an idea board for anything you can imagine. Things such at what to dress up your dog as for Halloween to decorating your dorm. The easiest way to succeed on Pinterest is to find companies that are doing Pinterest well and reverse engineer them. Companies also want people to contribute to their boards and also share boards. This will get you maximum engagement. How do you use Pinterest?

This past month YouTube has made some serious moves in its advertising department. Companies found out that some videos that featured their ads could possibly be offensive. To combat this, YouTube has started to flag videos that use offensive language or graphic visuals. When videos are flagged, ads from companies that are concerned are taken down. With ads being taken down, YouTubers are making less money on their videos. This sounds like possibly a good idea, but the problem is that the system is automatically flagging many videos that are not offensive such as educational channels or video game channels. This system needs to be enhanced to flag videos that are actually not offensive. There are hateful videos on YouTube, but most of the channels that are losing money from this, are not hateful. What do you guys think on this issue?

Friday night marked the last day for the lacrosse team to practice until the spring. Our coaches drafted an orange team and a white team to play each other. We played under the lights, with referees and also fans in the stands. It was cool to see everyone put on eyeblack and get ready like it was a real game. As a program, I feel like our team evolved throughout the short month of practice. You could see in the last week of practice how much potential we had because we all started to care more about our program. The juniors realized that they only have two more seasons left in their college career, which is insane. I am super excited to see the team work hard in the offseason and help us reach our goals in the season.

This weeks chapter was about YouTube, and how to use it properly. YouTube is both a content hosting website, and also a social media platform. YouTube features its own searching bar, which you can use to find a video on anything you want. You can also filter your search by upload date, type of content, length of video, features, or sort the videos. YouTube also has a feature where you can look at the video data of competitors, which I think is very interesting. They key to having a successful YouTube channel is to add emotion. For most businesses, the best emotion to use is humor. Humor can encourage sharing, without having negative consequences. If your video is funny, it will be shared purely because people think it's funny, then people will look ath the product and consider it.

Starting a couple weeks ago, Spotify announced that a Hulu membership would be added to any Spotify student membership. The Spotify student membership is only $5 a month. The base price for a Spotify account is $9.99 a month, and for Hulu, it is $5.99 a month. You are essentially saving $11 a month by using the Spotify discount, which is fantastic. I personally never used Hulu, mostly because I already have Netflix. But after seeing on twitter that I can get Hulu for free I thought, why not? I like Hulu because it has some shows that Netflix does not. I don't think I see myself ever choosing to use one over the other, I would probably just use both because they do have different show lists. Are you taking advantage of the offer? How did you find out about it?

This past weekend was fall break. I was super excited to get home and see my family. I spent my weekend doing everything I like to do, which is to do nothing and to shop. My sister, mom and I went over to Easton and spent a couple hours walking around shopping. I always dread going into American Eagle because I work there over the winter and the summer, and I'm afraid that my managers will try to make me work. Sunday I went and helped out at the Ohio Machine game. The Ohio Machine is the professional lacrosse team in Columbus. The Ohio Machine Scrimmaged Ohio State, which was really cool to see. I interned there over the summer, and plan on continuing this internship through next year. This gameday was a little different because the social media girl just kind of gave me the Instagram and Twitter password for the Ohio Machine account and told me to have fun. It was a little scary tweeting and posting pictures knowing that thousands of people are going to see it, but I thin...

This week we read all about how to use Twitter. A lot of this information seemed to be general knowledge about Twitter, or something we learned in the last book. However, I did find a few things in this chapter very helpful. I believe the analytics section of Twitter can be extremely helpful. This will show you information such as which tweets are most popular, how many followers you gained, and much more! Another good overall tip is to just engage with other people. You can engage with tweets, hashtags, mentions, retweets, likes,  and replies. If you're trying to get a tweet the most engagement, you should research what exactly gets retweeted in your field. This way you can gain the most amount of interaction with your tweets.

Last night there was a shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas. It was very interesting to see how the media chose to cover the event. It seemed like many new stations relied on social media posts to figure out exactly what happened and to find pictures and videos. There were many videos of people trying to hide from gunshots. It was extremely disturbing to see everyone laying on the ground because they had nowhere to run. This was an extremely intimate point of view because it was coming directly from people that were there at the time. It was also interesting to see how Twitter users posted about their loved ones that they could not contact after the shooting.  All these posts had thousands and thousands of retweets. This is one example how I believe social media is changing the world for the better. What do you think about the social media posts on the shooting?

This weekend my family and I decided to take a spontaneous trip to Cleveland! I met my mom, dad, sister, aunt, uncle, and my two cousins at a hotel in downtown Cleveland. We started off the night by going to Barrio, which is a make your own taco place. After we ate, we walked over to Progressive Field to enjoy the Indians game. They lost, but it was still a great time! Sunday we took a trip to Cedar Point. This is a great thing to do during the fall because they have haunted houses and everything is Halloween themed. Surprisingly, there was almost no wait for any roller coaster in the park. We managed to ride almost every coaster there! I was tempted to ride the Millenium Force more than once, but I wasn't sure if my stomach could handle it. As the night winded down, I said goodbye to my family and started the sunset filled road trip back to Ada.