Tweet Tweet

This week we had an interesting assignment for Social Media class. For this assignment, we had to follow two professionals and two organizations on Twitter for one whole week. The purpose was to see how companies and PR professionals use their Twitter accounts. We were also told to look for trends, specifically how people used hashtags. I tried to follow people or companies I was already following. One of the PR masterminds I decided to pay close attention to was Daniel Lemin.

For those of you that do not know, Daniel Lemin is a big deal. He graduated from Ohio Northern and went to do to public relations work for Google. Now, he owns in own PR firm called Social Studio. Daniel is an extremely successful professional and a very nice person too. I was lucky enough to meet him this year at ONU's PaRtner's Conference. He was the keynote speaker. He also came in and presented in my case studies class. This week, Daniel tweeted four times. His posts were all related to public relations like this one:

Cutting and insightful words of wisdom. Are we in a social media bubble? http://t.co/nEzavPS via @Econsultancy

 

Daniel adds links to his tweets very often, however he does not use hashtags very frequently. He also tweets at people in nearly all of his tweets and responds to people who tweet at him. The articles Daniel posted links to were interesting and though provoking. All of Daniel's tweets were public relations related. It was clear to me that Daniel uses his Twitter for professional purposes, versus only social. If you are not following him already, I recommend you do, especially if you are into public relations and social media.

 

The other professional I decided to follow more closely this week was Susan Slater. Susan is the public relations coordinator at Columbus Speech and Hearing. Susan has racked up nearly 3,000 tweets. She tends to tweet frequently during the day. Most of her tweets are about what she is doing during the day, something she finds to be interesting, or an entertaining fact. She is funny and upbeat about things through her tweets, like this one:

 

@ngiverson Happy Birthday, lady!! And, have fun at the dentist! Strange enough, I too enjoy having my teeth cleaned :-)

 

It looks like Susan uses her Twitter account primarily for social purposes. She often tweets at people and retweets other posts. She sometimes adds links or uses hashtags, but it is not very regularly. When she does add a link to her postings, it is usually connected with a unique news article.

 

One of the organizations I chose to evaluate this week was ESPN. ESPN tweets all the time, on average about ten times per day. ESPN is constantly posting tweets about scores to games, before, during, and after the contest. ESPN also uses Twitter to share information about athletes, like broken records, highlights from a game, or interesting facts. This tweet is a good example of a normal tweet from ESPN:

 

D-Wade puts on a show in the first half and drops 38 total points. 99-90, Heat take Game 1 - http://es.pn/lMHvLK

 

ESPN almost always will add a link to the tweet. The link is usually to a news article about a game. ESPN does not use hashtags very often, in fact I saw one tweet with a hashtag. If you like sports, you should definitely follow ESPN.

 

The second organization I analyzed during this week was PRSA. PRSA stands for the Public Relations Society of America. This organization is the parent society for one of the groups I am extremely involved with, the public relations student society of America. PRSA uses Twitter to post information about happenings in the world of public relations. The organization attaches links to articles in nearly ever tweet posted. Here is an example of a typical PRSA tweet:

 

Take a sneak peak at USA Today’s 2012 forecast for travel & hospitality trends @ #prsa T&T Conf. http://bit.ly/lRNBMZ #travelprsa

 

PRSA tweets often, around five or six times per day. PRSA tweets at people often and also utilizes hashtags well. In fact, there is a hashtag for this organization, #prsa. If you are interested in public relations, I highly recommend following PRSA.

 

I thought this assignment was interesting and fun. I am looking forward to reading the postings of my classmates and hopefully I will find some interesting professionals and organizations to follow.

Engaged Games

This week in class, all the students and I divided into groups of four and each took a section in Brian Solis's Engage. For this assignment, each group created a study guide and interactive game to play with the entire class. I thought this was a helpful and fun activity! The study guides helped me highlight the key points in the book and the game allowed me to better retain the information. My group was assigned to examine Part 4.

My group and I thought that the 10 Rules of Engagement must go on the study guide. These rules can be found on page 190 in the text. Similar rules have been identified in some of the other books we have been reading. The Rules are extremely important, and if remembered, can truly help someone be a strong social media force.

Another piece of information my group and I found to be important was the list of the divisions of social media found on page 218. There are seven different workforces in the field of public relations that Solis highlighted in Part 4 of the text. These divisions are: 

• Customer or product support
• Product and sales
• Marketing/PR
• Community
• Corporate communications
• Crisis
• Support 

These divisions seem to be broken down by different areas of expertise a professional can work. Another area we expanded on were the examples of Blogsearch engines, which can be found on page 237. Some of the search engines that were pointed on in the text have been mentioned in class. However, Solis listed some my group and I had not heard of before, such as BackType and Twingly. The group and I thought highlighting these searchengines would be a helpful tool we could all use as relatively new bloggers.

The last portion of the text my group and I added to the study guide was the information printed on pages 220-225. These five pages are about the elements of the conversation index. There are four pieces of the conversation index: listening, documentation, presentation and observation. The conversation index is also an applicable tool my classmates and I can use.

I thought this activity was fun and interesting. The games that were played resembled wheel of fortune, hangman and a true and false questioning game. Our professor gave away prizes to the winners of the games. Not only did I learn the information, I was super excited when I won the Wheel of Fortune/hangman game!