You Can Change It

One of the most popular apps currently is one named TikTok. TikTok is a Chinese video-sharing app that has grown in popularity among teenagers and Generation Z. Many know of TikTok now, but few know where it began. TikTok is owned by a company named ByteDance, a Chinese technology company. Founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming, ByteDance owns a number of successful social networking apps. In 2016, a new short-video app was launched in China by ByteDance called Douyin. The app reached 1 billion views per day within a year of its release. Douyin later expanded that reach internationally receiving a new name; TikTok. The anticipation of the unknown. I believe that is what makes this app so popular. If you look back to the similar to this like Vine, Musical.ly, iFunny, etc., you see each had a common theme. iFunny consisted of mostly memes and few videos. Vine was known for its short and funny videos, and Musical.ly for short music videos or song covers. Each app had its "thing....

I know I talk about this channel often, but it is a huge part of the social media that I currently do and applies well for the lesson I'm going to cover. In chapter 6 of " Social Media Strategy for Communication, we covered the steps to take when creating a social media strategy. We the process down into 15 steps. In this blog, I'm going to break down which steps my team used in creating the channel and ones we could benefit from moving forward. 1. Background information/mission statement. We spent almost 2 weeks sitting down talking about exactly what it is we wanted from this project. Our first video was an introduction in which we broke down who we were, why we are doing this, the purpose, and why we chose our specific name. The mission statement describes the key factors to achieving the vision and this is something we could have spent more time working on. 2. Client Focus and Background. Our goal with this channel was to be positive source of entertainment alon...

The Joker is one of the most well-known villains in comic book history. The new Joker movie released on Oct. 4th, 2019 and follows the origin story of Arthur Fleck and the events that led up to his becoming the Joker: clown prince of crime. While anticipation of the movie was on the rise, the potential dangers surrounding its release could not be ignored. The Joker is seen by many as a psychopath. What movies such as "Batman: The Dark Knight" and the new "Joker" made you sympathize with the villain as apposed to seeing him for just the bad guy as many previous superhero movies did. In 2012 , opening night of "Batman The Dark Knight" there was shooting in Aurora, Colorado. 12 people were killed and another 58 were severely injured. The Joker origin story coming out has the same atmosphere around it. This movie was criticized for glamorizing the criminal act committed by Joker. The US government  released a warning alerting military about potential viole...

Your voice is a defining characteristic of who you are. It is unique to everyone and is the primary way we express ourselves daily. Using a voice, is how brands can set themselves apart and make themselves more recognizable. Chapter 7 in "Social Media for Strategic Communication" takes about writing styles for social media. Under writing styles, the concepts of brand voice and tone help companies determine their styles. Brand voice resembles personality characteristics unique to each brand. Consistency is important in a brand voice because this will make you memorable to your audiences. Tone, while often grouped with brand voice, is a little different. The tone is what you add in the content you write to give it more personality. Your brand voice deals with how your audiences sees your organization and your tone controls whether your organization's content comes across as professional or having more personality to it. One of my favorite examples for this would be Arby...

I'm going to bring up a topic that comes up in the news often, but not in a positive light. During fall break, I went shopping with my girlfriend. On the way back to Bluffton, as we got within 5 minutes from the school, a car began to trail us. At first I thought it was just a car going the same route as me, but as time went on I noticed the car was actually following us. Then those flashing red and blue lights appear. A wave of fear came over me and my thoughts immediately shifted to all the stories of police brutality that I have seen. I was given a warning for turning right on red against the warning not to (which I went back to check and there was no such sign), and for having expired tags. I was driving my girlfriend's car so that added to my panic in the moment. Long story short, the officer was very nice during the interacting and even put on the sticker updating the tags for us. He let us off with a warning and sent us on our way. After this event, I ...

As you all know, I attend Ohio Northern University, which is located in Ada, Ohio. I am originally from Bowie, Maryland. It was an eight hour drive to come to school. Naturally, the homesickness sets in. Even now in my junior year, I still find myself really missing home. Throughout the semester, i only communicate with friends through social media. We Snapchat each other, send memes and funny videos on Instagram, and FaceTime when we can. With all of us being in college and having busy schedules, how much we talk starts to decrease and makes me feel more disconnected. Every now and then, something happens that gives me a little taste of home. This year, I met a freshmen who is from the same area as me and plays on the football team. One night at dinner we started talking and found out we grew up 20 minutes from each other. As we are talking and reminiscing of home, he brings out old bay seasoning for his french fries. For those who do not know, old bay seasoning is a very popul...

Fall Break is over, and back into the regular routine I go. I am often asked why ONU only adds an extra two days to the weekend (Monday and Tuesday) for the break and does not allow a whole week, as is given to some of my friends at various other schools, to which my response is that it provides just enough of a break to get us by until thanksgiving. As midterms near, it has reached that time in the semester where everyone starts to miss home and classes get stressful. The break allows us to get away for just long enough to feel comforted by the escape from Ada and recharge our batteries. I live on the east coast and going home for break, especially having to be back early for practices, just seems unreasonable to me. I have stayed on every year we have had fall break. I always tell myself that I am going to be productive. That is not what happened. However, I used that time to rest and heal from minor injuries sustained from practices and games.  One highlight of...

Have you ever experienced the feeling of having posted too much? In the world of public relations and social media, this is referred to as "social fatigue." Social fatigue is when the amount of interactions on social media by an individual causes them to shut down. In class, we talked about two types of fatigue which include fatigue with key publics and fatigue within the organization's own social media channels. I experienced this along with my partners for our YouTube channel. Although I have brought up this channel in the past, I felt this topic embodied the place we are in right now. We originally told our viewers we would be posting every Monday afternoon. For two months we stayed true to that, but after we started to slack off. It was unintentional, but only had gotten worse. First off, trying to build a YouTube channel is not easy. That, coupled with the fact that we are hundreds of miles away presented challenges from the start. As I mentioned in my previous...

Instagram has announced that it will be adding threads to its social media platform. When I say threads, I am not referring to threads in the same way they are used on twitter. A thread is series of responses to someone's post that allows you to join in on a discussion. Instagram has created an entirely new app to serve as an additional messaging service for its users. This new app will function the same way direct messaging does on Instagram now. Threads is a standalone app that will provide a new messaging platform for sharing photos, videos, and more. Stories, close friends, and direct message are being combined to form this new app. It provides the user control over who can message you. Threads will include a status. Status lets you update and keep up with friends without having to post a photo or video. There is even an auto-status feature that updates automatically based on what you're doing at that moment using emojis instead of giving away your exact location. ...

This week in my social media principles class, we discussed the use of content calendars. I found this interesting because this was something my partners and I for our YouTube channel had attempted. At the time, I really didn't know what a true content calendar was. We came up with a plan of what videos we wanted to do, considering the time frame we had before leaving for college, and created a list that way. We did not have schedule dates for specific videos but did what we can when we could. This was not the most organized process and we had trouble keeping track of content. It was sometimes a scramble to find what to say to go along with our videos or figure an a sequence as to why we post them when we did. The reason I bring up content calendars, is the process of planning out our content ahead of time would have greatly helped us. We talked about a few elements in a content calendar that help to create it. First was meaning making. This embodies the why. The reason behind...

This is a revenge story. Two years ago, my freshmen year, the Ohio Northern Football team faced off with the Marietta College Pioneers near the end of the 2017 season. After a long game, it comes down to a final drive from ONU to win the game. We scored and the sideline exploded with celebration! Our hopes and dreams of a playoff berth were paused when we saw the yellow penalty flag fly onto the field. A hands to the face penalty cost us the touchdown. We had another opportunity to score. We take a shot at the end zone, but fall short. Marietta storms the field in victory while our heads hang in disbelief. This loss cost us a spot in the playoffs. What would have been an 8-2 season, drops us to 7-3 and ends our time on the field. One year later, we face off against Marietta College with the sting of the past loss fresh on our minds. Coming back to ONU during fall camp, we heard the news that our offensive signaler had accepted a job at Marietta. He is now their offensive coordinat...

For my Social Media Principles class, we had to live tweet an event for homecoming weekend here at ONU. Now at first it might seem like an easy assignment, but if you don't have a Twitter account, then it is a bit of an issue. Now I know what you're thinking, "James how do you not have Twitter, everyone has it." Honestly, I'm not entirely sure why I never made one for myself. I had gone so long without it that I just kept on doing so. Now that I have to make one, I started thinking of all that goes into it. I have to pick a good username, profile pic, cover photo, and my bio has to unique too. So after about an hour doing all that, I was finally ready to get started on my assignment. I picked the homecoming dance mainly because it was one of the only events I would have been able to attend. The one thing about being on the football team during weekends like this is all of our time is devoted to the sport and we rarely get to attend outside events while in seas...

This is Adande Thorne. He goes by the name sWooZie, and is one of my favorite YouTubers ever. If you have never heard of him, I would encourage you to check out his channel . Swoozie gained his following by telling stories. As simple as that might sound, this is what he made his "thing." If you read my last blog post, I talked about how to establish your personal brand. I wanted to talk now about someone I think has done a great job doing so. I first heard him in a youth group when I was a sophomore in high school. We were doing a lesson on gossip and he had an incident where sharing information that shouldn't be shared can get you in trouble. After that, I went and look for more videos from him and found most of the videos are the same. Swoozie tells a story of something that has happened in his life, good or bad, what he learned from it, and how others can apply it.  That may not sound like the most interesting video to watch but stay with me. What...