Hallie's Happenings

     After the long month, I couldn't wait for Thanksgiving break. I looked forward to being able to relaxing and not have to think about school for the week. Unfortunately, a majority of my break consisted of me working. I work at a small business called GV Art & Design. It's a Cleveland based T-shirt store. I work in the shipping department with my sister, so it's always a fun time. With Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday, the store was trying to keep up with all of the orders. Surprisingly, we were more prepared this year than last year.      As for the real reason I came home, Thanksgiving dinner was great. While I don't tend to eat much of the food, it's great being able to see all of my family. I especially like being able to celebrate my birthday early with my family. In my family, there are three birthdays within two weeks of each other, so we tend to put them all together and celebrate them at once. My Uncle Nick, my older brother Da

     We are nearing the end of our Essentials of Social Media Marketing journey with Michelle Charello as we explore creating an employee advocacy program. With today's up-and-coming society, employee advocacy programs are starting to become more prevalent. While there are many known benefits, more than half of employees are not given the proper training on when or how to advocate for their brand. There are times when the marketing teams make promoting difficult through social media. Creating an employee advocacy program takes a proper strategy. Steps needed for this to run smoothly include creating an advocacy team, setting goals, educating and training employees, getting employee buy-in, using tools and resources, recognizing and incentivizing and tracking and reporting. With the right strategy in place, the organization and its employees will have a better chance at succeeding.      Regardless of who it includes, an advocacy team is vital for running and promoting the program.

     In today's society, influencers play a major role in marketing. More and more businesses are partnering up with influencers to promote their brands. Influencers can reach certain target markets businesses are struggling to reach with their large followings. This past year with COVID-19, the uprising of influencer marketing took the world by storm. For a business to effectively use influencers for their marketing purposes, they need to come up with a social media influencer marketing strategy. There are seven steps involved in creating a social media influencer marketing strategy including establishing goals, determining a target market and social media channels, identifying and finding influencers, setting up monitoring and listening streams, discussing the partnership, incorporating influencer marketing into the social media strategy and measurement.     The first step in most plans starts with establishing goals. These goals should revolve around the goals for the business a

     For my social media course this week, we were challenged with creating a podcast on any social media issue of our choosing. I decided I wanted to dive deeper into the effects of social media on body image. Personally, social media has affected me on my own body image. I don't think I'll ever be able to go on a social media platform without comparing myself to the women in the posts. By taking a deeper look into this issue, I learned I'm not the only one feeling this way. Before I started my research, I had to go about setting up a podcast profile.     I have never made a podcast before, so this was a very new experience for me. I like to consider myself "tech-savvy", but in reality I know nothing. The hardest part for me was perfecting my recording. I had a total of 13 takes before I was able to have a good take. Podcasting is a great way to get a foot in the door, not only as an influencer, but also for businesses. I feel like podcasts draw more appeal to pe

     For a majority of this year, we have talked about content strategies for specific platforms. Now, it's time to understand the steps needed to launch a social media marketing campaign. Chapter 13 says, "in general, a campaign refers to a set of planned and coordinated activities geared toward achieving a goal." There are three main factors involved in a successful campaign, the before, during and after. Within each of these, there are more specific steps required. To launch a successful social media marketing campaign, one needs to follow these simple steps.            During the before stage, there are 11 steps. These include establishing goals, choosing a campaign idea, theme and type, identifying the target audience, determining a campaign budget and resources, outlining the campaign parameters, choosing incentives, determining where the campaign will live, selecting social networks, choosing a timeline, developing the campaign assets and content calendar and set

     This week my sorority, Zeta Tau Alpha (ZTA), had their annual semi formal. What our semi formal usually consists of is a nice dinner, superlatives and lots of pictures. Due to COVID-19 last year, we weren't able to safely host this event. It was a real bummer, as it's a looked forward to event. Semi formal is an excuse to dress up and enjoy being with your sisters. Typically, we host this event on campus in the Bear Cave, however, we decided to change things up and have it at The Inn. We were skeptical at first since we have never had it there, but it turned out great! Our theme this year was "Dripping in Luxury," so we had red, silver, gold and black decorations with lots of pearls and diamonds covering the room.      The Inn catered the entire event and even had all the tables set up for us. All we had to do was set our centerpieces up. While it was a little chilly last night, everyone braced the breeze and came out for the event. The dinner served was chicken

     While I'm not one to share my personal life, I just reached a milestone in my current relationship. My boyfriend and I celebrated our anniversary. This may seem insignificant to people who have been in longer relationships, but it's crazy to think how fast time went by. To give a little back story, here is how my boyfriend and I met.      My boyfriend, Dylan, and I met here at Ohio Northern University (ONU) our sophomore year in an accounting class. I had been struggling in the class and a friend of mine invited me over to work on homework together. Little did I know, Dylan would also be there. From this encounter on, Dylan and I began to hang out more and the rest is history. What's crazy is Dylan and I had been in the same classes since our freshmen year and we never crossed paths, despite the fact of him being on the golf team at ONU with my roommate. I think it's funny how things work out for the best. Maybe we weren't meant to meet each other freshmen year

     Chapter 12 is all about blogs, vlogs, podcasts and webinars and today I'm going to focus on getting started with blogging. There are 5 steps one should follow when trying to get started with a blog, those steps are setting goals, identifying the target market, creating a blog site, brainstorming topics and post types and creating an editorial and distribution strategy. These are all things I did to get started here with my blog, so follow along and you will be blogging in no time!     Like any new project, setting goals is an important factor. Blogging goals should revolve around organizational and marketing goals. For a business, they should focus on setting measurable goals. These goals could be number of visitors, engagements, website traffic, clicks, quantity of blog posts produced or even bounce rate. After setting goals for your brand, the next step is identifying the target market. To write an effective blog, brands need to figure out who they are writing for. With dif