Numbers For Social Media

      During class on Tuesday my professor gave an interesting lecture. She talked about how many people assume that people who deal with social media accounts don't have to worry about numbers. Those things are left to the mathematicians of the world to boil down and put into the pot that is data analytics. However, this isn't necessarily the case. Even though most people may assume that social media strategists, as I will call them, do not deal with numbers, they do. There is actually a lot more analyzing than you may originally think. For almost every post you have to deal with numbers that go beyond likes, shares or retweets that are visible to anyone on social media. There is background information for every single piece of content and most people do not know this. For example, there are social media tools out there that will allow you to look at how many people have clicked on a post, and what kind of traffic each post you have is generating. Who is seeing the post? Who is liking the post? What kind of posts are statistically doing better than others? These are all factors that have to be put into consideration when you are managing multiple social media accounts. Thus, even though people who run social media pages may not be rocket scientist they still have to deal with more numbers than you might think.

The Positives of Social Media

      I always find myself taken back at the level of involvement social media has in today's world. It seems as if every time I look away there is something new, or something different, that was not there the second before. Recently, I have noticed something on Facebook. Granted, this isn't a new trend that was not present before. However, considering I never use Facebook, it is something that is relatively new to me. Anyway, the other day my girlfriend was scrolling through her Facebook and I happened to glance over at the moment she went past a picture of a missing dog post. This post had hundreds of notifications of people commenting, sharing or any other way to get the message out there. Now, I am not new to this and I understand why this is a popular thing to do, but it still blows my mind. I never realized how popular this was on Facebook because I haven't used it since some time around the fifth grade. Yet, now posts like these are commonplace, and it is great. There are many negative things to social media, but I have to say that this is a very big positive. The fact that people are willing to share posts about lost dogs so that they may be found more quickly, or even at all, is just superb. So, I hope more positive social media innovations like this come about for the future users of the always lovely internet.

Luka Doncic is the Future

      Last night the Dallas Mavericks rookie, Luka Doncic, did something truly amazing in his game against the San Antonio Spurs. The young player recorded a 42 point triple double. For someone his age this feat has only been topped by one other player, and that is LeBron James. So, needless to say Luka Doncic is putting himself in some pretty great company as of right now. Doncic has quickly established himself as one of the best players in the league and could possibly be the greatest European prospect of all time. Last year he took home the National Basketball Association's Rookie of the Year award over Atlanta Hawk's star Trae Young. Obviously the most impressive stat the viewers would see is his 42 points, but he also managed to rack up 11 rebounds and 12 assists. Most average fans would not understand the difficulty and magnitude of these two stats. First of all, 11 rebounds from a point guard, even if he is big for the point guard position, is very impressive. Doncic is grabbing those boards around people much taller than him including his 7'3" teammate Kristaps Porzingis. Additionally, Doncic's 12 assists become even more impressive when you realize that having that amount of assists means that he was involved at least 66 of his teams points, which is over half of their total 117 points. Needless to say, Luka Doncic is a great player, and recording a stat line like this in his second season of play shows the potential for a great career. 

The "It" Factor

      Today in class we talked about Chapter 9 of "Social Media for Strategic Communication", and it stumbled upon the idea of one of my favorite things to talk about. It all began when a slide came up that talked about how each social media brand or influencer should have one "it" factor to their social media and use it as the fuel to fire all of their content. Then, our teacher told us about a story who has half of a million followers on TikTok because of the way she takes notes. That's right, you read that correctly. Apparently, she incorporates all of these really interesting, unique doodles into her note taking and puts them on TikTok for other people to copy, and they love it. Thus, bringing me to what I love talking about which is that "it" factor. I think a lot of people think that it is some brilliant idea constructed over thousands of hours of contemplation. Yet, often times I believe it just comes from what people are passionate about. A great example I can think of is people who have gaming channels on YouTube. In fact, one of the most, if not the most, popular channel on YouTube started out as a guy playing video games. You may have heard of him. His name is Felix Kjellberg, also known as PewDiePie, and he currently has 102 million subscribers. Yet, he obviously did not start out that way. He has discussed in many of his videos that he started making YouTube videos of himself playing video games because he loved it. It was something he enjoyed and was passionate about. Now, he has turned it all into a multi-million dollar business over the course of nine years. This wasn't some brilliant plan hatched over years of thought and preparation. It was something he genuinely enjoyed doing, and happened to find success in. The moral of the story is, do what you are passionate about and success will find you along the way. Don't go looking for the secret ingredient, or the "it" factor when the truth is that it doesn't really exist. So, whether you want to play video game for a living or post videos of yourself taking notes, just have fun with it.

My Favorite Kind of Troll

      Last week I discussed the idea of real-world trolls who roam the space of the internet. This week I will talk about one that I have actually come to love. He is a troll in the world of sports, and some of you who continuously keep up with that world may have heard of him. His first name on Twitter is Barry and his last name begins with an M, but I am not going to finish it because it is highly inappropriate. I believe that if you truly want to take a look for yourself you can find the man on Twitter @sexytrooplover. Now, on to the description of his trolling abilities. First of all, he has actually gained a lot of popularity for what he does. Granted, his accounts constantly get deleted, but after having one for awhile he will usually sit at somewhere around 500,000 or more followers. His tweets consist of many different things. For basketball he will likely talk about how overrated Michael Jordan is, and for football he will constantly discuss the fact that Tom Brady is a system quarterback. Although, my personal favorite tweets are the ones in which he pretends to be another famous sports reporter. He will change his profile picture and name to match theirs. Often times he will even go so far as changing his @ so that it is only one letter off of the real person he is imitating. Then, he will tweet something absolutely ridiculous and make it seem as if it has come from a real source. Believe it or not, his tweets have actually come up on multiple sports talk shows and organizations around the country because people think it really is the real reporter and not Barry. Some of what he tweets is very childish and ignorant, but I can't help but find it funny. Thus, he is one internet troll who I will follow on a daily basis.

Bounce Back Time

      This weekend the men's basketball team here at Ohio Northern University (ONU) had our very first games. On Friday we played Mount Saint Joe, and on Saturday we faced off against Transylvania. The Mount Saint Joe game was a tough win. We came out in the first half and competed hard all the way through the end of the first half. Unfortunately, we did not have the lead at that point and were down by six points. Thus, going into the locker room we kept hyping ourselves up saying the we didn't play a great half and were only down by six. So, we came out and played a terrible first five minutes of the half. Mount Saint Joe increased their lead to 15 points and it seemed as if the game was out of our hands. However, we did not give up and started to turn the game around. Then, with about six minutes left in the second half we took back the lead, and fought hard to keep it. In the end we won the game by nine and trotted into the locker room with our heads held high after the first game of the season. Yet, our game against Transylvania would not yield the same result. The story, however, was much of the same. The score was close at half, and then went on a run at the beginning of the second half. Once again, we fought back and cut the lead to three just in time to put up one last shot with just seconds remaining on the clock. However, the shot fell short and our hopes of being undefeated went right along with it. Now, it is time for us to bounce back and defeat Denison this Friday. Go bears.

Real-World Trolls

       Chapter 11 of "Social Media for Strategic Communication" delves into very relevant topic in today's day and age. That is none other than the subject matter of internet trolls. Trolls are essentially haters. They comment on your pictures leaving nothing but negative feedback. Everything they put is just trying to bring you down, and often times they want nothing more than for you to respond to their hate. It fuels their weird, twisted fire. Trolls are the kind of thing that seem easy to ignore. I mean all you have to do is not read the comment section, right? Wrong. Well, not exactly wrong because if you never read the comments you would avoid a lot of the hate. However, avoiding comment sections if you are famous is not exactly a great thing to do because that means you are also neglecting all your loyal fans leaving positive, loving comments. So, if you don't respond to your true fans then they will eventually stop commenting, or following you, all together. Thus, while it is easy to tell people to avoid reading negative comments it is almost impossible. One example of someone who let the trolls get to him is Ed Sheeran. He read all the negativity and eventually deleted his Twitter account because of it. Thus, it seems that trolls no longer reside under bridges as they have since the dawn of time. Now, they reside within the firewalls of our beloved internet.

Empty Followers

      Have you ever noticed that it seems way easier to get followers on some sites than it does on others? The prime example I can think of is TikTok. With this platform being relatively new you would think that it could be hard to get followers. However, I swear the opposite is true. For example, I have seen multiple people who have accounts with over 10,000 followers, but many of their videos will only have 40 likes. How does that happen? How do you have that many followers and only that many likes? It honestly blows my mind. I find that often times their large following stems from one popular video where they accumulated a mass amount of likes. I find this attribute to be somewhat similar to YouTube. You can go on YouTube and see that someone has over one million subscribers and they will only get a 100,000 views on a video. Now, don't get me wrong that is not a bad ratio, and by no means and I saying that you should get the amount of views, likes or retweets equal to your number of followers because that is not the case on any platform. I mean, I have over 1,000 followers on Instagram, but I have never received even 400 likes on a picture. Although, platforms like YouTube and TikTok are different because users on those sites often, like I mentioned earlier, have one video that has received much more recognition than any of their other videos. To me, it makes their following seem a little more empty and less useful. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe I'm not.

College Basketball

      I know that lately I have been talking a lot about the National Basketball League (NBA), but tonight something that might be even greater is starting. National College Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball starts tonight with the long awaited Champion's Classic. Tonight number two seed Kentucky faces off against number one seed Michigan State in what is sure to be a great game. Although, as a Kentucky fan I hope they blow the doors off of Michigan State. Then, the third seed Kansas Jayhawks face of against the number four seed Duke Blue Devils. Honestly, for that game I would just like to see a good showing between two teams. I do not have any particular dog in that fight. Yet, this night is exciting for more reasons than the simple fact that there will be good games on. It also means that it is almost the start of Ohio Northern basketball. We have our first game this Friday in Cincinnati against Mount Saint Joe. This season will definitely be a big test for our team because we lost All-American Ryan Bruns, and we have a lot of freshman that will be playing this year. Therefore, it will be interesting to see how the season turns out. Last year with an All-American the team finished with a total of seven wins. However, I would like to think that we can do better than that. On top of that, I would say that we have a promising future with the amount of young members that we have. Thus, here is to the start of college basketball and the future of Ohio Northern.