Maintaining Your Online Reputation

         This morning, I am going to talk about something that is very important to keep in mind when you are using social media, your online reputation. Maintaining your online reputation is important because building it takes ages to build a good reputation, but it takes one blunder to destroy it. There are several things to remember when you are managing your online reputation but today we are just going to focus on two: try to keep your online voice consistent and make sure you know how to maintain a healthy influence with your followers.

         Keeping your voice consistent online may be harder than it sounds, but it is necessary because your distinctive online voice is part of your personal brand and can express your personality. I recommend trying to keep your voice genuine, but not offensive, just in case potential employers or clients decide to Google you to figure to learn more about you. One offensive, out of character tweet, like this one:

 can demolish your reputation and ruin your chances of being hired or even get you fired from your current job.

         Maintaining a healthy influence for your followers goes along the lines of maintaining a good voice, you should be consistent and use caution. Sure, you may think it is nice to follow someone who is following you, but if they don’t have use the tone you want to convey, then don’t follow them. You should try to keep an image that is true to your real self. Another way to maintain a healthy influence is to engage your audience, you can ask them questions, learn from them, and create original content for them to view. Your audience will appreciate it.

         I hope you found this advice helpful! If you would like to find out your degree of influence, then check your Klout score for free at https://klout.com . Feel free to comment on this post and on any of my other posts, I’d love to hear your guy’s feedback. 

6 Tips for Finding a Good Workout

In college you are busy with classes, jobs, and friends, and this can sometimes make it hard to find time to exercise. Your issue might also be that you have the time to exercise, but no money to afford the gym or different exercise classes. I have six tips to make exercising easier.

1. Take Advantage of Your University Gym: Most colleges offer a free gym membership to their students and many of the larger universities have state of the art gym facilities, so take advantage of what your tuition helps pay for.

2. Attend Group Gym Classes: If part of your problem with exercising is motivation, then you should join a group fitness class, which are usually a free part of your campus gym membership.

3. Gym Buddy: Another way to motivate yourself to exercise is to schedule a gym date with a friend so that you will feel guilty if you miss your appointment.

4. At Home Workouts: If you have no time to go the gym during the day, then you can still get your exercise at home. Workouts like the one pictured above can be done anytime and anywhere because they require no equipment.

5. Use Fitness Apps/Videos: If the workouts above aren’t your cup of tea, then you can use fitness apps like JeFit (GooglePlay) and Daily Workouts Free (GooglePlay) or stream videos on YouTube channels like Yoga with Adriene and the BeFit Channel.

6. Invest in At-Home Gym Equipment: If you want to do any at home weight training or yoga you should invest in kettlebells and a yoga mat. You can find affordable workout equipment on Amazon and at Target.
I hope these tips help you have a nice workout. If you have any other suggestions or tips for finding a good workout, please leave a note in the comments. Enjoy your week and stay tuned!

7 Tips to Help You Ace Your Next Test

         

Hey guys, welcome back to A Millennial’s Survival Guide to College, get ready to put your thinking caps on because this week I am going to help you study better. The tips that I am about to present to you should help you focus better while studying and retain more information. I will be honest, not every tip will work for everyone, and this post just serves as a general guide to help you figure out which study habits are most effective for you.

1.    Pomodoro Technique: This technique is a personal favorite of mine because it involves giving whatever topic you are studying 25 minutes of focus and then a 5 minute break from your task. This helps you retain more information and produce better content because it helps you prioritize what you need to get done in the 25 minute window and then you get a 5 minute brain break. For more information on the Pomodoro Technique, check out their website: http://pomodorotechnique.com/

2.   Quiz Yourself: Chances are you’re going to be tested on the information you studied, so why not test yourself to see what you really know. You can use the quiz questions from the end of the chapter in your textbook or you can use apps like StudyBlue (available in IOS and Android) to create your own questions and quiz yourself with ones created by fellow classmates.

3.   Write Your Notes By Hand: Yes this tip sounds tedious, especially during a lecture with a professor who talks way too fast, but it has been scientifically proven that you retain more information this way. Isn’t that more important in the long run than the hand cramp you might get?

4.   Get Paper Textbooks: Yes, you may hate carrying around these books and paying for the paper version, but chances are if you grew up using paper books and paper textbooks, you are more likely to remember content from the paper version than the digital version.

5.   Exercise:  This may sound like a random piece of advice, but getting those endorphins going and that heart rate rising actually helps you retain more information, so go to Zumba, do your Crossfit, and do whatever gets your pulse racing.

6.   Teach Your Peers: If you really want to be sure that you know what you need to know, then you should try to teach your peers about the subject. This will test what you really know.

7.   Ignore Social Media: If you want to spend your time studying, then avoid Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat. You will be so busy scrolling through posts that you’ll end up wasting all of your study time on social media instead of learning the content you need to learn.

I hope you find these tips helpful and good luck with your next test. Do you have anything you do to help you study?

Social Media and Strategic Planning

        Social media has been a large part of advertising for different companies since the major rise of social media in the early 2000s and with advertising comes the need for strategic planning. Successful strategic planning in social media requires research, careful planning, and great timing. These factors may sound very difficult to achieve, but thankfully there are several different websites and apps that can help your company’s social media posts be effective.

         Research is one of the most important steps in strategic planning because it is the time when you try to answer all of the questions involving the demographics that you are trying to influence, but sometimes finding information on these groups can be hard. I find that the Pew Research Center website is one of the most helpful tools to use when you are trying to find what platforms each demographic uses most, in fact I used this link to help decide where to post different posts on the various platforms of social media: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/08/19/the-demographics-of-social-media-users/ . After you figure out where your audience is you need to research what posts get the best positive reaction from your demographic and general members of that social media site.

         Once you have your platform(s) for advertising figured out and what tone to use on the post, next you need to figure out what to say and how to say it. I would recommend that since you most likely know the general information that you are trying to convey, that you should use either the Facebook private message or Twitter private message settings to send a few samples to trustworthy members of the demographic you are trying to target. This gives you the opportunity to get feedback for what your ad appears to convey to them.

         After you have determined exactly what you are going to post, you must figure out the exact time you should post your information. If you post at the wrong time on your chosen social media platform(s), then you can risk being ignored by some of your target audience. Thankfully, there are some apps and internet extensions to help you determine when to post. You can use the Google Analytics extension on Google Chrome to track how many people view your posts at what time and from which country they are from. If you want to guarantee that your information is posted at the optimal time you can use the HootSuite website and app to automatically post your information at the best time for each platform.

        

Privacy, Legal Implications, and Ethics

         In an age where many people’s first instinct is to post whatever is on their mind, many questions about important issues arise. What level of privacy settings should you use for each social media platform? What online information can an employer require you to give and what are you allowed to post in association with your place of employment? What is ethical to post? I hope to answer as many of these questions as possible in this post.

         With the evolution of the different social media platforms throughout the years, choosing who can see what content has become a challenging decision when applying for jobs. When you are applying for a job, employers will search for you online, and very social media settings can seem suspicious to prospective employers. So the question arises, what kind of media presence do employers want to see in their candidates? Recruiters tend to be less suspicious of candidates who have the privacy settings that are most commonly used on that specific platform, so a good rule is to choose the most common privacy setting.

         Two of the other most common issues involving social media and the workplace are tied to legal implications. The first issue that arises involving the law is to what degree of access to your social media account your employer can require. Until very recently employers could require their employees to disclose their social media passwords so that the employers would have total access to their accounts, but thankfully many states have banned this practice. At our current time nearly half the states across the country have either enacted or introduced legislative bills prohibiting employers from requiring their employees to disclose this information, and if you are curious if your state is one of those states, you can click this link to find out: http://www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunications-and-information-technology/employer-access-to-social-media-passwords-2013.aspx . Another social media issue that has been connected to legal implications are the employee social media policies that most companies require employees to sign. Most of these policies are used to prevent employees from disclosing sensitive information about the company and require access to social media pages, but some companies require their employees only post socially appropriate things on the company social media. This means that companies are constantly monitoring their employee’s online activities to prevent any blunders or fire the person responsible for a serious media blunder like the one on Chrysler Autos account in 2011:

         The final issue involving social media would be the ethical debate of employer’s right to view vs. an employee’s right to privacy. It is already generally agreed upon that employers should not have the password to an employee’s account, but other important ethical questions have risen as modern social media platforms reach their tenth anniversary.  Should a company monitor an employee’s social media? Should companies require employees to sign social media policies? To learn more on social media ethics in general, click this link: https://www.scu.edu/ethics/focus-areas/internet-ethics/resources/unavoidable-ethical-questions-social-networking/ .

         

What is Social Media?

          What is social media? This is the question that my professor posed to us this week in class. I could give you the textbook definition for what social media is, but the definition would change from textbook to textbook because social media is so dynamic and massive that an author would never be able to condense the full definition in just a few sentences. This is why I have decided to change the question to this one instead, What is social media to me?

          Social media, to me, means having a platform that allows you to share your ideas and content virtually with people around the world in order to communicate with others in an open forum (the level of openness can be controlled by user settings). Today, I am going to present three different social media platforms to show just how different the ways open forum communication can be.

           Twitter is one virtual platform that people use to communicate through short sentence posts. For example, I was scrolling through my feed on Twitter yesterday morning and came across this post:

just minutes after CNN tweeted this post, friends and fans of Alan Rickman made posts of their own expressing their sadness and sharing memories. Twitter was being used as a platform to express their grief.

          Twitter is just one of many social media sites that people use around the world to communicate. Pinterest is another social media website that people use to communicate with one another, but in a very different way than Twitter. On Pinterest, people communicate things that interest them to a virtual bulletin board like this one: 

instead of messaging each other.

           Facebook will be the final social media platform that I will present this morning has its own unique forms of communication. Many Facebook users communicate by typing up paragraph long Facebook posts like the one below:

and through Facebook webpages created by organizations that allow a group of people to contribute articles and updates on one central page that alerts the followers whenever the page is updated.

Introduction Post

Hey everyone, welcome to A Millennial’s Survival Guide to College, I would like to take this time to tell you guys a little about myself. My name is Joie. I am currently a junior communication major at the University of Louisville and am originally from the Northern Kentucky area. I have started this blog as one of my projects for my social media class and hope that this will help other university students learn many of the skills needed to succeed in college for the next several years. I also hope that this project and the class that assigned this project will help improve my social media writing skills and help me learn how to use social media to improve my workplace.

            After graduation, I hope to work in something involving public relations or advertising, but cannot really go further into specifics. I am currently considering doing something involving account management or event planning after college because I have enjoyed coordinating the internship fair and the mentor luncheon for Young Communication Professionals. The great thing about being in college is that I still have plenty of time to decide what I want to do with my life. I hope you guys enjoy my blog!

Episode 1: Budgeting

         

 Hey everyone, welcome to episode 1 of A Millennial’s Guide to College. Today we’ll be talking about a very important skill that all college students should know, how to create a budget. Budgeting in college is a bit different than budgeting outside of school because during the semester a lot of your income is made up of financial aid and scholarships. I’m going to help you budget for the months that you are in school. Let’s get started!

          There are many types of budgets to fit your needs. You can make a pen and paper budget, like the PDF I provided below, an app like Mint or Penny, which sends you notifications when you submit a deposit or go over your expense account, and you can use your banks online services like PNC Virtual Wallet to track your spending. You can use any of these or any combination these budget making tools to create your budget.

          Now that you have your budget template, you can start to create your budget. The first thing that you need to do is to calculate how much money you make in an average month. You should include things like how much you usually make at your job, if you have one, how much you usually get for financial aid during that specific month, and how much money you usually receive from family and friends during that specific month.

          After you add together how much you make in a month, you can figure out how much you should spend in a given month. A good rule to follow when calculating, is the 50/30/20 rule, which means that 50% of your income is meant for living expenses like groceries and organization fees, 30% is meant for fun stuff like shopping and going out with friends, and 20% of your income is meant to be saved.

          Once you have filled out your expected monthly income and expenses, it is time to try and keep to your budget while tracking your actual income and expenses for the month. Good luck and happy spending!!

    Click here for a free printable budget to help you get started.

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