We learned many lessons this semester, but one of the most important is how the people you know and connections you make can go a long way in helping your career.
We had many guest speakers this semester and they were all excellent. They provided us with valuable information about how to succeed in the real world. With each guest speaker we had, we were provided with their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts so that we could speak with them before/after their visit. They were all willing to talk with us about our clients, projects and careers.
Making connections with these people is something that we were never explicitly taught in class. It was implied that we should use these people as resources, but we never discussed how helpful this can be. People always say that working in the real world is "not about what you know, it's about who you know" and I honestly believe that is true. We have been exposed to people in all types of communication roles. Even something as simple as the best way to connect with someone on LinkedIn, which was taught to us by Wayne, can really make a difference.
I have never had a class where I was exposed to so many guest speakers. I am grateful that I had this opportunity and I honestly learned something from each speaker. I am thankful that they took the time out of their busy lives to come and speak with us. The guests we had contributed to this excellent class.
When looking at our popular previous posts, Jessica and I found that we got the most traffic when we mentioned other people in our tweets. For example, doing our Sophomore Res Hall spotlight tweets when we @mentioned specific res halls, we tended to get more retweets and impressions. This was good to know because we are currently in the middle of our Freshmen Res Hall spotlight week.
The tweet we had that got the most impressions was posted on April 3 advertising the Apartments Council Block Party (which I coincidentally helped plan!). The reason the tweet reached that many people was because @MarquetteU was nice enough to retweet it!
We also received over 200 followers this week! Thanks again to the Marquette account who promoted us, we are now up to 224 Twitter followers.
I'm optimistic that we will gain a few more followers during this freshmen spotlight week. Hopefully the incoming students will find it useful when trying to list their preferences for their housing. A few retweets from the residence halls will likely get us followed by incoming students. We would like to be their place to turn for questions regarding living on campus.
We are also using the last few weeks of the semester to (hopefully) post some pictures of campus looking spring-y. We also will send out tweets about spring cleaning and the last few days of the semester. It is an exciting few weeks we have left!
Jessica and I decided to use Mailchimp to send out a reminder to incoming freshmen about the upcoming housing deadline. By May 1, students who are enrolling in Marquette in the Fall have to submit their housing deposit and their top three residence hall preferences. Creating this email campaign was very easy and convenient to use.
Jessica added the colorful pictures of the residence halls as the cover photo at the top of the email:
She even made it optimized for mobile!
The body of the email was a short and easy reminder for students. The title "Only 19 More Days" generated interest for prospective students to look into what is only 19 days away. Here is the body of the email:
This taught us about how to create an effective email campaign. It is short and to the point, but also provides students with the information they need and an external link to find more information about housing.
In other news, we are planning social media messages for the upcoming Little Sibs Weekend! We have been in touch with members of RHA about the events so that we can highlight specific events.
Tomorrow is Residence Life Awareness day! Keep an eye out for all of the blue "WE ARE RES LIFE" shirts around campus! I was flattered that Sean included Jessica and I in this by saying that we "are as much a part of the department this semester as anyone else!" Thanks, Sean!
Last week in class we learned about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)! Our task was to find a page on our client's website and change it to be more SEO'd. The trouble Jessica and I had is that we have found that people search the term "dorm" much more than they search "residence hall". However, Marquette is adamant about not using the word dorm in any of it's publications. When talking with Sean about this at our weekly meeting, we came up with a possible solution:
Creating a page where we explain the difference between a dorm and residence hall. This would benefit us in two ways:
When people searched for "Marquette dorms" they would be brought to this page. Therefore, the search result would still bring them to the Marquette ORL page.
They would then see that we call them Residence Halls instead of dorms and would hopefully begin searching "Marquette Residence Halls" which would increase the searches we have for that phrase.
I learned a lot from SEO and realized that it is much more complex than I thought it was. There are ways to make any page optimized with just little changes to words or phrasing.
As nearly everyone in Milwaukee knows, the weather has been extremely crummy all week. One of the minor ideas we have for the Twitter page to engage interaction is to 1) send out ideas of things to do in the bad weather and 2) Ask students what they like to do to keep their spirits up in the bad weather. This is a great way to send out some "fun" things to our followers and get some feedback.
Also, with spring (sort of) right around the corner, we were also looking to send out some links to help students with their Spring Cleaning. Starting now will help making move out easier and will give students a potentially fun activity with their roommates.
In two weeks we are going to spotlight the Freshmen residence halls for the incoming freshmen! Their deadline for housing preferences is May 1st, so we would like to get up the information as quickly as possible. We are lucky that Cobeen and O'Donnell have main events that we can promote (Swing-a-Thon and Teeter-Totter Marathon).
It's crazy to think that there are only a few more weeks left in the semester. I'm looking forward to moving forward on more of these social media projects and seeing what all the MUResLife pages can do!
It's been a while since there has been a weekly update, so this will work as more of a monthly update!
Our biggest project to date took place in the week following Spring Break. Our job was to spotlight one of the Sophomore Residence Halls on each of the five days leading up to Sophomore Housing selection. Although it seems rather simple, it ended up being a bit more stressful than I was expecting. We planned on tweeting each hall in alphabetical order as to not appear to be selecting favorites. You never think something is miniscule as that could sway opinions, but it could.
Our goal was to feature some pictures and fun facts for each building. It turns out that we were successful in the amounts of views, clicks, or retweets we got (see attached picture).
We have been experiencing some technical difficulties with our Pinterest page recently. The secret boards we created have not been publishing which is causing us problems. I don't know much about Pinterest, so luckily Jessica has been handling most of that. We are hoping to get this resolved so that we can publish these boards and begin interacting with people. We think the Pinterest page will be a good way to promote Res Life with current and prospective students.
Last week we worked with infographics and that was a certain struggle. The website we used was not agreeing with me and I felt limited to what we could edit. We focused on the four main freshmen residence halls and used quick information they offer. Infographics are effective if done correctly, so with more practice, I'm sure we could use them to promote Residence Life.
It is almost time for Housing Selection which means we have a lot of work to get done! It is hectic, but very exciting.
At our weekly Monday meeting, Jessica, Sean and I discussed how we wanted to run the Residence Hall Spotlight idea we had leading up to Sophomore Housing Selection Day. Our plan is from March 18-22 to spotlight a sophomore residence hall each day via Twitter . The spotlight will include:
A Tweet in the morning to introduce the building
One to provide the room layout
Some interesting facts about the building
Any other fun facts or pictures we can provide
We hope that this will create interest and help us to gain some Twitter followers, all while helping current freshmen determine where they would like to be living.
Seeing as this starts the first day back from Spring Break, we now have to draft/queue up some tweets so that they are ready to go come that Monday morning. This is where Sprout Social becomes helpful. By being able to queue a few tweets, we don't have to stress about waking up early to prepare to tweet on Monday morning. The other bump in the road is that Sean will be in Disney World Orlando for a conference and we will not be able to meet on that Monday afternoon. This is where Jessica and I really have the chance to shine when it comes to setting up the tweets and making sure they are all ready to go.
At our meeting we also discussed ideas for what various things to highlight in each residence hall. For example, Mashuda has the ballrooms and the 50's diner. Each building has unique aspects that will be great to promote to show everyone how neat our halls are.
Our Pinterest page will likely be live soon! We began creating some boards and Sean gave us the go-ahead to publish the board. We will obviously be adding to it as time goes by, but what we have is a good start to begin generating interest in the page.
The thing I really learned this week is why wording is so important when it comes to writing posts for Facebook or Twitter. In class last Thursday, Jessica and I drafted some tweets where we kept referring to "freshmen." Sean pointed out that this can be confusing because people may not know if we are referring to current freshmen or the soon to be freshmen. Phrasing everything very carefully is extremely important in social media. Addressing freshmen and telling them to prepare for housing selection could potentially have caused chaos from incoming freshmen who did not realize we were not referring to them.
Therefore, following Spring Break, the @ResLifeMU page will be tweeting a lot! Watch out, campus! Here we come!
Jessica, Sean and I decided that we will continue our Monday afternoon meetings because they have been very productive thus far. As I said last week, we are extremely lucky to have our client right on campus. We really lucked out having Sean as our client. He is great to work with.
Yesterday the three of us met to discuss what we specifically wanted to do with each of the new mediums. Sean was great and snatched up the URL for the Marquette Res Life Pinterest page! We have been talking about the number of different boards we can create on Pinterest. We originally talked about potentially doing a board for each Res Hall, and at yesterday's meeting, we decided to expand on that. We are going to have boards related to all aspects of living in a Residence Hall! This includes:
Ideas for decorating your room
The best snacks for a movie night with friends
Fitness tips and how to avoid the "Freshmen Fifteen"
Great food to make with a microwave (since you can't have an open flame)
These are just some of the ideas for our Pinterest page, and I'm sure there are more to come.
With Instagram, we discussed giving access to the Hall Directors and/or RAs in each of the halls so that they can help document what life is really like in the Marquette Residence Hall. For example, Cobeen and O'Donnell frequently team up for events to bring the freshmen men and women together. Pictures from the event could be put on the Instagram account which can be seen by any of the followers.
Also with Instagram, we discussed using the hashtag #mureslife as one that would allow us to follow what other people are doing in their room. It would be a great way to attract student involvement and could allow for some great interaction.
Jessica and I are also working now on a press release to officially announce the revamping of the Marquette Res Life social media! Our goal is to finish that this week and present a draft of it to Sean at our meeting next Monday. This release would inform readers of all the various sites to follow Marquette Res Life and some of the plans we have.
This week did have a downside for me, however. I broke the number one rule of working with a client by being late to a meeting. I know that if this were my job and was being paid, I would likely have been fired. It is unprofessional and has certainly made me more accountable for where I have to be and when. That being said, the lesson of the week for me is to always keep the client in mind. Being late to a meeting reflects poorly on you and can potentially damage your relationship with the client.
Finally, a big shout out to Mykl Novak who contacted us with an awesome new avatar! You can see it on our Facebook and Twitter pages!
I must say, we are very lucky that our client is right here on campus! I feel as though this allows us to be much more productive and to get to know Sean (he is essentially our boss in this situation) a lot better.
Yesterday Jessica and I met with Sean in the ORL office to discuss ideas we had been developing and to touch base on where he wanted to see the social media platforms go.
The two of us have been throwing around the idea of changing the Twitter handle (@ResidenceLifeMU) to something that is easier to tag and is more searchable. The problem is that @MUResLife is already taken by Madonna University (she is so fierce she has her own college)! We are now on the hunt for something that we can use instead. The thing that Sean asked us to keep in mind is consistency. Whatever we choose, we want it to be consist throughout all the social media platforms that are used. We are also working on updating the Facebook page to include more pictures, a cover photo, and even a new avatar!
Sean pointed out that using the picture of Carpenter Tower as the avatar for Res Life can be very confusing. We are now in the process of creating a new one that can be used as the basic block picture for all the current and upcoming social media.
Speaking of upcoming social media! We have a few ideas in mind....
Marquette Res Life is going Pinterest! We want to use a pinterest board to highlight each of the different residence halls, some of the staff who work there, potentially "throwback" pictures of what the residence halls used to look like, and more! We realize that Pinterest is most dominated by women, but we feel as though this will be a good social media site to be part of.
Vine: We are also discussing ORL up on Vine. Sean had a fantastic idea of using Vine to show all the different ways a room can be set up. For example, it would be one room with the beds bunked, lofted, flat on the ground, etc. This is a great way to show the incoming (and even current) students how to set up their room to fit their personal needs.
Instagram and Youtube- Did you know that Marquette ORL is on Instagram and Youtube already? There isn't a lot going on there right now, but we have plans. Instagram is another great way to connect with current and future students to show them the beauty of our residence halls through the variation of different "lenses". The Youtube channel allows for the opportunity to give extended tours of buildings and rooms, and perhaps even interviews with students, RAs, or Hall Directors. The possibilities are endless.
We are extremely lucky to not only be working with Sean, but to be able to sit down in a room with him and throw around ideas. If I learned anything this week, it's that if you have the chance to meet with a client in person, DO IT! It is MUCH better and more effective than emailing back and forth.
This past week, Jessica and I spent time looking into how to better optimize the Marquette Office of Residence Life (ORL) Facebook and Twitter accounts.
We took the advice we heard from Wayne Breitbarth last week and looked at what some "competitors" are doing. My responsibility was to look at Facebook pages, while Jessica looked at the Twitter accounts.
The two Wisconsin schools that seemed to have the best ORL Facebook pages were University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Both pages are used multiple times per day and work to increase the interaction they have with current and prospective students.
The UW Madison Res Life Facebook page has nearly 1,400 'likes' and features photos and videos of many of the residence halls they offer. They tend to link to stories or articles about current events happening on their campus to keep students up-to-date and informed of campus life.
The UW Miluwaukee Res Life Facebook page has over 2,300 'likes'. Like Madison, they post about current events happening on their campus, which allows for great interaction with their students.
The Marquette ORL Facebook page (which you should all go 'like' RIGHT NOW) does not frequently get use. Jessica and I would like to keep it updated and allow better interaction between the Facebook page and past, present, and future MU students.
The Marquette ORL Facebook page can be an excellent resource for current students who have residence life questions or comments, as well as future students who are interested in what our residence halls are like. On the flip side of that, it is also a great place for ORL to share with students events that are happening on campus and the best ways to get involved.
It is important for ORL to be active on social media, especially if other competing schools are active. Marquette needs to stay up with the times so that we appeal to prospective students who can have their questions answered without the hassle. If they can connect with current students or faculty via Facebook, they will likely feel more at ease and more comfortable with Marquette.
In class tonight, we will be adding the Facebook and Twitter pages to our Sprout Social accounts so that we can better control them. We are hoping that by the end of the semester, the Office of Residence Life will have a strong presence on multiple social media sites.
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY
Contact: Emily Joria
(773) 910-2707
[email protected]
Wisconsin native finds second home at Marquette
Plans to focus her PR career on a single company
MILWAUKEE- Current Marquette University student and Sheboygan-native Leah Steinbruecker plans to have a successful career in Public Relations at a company where she can dedicate her time effectively.
Steinbruecker is pursuing her degree in Public Relations because she enjoys having the opportunity to solve problems and interact with people. Although she acknowledges that some aspects of the career are daunting, she believes it will be worth it to work on a personal level with clients. Steinbruecker’s goal is to work at a corporation or with an individual client rather than a Public Relations agency.
“I would rather work at one place than an agency because it allows me to be devoted to one specific company,” Steinbruecker said. “If I’m only working with one client, I can focus all my attention on how to best serve them.”
After initially being undecided about her studies, Steinbruecker has found Public Relations to be a good fit. She considers herself a talker and believes this will help her connect with others in her career. She is currently considering the addition of a business minor to her degree in hopes that it will make her more marketable.
ADPR 3600 @emilyatmarquetteu - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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