The Strides of Gallagher

Twitter. What started as a microblogging concept to coincide with SMS messaging has become a worldwide platform for news, media, sports, politics and more. In the span of 14 years Twitter has seen an evolution and growth that has set it place amongst the top social media platforms of all time. In addition to being more likely to follow a brand, Twitter users are also more likely to willingly interact with ad and new brands than on any other platform.  Much like Instagram and Facebook, Twitter allows brands to create business profiles. These contain the same features of the other two save for two factors. Twitter does not have a market in the app, but what they do have is a blue "verified" checkmark for brands that meet certain criteria. This checkmark is something that allows Twitter users to for sure know the brand they are looking at is the real thing and not a imposter posing as them for nefarious means. I like this factor that Twitter has because, in a world where digital...

Stress. The feeling that is almost ever present within the college community. Each student here at Ohio Northern University feels it at some point for one reason or another. Whether it is classes, homework, friends or family stress finds it's way into our lives. The presence of stress is not all bad though. It can be great motivator to do better in many capacities. There is research showing that stress can improve performance is tense situations. Stress exemplifies concern and desire in people. In this way it is almost a performance enhancer. It can have physical benefits like allowing the body to push itself harder. Mental benefits can also be extended such as decision making speed and focus. But like a drug, stress can also have severe drawbacks when found in large quantities. While in short bursts stress can be beneficial, in large amounts it can be harmful to one's health. Large amounts of stress is associated with physical heath issues such as hair loss, high blood pressur...

The fifth chapter of "Essentials of Social Media Marketing" revolves entirely around the social media platform of Instagram. Instagram is currently the second most used social media platform of all time, with hundreds of millions of photos posted daily across 1.45 billion users.  The real interest I find with Instagram in general is the simplicity of it translating to the raw utility it grants users and business alike. Being able to creatively use an outlet entirely based on a universal format is a perfect way to grant people easy access to the world at large to further their personal brand. On a larger scale, the universal "photo and caption" format creates a factory-style way of business creating posts. Each photo is the same crop size, each caption can have any hashtags and each photo can contain links to their products. For large spans of time companies can easily schedule posts with minute changes to description and photo associated with them. I've seen thi...

Below you will find my latest episode of my accompanying podcast to this blog site,  The Sounds of Gallagher. Today I discussed social media and memes with Dr. Shane Tilton. Dr. Tilton is an accredited author of multiple books and research papers. The most recent of which being Meme Life . He's a professor at Ohio Northern University and teaches his media knowledge through multiple courses of his own design. Here are some of the questions I asked him in our interview:  What is the extent of your experience with social media?  What is a "meme" and what kind of role does it play in digital culture? Is there a difference between a "meme" and a memetic piece of media? According to Research done by  Scott Atran with HAL Open Science, memes are more about inference in the mind than imitation of reality. Why do you think this is true or false? In the same research document by Scott Atran, memes are often referred to as being able to evolve. In what way h...

 Facebook is one of the longest standing social media platforms out there. From it's infancy to right now it remains to be a giant in the industry of not just social media, but marketing and advertising as well. When a platform reaches more than half al off people who use the internet, it is a gold mine for cheap advertising.  Being mostly used by millennials at the moment, it is easy to how Facebook excels at advertising to the younger folk. Advertisers on Facebook use easy to click links and eye-catching pictures to grab your attention while mindlessly scrolling through posts. This allows their content to blend in with the overall look of the site, but still be noticed as an ad and drive people to click on it.  Another pro that I think puts Facebook above other social sites is the ability to make a business page. This is a recent upgrade to Facebook that allows companies to keep track of a multitude of details for their business. From clicks on ads to views and likes, i...

This week has been an interesting week for me. College always has it's new and old challenges each semester, but this...this is different. Nothing too bad has happened but so many minorly inconvenient things have happened since the semester began that I can't help but think of the oddity of it all. This all started with a week-long incident in Lima Complex at ONU. I will not go into detail because it is not my place, but know that this took seven days, the entire Lima Complex staff and Public Safety to solve. That was the start of this series of events that have no relation to each other in subject, but I somehow am partially involved in all of them. Within a few days of that occurring, someone stole the gas cap off my car. Normally at ONU, the hijinks are limited to stealing bike seats and late-night dorm parties. But stealing a gas cap off of someone's car, really? On top of that there wan not much that Public Safety could do for me because it is untraceable. It is a simp...

 This week the text covered a step-by-step guide on developing a social media marketing strategy. Currently, social media advertising is the most popular and effective way to market products of all kinds, Social media ads are interactive, fast, easy to read and can be viewed on almost any platform whether it is handheld or desktop. Where most of this chapter is familiar to me, the idea behind a social media audit is new and intriguing to me. We have all this knowledge about ourselves right at the fingertips, it just needs digging up. The internet is a huge web of pages and blogs and social media that it can be hard to find what you are looking for. But if we follow along with the ideas behind a social media audit, then the information will sift through where it needs to be found. After that, is it merely fitting all the info to the metrics that need to be found and we can know loads of social information about ourselves, or another brand.  Once you do the audit and go through ...

Today something happened on ONU's campus that is abnormal. We experienced a power outage. But this was no ordinary power outage, this one was campus-wide. That is a rare occurrence around here due to all the fail safes and modularity of the ONU power grid. Normally this would be a write off occurrence as a lot of what I do is not reliant on power and I can be patient enough for power to come back on. But today was different becasue this was my first power outage as a member of ONU Res Life. As a member of Res Life my duty is to watch over my residents of my residence hall and ensure their comfort and safety. That, and be a filter for every single one of their concerns when something bothersome or unusual arises. That concern today was the big power outage in the middle of the afternoon when everybody is doing homework.  As soon as the the power went out multiple things began to happen simultaneously such as: I began to get multiple calls and texts from my residents saying the power...