Luck O' The Irish strikes again!

For the second week in a row, my Fighting Irish of Notre Dame have pulled off another remarkable victory. I know these consecutive posts may be tedious, but it is highlight of my weekend because of how the win occurred.  The Irish had played a pretty great game up to the third quarter. Then the crap hit the fan. Starting quarterback Malik Zaire went down with a broken left ankle and the Irish had to put in redshirt freshman, DeShone Kizer. I wanted to turn the TV off right then and there, because last week the starting running back tore his ACL and is out for the season, so now it seemed like our season was in for the worst. But the luck of the Irish had come around once again and the Notre Dame found themselves in a tie game on the road. The freshman Kizer, dropped back and found Will Fuller down the field to deliver a perfect pass and put the Irish up 34-27 with only 7 seconds left in the game. Notre Dame definitely escaped Virginia with a win, but under the circumstances that they played under, I can't help but be proud of my Irish. Every week, ND plays a top 5 conference opponent and they've done that for as long as they have been around, so to see them compete like that with their team captain out for the season was very "Ohio State like" of them. 

Notre Dame was the only team of my 3 favorite football teams to win this weekend. When a football game makes me jump out of my seat and start hooting and hollering, then it is a successful weekend in my book.

Embracing the Tweet: Real-Time methods

Twitter is more than an app. Twitter has become a global phenomenon that has linked people, friends, and businesses to connections that wouldn't be possible without it. The reading in "Real-Time Marketing and PR" talked about "Embracing the Tweet" in chapter 10. The author talks about how Twitter is so easy to use and allows its users to search whatever they want, whenever they want. The more I thought about how true that statement was, I kept thinking of ways to better my fraternity's Twitter profile. My fraternity, Delta Sigma Phi is an organization just like a business or company with a Twitter page. Our social media was a little out of date until the beginning of the semester, when we had one of our brothers go through all of our channels and update some information. One of our brothers is in charge of the social media channels right now, but after reading this book, there are some valuable tips that I could implement into our profiles. Those changes could make our image more appealing and give us more followers. In this article, it talks about the positives and negatives of social media for Greek Life. Recruitment is a vital part of the social media aspect for Greek organizations because the millennial generation is starting to become known for it's attachment to social media, and the best way to get in touch and connect with those potential new members is through social media. David Meerman Scott talks about how Twitter can sometime make an organization/business's image look sleazy if the post seems to have too much hype. Twitter is more than an app. It is a useful tool that can help our businesses and improve our overall public relations with others around the globe.

Real-Time for Real Businesses

In todays business world, the time to react is key. Knowing how much time you have to complete a certain task is vital to not only yourself and your business, but your associates as well. In this weeks reading of David Meerman Scott's, Real-Time Marketing, I was introduced to the idea of "Real-time" strategy used in businesses. First off, I learned that a standard time for a response for a journalist or someone in public relations is 72 hours. Being a journalist, this is important and pertinent to my major and career after school. In Scott's book, he notes in the world of business, you are rewarded for speed. Especially in any field with the media, speed is vital. Speed is not just what we think it is. There are laws for speed and in real-time, those laws can make or break your career and job. There are laws on how to disseminate the news and how to spread the word through different news outlets. Now these laws are not legislative laws, they are more advised principles to follow to better yourself and your business. At the same time, Real-Time thinking is not an "either/or" thing, it is a mindset that we must have as entrepreneurs, co-workers, and professionals. In our world of news, we need to use real-time methods and use speed in our work, because you’ve got to react quickly to the news. If not first, then early, because you can’t react late.

Hale to the Ol' Notre Dame

This weekend was one of my favorite times of the year. That time of the year when football is back. I play baseball and it is my craft, but man, there is just something about football that rejuvenates me. The smell of the fresh cut grass and the popcorn. I could go all Kenny Chesney here with the "Boys of Fall" spiel, but instead I want to show some love to my Fighting Irish of Notre Dame for making a big statement win this weekend versus the Texas Longhorns. The anticipation of the game was built from the moment I woke up. It was like a beacon of hype that couldn't be ignored any longer. My Irish had a so-so year last season, so I was ready to here the sounds of the marching band and see the classic gold helmets take the field again and stat off of a good note versus a solid Texas squad. Once I had all of my green and blue on and my game face on, I do not think that I sat down more than once or twice during the game. The game started off with the Irish striking first and going up 7-0. Once they scored the first touchdown, I started speaking in an Irish accent that me and my "boyo" can nail. The game wasn't just another sporting event, it was the kickoff to what should be a great year of football. I got the BYU hail mary pass on snapchat and that was a great game. Notre Dame's game might not have been down to the wire like some of the other game this weekend, but they definitely have the pieces to make a run for a playoff berth this year. Watching Notre Dame football is just something that appeals with my heritage too. The fighting Irish, Touchdown Jesus, all that jazz. Anyways, college football is back folks and you best bring your popcorn.

Social Media: When is enough, enough?

This week in social media, a line was crossed. A photo of a boy who was a refugee from Syria, was found dead on the shores of Turkey this past week, according to an article by guardian.com. The boy and his mother and siblings had drowned and washed on shore and a photo was taken when the bodies were found. The most famous picture was this photo (shown right), that shows the boy being taken off the shores where his body was found. The boy was wearing a red children's t-shirt and some denim shorts. That description right there is enough for me. To know that a child, who was only trying to survive and stay with his family, had to pay the ultimate price because he was not allowed to be free, unlike us who are free everyday. To make things even worse, the photo was shown and went viral on social media, especially Twitter. In my opinion, there is a line in the "social media world", that shouldn't be crossed and when that picture went viral, it was crossed. I can understand the argument that social media can be used as a news outlet to relay the news to the general public, but when the picture that has gone viral is a picture of a dead boy being carried away, that is more than news being shared. Unfortunately in our world today, those kinds of things are being accepted and the photo that is being shown here is actually not the worst of the photos. The worst is a close up shot of the boy laying on the sand as his body just lays there. There is one potentially good thing that I can think of coming out of this; The leaders of the world and the leaders of the middle east and in countries like Syria, Hungary and Turkey will see the disasters like this that happen and will see that the people  that use social media won't stand for it and will voice their opinions until a change is made. I hate when all we hear in the news today is just stories about evil, tragedy or strife, but I couldn't believe that social media actually made this photo go viral.

That freaking song that got stuck in my head

In the reading for this weeks class, David Meerman Scott certainly made the first two chapters pretty easy to read. It was so easy to follow the story of Dave Carroll and his broken Taylor guitar. In fact, it was so easy that I still cannot get that stupid song out of my head. The books talks about how Dave Carroll  made an unremarkable public relations exhibit and he probably didn't even try. He was just making a statement about his discontent with United Airlines. The way that his song blatantly calls out United, one would figure that United would have responded with a little more urgency. Instead they leave Dave with no answers for nine months.

A question to raise to the reader: If you were Dave, would you have redacted differently? I can personally say that I would have done the same. I think that his creativity is probably much greater than mine, but I would've tried to use my platform as a singer and musician to make my message known to the public. Especially since United Airlines is a very popular airline and is a company that is used everyday around the globe, he had some serious guts to pull that off.

Pop the volley, I'm settin'

This weekend at college, I finally got the motivation to participate in the mud volleyball tournament. I have always said I would play in previous years, but I never followed through with it. Well this past Saturday,  I rolled out of bed and was ready to get knee deep in some mud. After going to the volleyball courts and seeing the line for registration, I quickly felt that familiar feeling to want to call it quits and just crawl back to bed; but I stayed strong and had to wait it out. Our co-ed team of 6 was called "Knee Deep", which was nowhere close to the level of creativity that some teams had for their team name. I'm not that great at volleyball, so my attitude going into the tournament was just to enjoy the atmosphere and have fun and the winning would take care of itself. Sure enough, thats what we did. We won our first 3 games pretty easily and found ourselves in the sweet sixteen. As the day went on, we heard the tournament was going to go till around 8 PM. Instead we decided that we needed to eat soon, so we forfeited our next game and called it a day. After falling into the mud filled pits a couple of times and channeling my inner pig, it felt good to be involved in something so fun and inclusive of everyone on campus.