ONU Social Media Workshop 2023

On March 24, I attended the 2023 ONU Social Media Workshop. There were plenty of interesting speakers to listen to, so I will give you all the main points of these presentations that I found stuck with me.

The first speaker was a man by the name of Steven Miller. He graduated from ONU with a political science degree, but now works at Disney World with the marketing team. He instructed us all to be open to any possibility and to continue saying yes to all good opportunities being given to us. He writes the Disney Parks blog and through this experience realized that if you start writing something, you can always edit it later. From this presentation I learned to have hope, use my emotions to convey experiences to others, and most importantly to be authentic. His speech was truly inspiring, but I expected nothing less, coming from an employee of one of the most magical places in the world!

The second presentation was done by two employees of Airstream. From this presentation, I learned to always communicate goals with your client, be transparent and that the size of a team is worth considering when you’re on the hunt for a job. Their social media calendar has them holding a monthly content call, reviewing the content plan, reviewing social media posts, and doing a final review to ensure everything is perfect. The third presentation was done by someone who works as a marketer for the Ohio State Fair! She told us her job revolves around finding influencers to promote the fair. I did not know that there are 4 different types of influencers. They are Mega (over 1 million followers), Macro (100,000-1 million followers), Micro (1,000-100,000 followers) and Nano (under 1,000 followers). This means that almost everyone can be an influencer (unless you have 0 followers)!

The fourth presentation, done by Diane Lang, from the Nationwide Children’s Hospital was super intriguing to me. I decided to live tweet it. Follow my Twitter: @elkins2468. To summarize, she talked about Nationwide’s TikTok strategy. She said they use trends, are authentic, professional and seek to raise awareness and spread knowledge to their patients and audience. Their most famous TikTok shows a doctor dancing to either side of the camera screen, depending on what symptoms are shown. One side of the screen shows which symptoms warrant a visit to the ER, the other side shows those symptoms that don’t. This was so creative, and their followers agreed, as it got almost 3 million views!

To wrap up the ONU Social Media Workshop, Kevin Saghy, from The Ohio State University spoke on social media strategy. He shared that what worked for them was to live tweet/interact with brands, let the audience know that they can take a joke and to have a set target audience and specific goals. He said that playing on opportunity, experience and pride/nostalgia worked the best for The Ohio State University in appealing to their target audiences.

In conclusion, I felt like I learned a lot from attending this conference and am thankful for all the professionals that came to speak! Maybe one day, I'll come back to ONU as a professional in my field to speak.