#ONUPRSSA Storified

The Ohio Northern University Public Relations Student Society of America is a pre-professional organization for college students interested in pursuing careers in public relations and communications. Our organization encourages students to gain a greater understanding of the field and practices of public relations by attending weekly chapter meetings, which usually involve a guest speaker or a workshop of some sort.

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of live tweeting our meeting. Madison Bender came to speak about integrated marketing and her role as the social media specialist for an agency in Cleveland called thunder::tech. As an ONU alumna, Madison also offered a lot of valuable advice for her fellow PR polar bears. I tweeted the highlights of Madison's speech with the hashtag #ONUPRSSA so followers could keep up with the event in real-time. After the meeting, I used a site called Storify to compile all the #ONUPRSSA tweets and make a story out of the event. Check out my Storify here!

In addition to my live tweeting, I looked at how the official ONU PRSSA social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook and Blogger) promoted the meeting. The night before our meeting, ONU PRSSA posted promotional messages on the Facebook and Twitter pages, but the accounts did not post during or after the meeting to recap for those who couldn't make it. The blog has not yet posted a recap either. 

Live tweeting was a little difficult for me because I was constantly torn between giving Madison my full attention and giving my Twitter followers an update on what Madison was telling us. I was ONU PRSSA's social media director last year, so I know what a challenge it is to keep our followers up to date in real-time. As we've learned from Groundswell, Share This and Madison Bender last Thursday, effectively running social media accounts for any organization takes a great deal of time, effort and commitment. We've also learned from Real-Time Marketing & PR that social media users want their information instantly. The longer we wait to relay information to followers the less relevant that information becomes.

Taking all of this information into consideration, I think it would be beneficial for ONU PRSSA to try to live tweet our Thursday meetings more often. ONU PRSSA could then recap the meeting and live-tweet session by creating a Storify for those who weren't able to follow the live tweeting.