CarlyEmergeTO

I can’t believe EMERGE 2014 has come and gone. The day was super busy, and my phone almost died about 4 times. I have never been on twitter for an entire day before but it was pretty fun. I sat in and live tweeted from Greg Terrence’s, Rent, Frock, Repeat’s and Christine Bentley’s break out sessions. I especially loved hearing Christine Bentley speak and even got a photo with her! I am so proud our team got #EmergeTO trending not only in Toronto, but also in Canada. Our team was great and I am so happy I was part of such a successful team. To see my personal Tweets from the conference, you can check out my twitter account, @Cargas. The day was long and tiring but I would not trade my Emerge experience for anything!

Due to other commitments, I missed the very last class of my university career. This is definitely our crunch week! We are finalizing all ideas and getting things together for the conference. Robin has broken us up into teams so we know who we are working with on the day of the conference and what our tasks our! I can’t wait until Tuesday to see how this all goes!

This week was my last class because of Passover, and was it ever an eventful class. When we practiced lived blogging I think I may have had a little too much fun with it. This week we just kept up with our usual social media tasks and had a few meetings during class. Other than that nothing to eventful for myself!

This week was our last four-stream lecture, which I think went well. It was nice to hear what the other streams were up too and how they’ve progressed throughout the semester.  The best part of the class was when a small group of us discussed how live blogging and live tweeting was going to work on the day of the Emerge Conference. This week we had our first Emerge Chat on Twitter, which went well, lots of people took part and participated. Alexa and I continued to write for the community blog this week as well. I think there will be a lot of prep work for the conference because that is going to be a very busy day of the social media team, but I’m very excited for it!

This past week has been a busy one but the Social Media team has been on top of things. Alexa and I were busy writing more social media stories for our blog, which is now featured on the Emerge Magazine website. I have started promoting the blog on the Twitter account as well. In class on Tuesday we started to discuss the conference and how our team will be using social media on the big day. We plan to meet in person on Tuesday so further discuss how we will handle the accounts on the day of the conference. We plan on discussing how our social media accounts are either staying steady or are growing during our multi-stream class.  Our team will continue to work hard and promote the magazine and the conference as it quickly approaches. 

We are another week closer to the conference and I can’t believe how fast this semester is flying by. This week Alexa and I continued to keep an eye on social media and wrote stories for the social media/ community blog. Besides working on the blog I have also been helping out on social media, we have been re-teweeting the Emerge account as well as writing my own tweets for the account. In the next week I hope to see a link to the blog on the Emerge website and to have a few most posts up. Other then that, the social media team will continue to promote the magazine, the conference as well as contests. 

Talk about a busy week! I wrapped up my last week at my internship and was unable to make it to class on Tuesday. With my 240 hours complete I will finally have time to focus on my blog posts for the Emerge social media blog. This week we have just kept up with promoting the conference, tickets and stories from the web magazine. Alexa and I plan on having at least three stories on the blog by class on Tuesday. Our numbers continue to climb so we plan to keeping on doing what has worked out for us so far! 

This week our first contest ran on social media. We gave our twitter followers a chance to win 2 tickets to the conference by tweeting us what speakers they were most excited for using #EmergeContest. We tweeted around noon and six every day to promote the contest. Also this week we delivered our social media update to the class. Our number of followers on all social media platforms is growing on a daily basis. Alexa Lewis and I also worked on draft blog posts for when our Emerge Community Blog which live, but we are still working on content. We announced our winner of two conference tickets on Sunday evening. 

The first class back after reading week was busy and flew by really quickly. Alexa and I proposed our idea to start an Emerge Community Blog. We plan on posting a ‘social media round up’ and plan on writing about stories that are popular on social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. I also pitched a story idea with journalism student Kevin Scace. I offered to get an interview with Sochi 2014 commentator Rob Snoek. I have been brainstorming questions for the interview and plan on doing it within the next few days. The social media team promoted the conference website going live and on twitter we keep promoting tickets. Social media has slowed down a little bit since the Olympics ended but will pick up soon once our contests start up. 

It may have been reading week but my nose was far from being in a book. Unlike most students who get relax on the week off from school I stayed very busy. Besides working at my internship, I also stayed very busy posting on Twitter for @EmergeTO. Starting at 5 am in the newsroom usually means I am one of the few awake and watching the Sochi events live. I have been working with Mathea on keeping the Twitter account up to date since Valentine's Day. During major Olympic events, such as events where Canada is playing for a medal or events Team Canada won a medal, I have live tweeted. I have sent out interactive tweets asking who was watching as well as the results, such as the score or who how Canada placed. I had never realized that updating a Twitter account could be a full time job. I have also helped promote student profiles and the hard launch of the website since I started helping with the Twitter account. Since Valentine’s Day our numbers have been growing. We have gained more followers, have had many mentions and others retweeting our tweets. I enjoy posting on our Emerge account because I really feel like part of the social media team and not just a helping hand. Now that the Olympics are coming to an end I may find it a little bit harder finding things to tweet about, but with March less than a week away I feel like our tweets with be more Emerge focused. Contests for Emerge conference tickets are going to be staring soon as well so our followers should stay tuned! 

We did it! We launched all forms of social media this week! Week six was a success. Our social media team was in full force this week helping with the launch. On Monday, February 10th we launched at 11am. This led to all team members promoting the accounts a little bit more than usual. This included hashtagging and retweeting many EmergeTO things. This week the journalism students that are part of the social media team worked on a work back sheet for our professor, Kimberley Noble. This was an indepth breakdown of what we have been doing on a week to week basis. On Tuesday, February 11th a few of us met up just to make sure we were all on the same page and to track our progress. 

Sadly I had to leave the big group all stream meeting because I had to be up 6 hours after I left, and who really does anything well with just 5 hours of sleep?

Recite an acrostic poem for the word EMERGE (then we can edit each person’s answer so the entire video spells the word)

I started my position during week 3 when I started to generate ideas for Instagram photos and posting on Instagram myself. I also attended multiple meetings with Robin that week, where we met with many different Public Relations teams.