Category: Uncategorized

Spring splash continues to be an extremely positive time for many local business owners. Despite the Common Council and many townspeople’s best efforts, it was once again a time where many students were day drinking and having a great time, while helping local businesses.

Today, the unofficial numbers I was told from a fellow Walmart worker is that we had $16,000 in alcohol sales combined over the Friday before and Saturday of the city-wide celebration. Unlike last year when Walmart literally ran out of nearly every type of alcohol they had, this year the managers were prepared for it. After checking out untold amounts of alcohol during my 9:30-2 p.m. shift, I went to the alcohol aisle out of curiosity and discovered it fully stocked as if no one had even touched it that day. In my mind, that was extremely impressive.

As I left from my 5:30-10 p.m. shift tonight, another fellow Walmart worker (who also works at the local McDonalds) told me that McDonalds topped that in sales and were nearly out of the ingredients for most of their food. Apparently, they went through the entire stock of everything that was in their freezers and coolers and won’t have a truck bringing in more food until late Tuesday. I was also told that the company brought in nearly $10,000 worth of sales just overnight as many drunk college students stopped at the restaurant for food.

As much as soon many people in town love to complain about it, just look at two of the more prominent local business sales. Knowing that so many other businesses probably saw just as large of an increase in sales for the day, there is plenty of good that the celebration brings the town. Yeah there might be lots of drunk college students potentially littering and doing other disruptive/illegal things, but it is also a college town. If the residents can’t handle that, it reflects very poorly on them.

The online social shopping experience is something that picked up in the blink of an eye. Just five years ago, I had never even attempted to buy anything online. Just thinking about how much online shopping I do, that fact is incredible to me now.

After never buying anything online, now all I hear about is people buying stuff online all the time. It has grown through word of mouth marketing and the fact that you don’t even have to leave your home. The revolutionary concept would’ve been even more foreign to anyone thinking about internet’s earliest adoptions with dial-up.

The speed and functionality of the online shopping experience makes it easy to be used in different forms of social media as well. Online shopping has been stream-lined by both Facebook and Twitter, the two social media accounts I use the most. Everywhere you go through the Twitter timeline or Facebook feed, you see both ads for products or people talking about how much they love something that they bought online.

Any time you look back and reflect on how much things have changed over time, you can easily get amazed by how far we have come. Seeing online marketing ploys and ads from both people’s personal social media accounts is still crazy to me.

Watching technology move so fast to make companies that don’t have phone or tablet apps to buy their products is incredible. Now near the bottom of the ads that usually shows the company website, the symbol for the ap store or google play is there instead to show that the company has its own app.

The online social shopping experience is an incredibly fast-paced changing mechanism that has grown up right before our eyes. Reflecting on how it has changed was crazy to think about.

Since I have come to school five years ago, the Royal Purple student newspaper, which is a large part of who I am, has made incredible strides on social media accounts such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

When I first came on as a staff writer for the paper, the website and Facebook page were very primitive. The paper didn’t have an Instagram, but both the Royal Purple news and Twitter accounts did have a large following. We continued to slowly grow the online presence by posting stories, live-tweeting sports events and the Whitewater Student Government races and much, much more. In the past two years, we have created an Instagram account to share some of our top photos and graphics that further spread the message.

Two years ago, as a staff, we decided to add two more positions, multi-media and social media editor. Unfortunately, we currently don’t have a social media editor who would make YouTube videos that we would share on our Twitter and Facebook accounts about upcoming stories, video coverage of events that we had been covering.

Our social media manager is responsible for promoting all of our stories that get uploaded to our website and using language to entice people to click on our site and read our content.

The one thing that we really do not promote as much as we should is our Twitter. Besides live-tweeting some events, both the news and sports accounts could have a chance to reach a completely different following on that app by tweeting out our stories like many top news organizations do.

The social media world is an ever-changing place, and as we as people and organizations strive to keep up with it, it changes again. It can be frustrating and rewarding but is something that is here to stay.