Ohio Northern University Homecoming

For any school, homecoming is one of the major events of the year.  It can be high school or college but homecoming football games are one of the biggest moments of the school year, especially the fall semester.  This past Saturday, Ohio Northern had its homecoming football game.  It was a cold, slightly rainy and very windy day.  Nevertheless, students, professors and alumni alike all filled the stadium to cheer on the football team.

With the popularity of social media and its easy access on almost any cell phone, many colleges, sports organizations and media outlets have started to use twitter and Facebook as a means of letting people have immediate access to live scores and details about games.  This is what I did for the football game.  I sat in the unexpected and very cold weather and live tweeted the important occurrences throughout the game and then documented it using Storify.  I included everything from weather details to pictures, other people’s experiences at the game and of course important football aspects, such as highlights and scores. 

Since homecoming is one of the biggest events of the year, I expected to see a lot of tweets from ONU’s official twitter account about not just the game but other events as well.  To my surprise, there were a grand total of three tweets about homecoming.  I was a little shocked that homecoming, an event that garners a lot of attention at any school, received so little attention on ONU’s twitter page.  To be fair, ONU’s sports account did keep a live update of the game, similar to what I did but there was no reference to it on the official account.  This seems like a mistake by Ohio Northern’s media management.  The better decision would have been to engage followers and try and promote not just the football game but also many other homecoming events.  By engaging target audiences (alumni and students) there could have been more people at the game and other events.

What ONU should have done is compiled a group of people who were responsible for managing the school’s social media accounts during homecoming and the weeks leading up to it, so that way they could have been engaging followers prior to homecoming weekend.  This way, more people would have been made aware.  The faster and earlier they would have promoted it the better.  They also should have monitored anything related to homecoming that was being tweeted.  They could have checked for hashtags and direct tweets at the very least.  For example, I used the hashtag “ONUHC14,” standing for Ohio Northern University homecoming 2014.  Frankly, the school could have done a much better job promoting homecoming on twitter, because what they ended up doing was rather poor.

Klondike participates in the parade on saturday, homecoming weekend.  

Facebook was really the same situation.  There were only two posts about homecoming.  However, there were several pictures added so that was a positive.   But they were added two days after homecoming, so it wasn’t any kind of immediate update anyone could view or enjoy. 

To conclude, I did have fun on homecoming.  Going to the game was fun, albeit cold and spending time with fellow students during the game was enjoyable too.  Once again, check out my Storify containing several live tweets from the football game for full details.

Go Bears!