Chronicles of Carson

 Howdy Friends!     This last week was packed with excitement, school and thankfully no drama. To start, last week was pretty laid back as far as class is concerned, although, we did have the Chief Financial Officer of Grange Insurance, Terri Brown, speak with my Portfolio Management class about her story and how she has reached the level of success that she has today. If there is one takeaway from her story, it was to always be yourself and never burn bridges. Terri was always true to herself and presented herself in that manner while working, and although she parted ways with a few different companies, she never ruined any of her previous connections and was offered her current position because of a connection from a previous employer.      Anyways, I really enjoyed listening to her speak and her message was great, but I think the main highlight of my last week was the first game of my senior lacrosse season on Saturday! This was an emotional week for me, but in a good way. We have b

     This week we studied marketing on the social media platform, Twitter. Twitter's platform is slightly smaller and geared more towards younger generations, especially when compared to Instagram and even more so when comparing with Facebook. Twitter users are also more focused demographically focused in urban and suburban areas with 26 percent and 22 percent respectively, while only reaching 13 percent of the rural population.      Although the user population of Twitter is slightly less than Facebook and Instagram, interaction with brands is higher, three times greater to be exact. Users on Twitter are three times more likely to follow a brand than on Facebook. Users on Twitter are more open to brand interaction as most users use the app as a way to find news, search for deals, customer service and purchase ideas. Twitter's live tweeting style allows for easy to find, live updates from brands and news outlets as well as a quick and easy way to respond those brands. 69 percen

 Howdy everyone!      This past week was fairly tame when looking back at the rest of the semester. I started the week with classes and a day off of lacrosse practice on Monday and the majority of my week went the same, with the addition of practice each afternoon. However, on Wednesday we had a financial advisor, Chris Daris, come in and speak to my portfolio management class. This was exciting because he is in the field that I hope to be joining in a few months time, and he offered great insight on what he has done throughout his career to reach the level of success he currently has. He spoke more specifically about how he manages the money that his clients have entrusted him with and how he looks for opportunities each day to best help his large book of clients. What was most interesting to me, however, was how he started this career and built up a client book from nothing. He spoke about how he was in the banking industry, which was great, but he wanted to have a greater impact on

    This weeks reading installment is about social media marketing with Instagram. This platform is great for B2C connections with 84% of users saying that they want to find new brands through using this platform and 60% of users claiming that they have found a new brand through using Instagram. These numbers prove important and effective as about 72% of Instagram users have claimed to have purchased a product they first saw on the site. Instagram is a platform used by a majority of businesses, as roughly 71% of businesses have an active Instagram profile.     Instagram is an effective platform for businesses to use for marketing as they offer the ability to hyperlink posts and customize your profile with links to contact information, new deals or simply to the company's website. This customization allows full control of what a company wants its potential consumers to see immediately, all in just one or two clicks. Although Instagram is dominated demographically by a younger audien

 This past week was quite exciting with a lot to talk about, so I'll keep it to the highlights as to not take up your entire day.  So, where to start? Let's start mid-week as the early portion of the week was not much more eventful than going to class and lacrosse practice. However as Wednesday rolled around, there was talk of snow, and a lot of it! We heard that there was going to be anywhere between 5 and 36 inches of snow over just about 24 hours! My house was beyond excited and began planning our snow day and what we would be doing if we happened to get snowed in or have class cancelled. Sure enough, we had class cancelled on Thursday and the house spent all day watching and enjoying the snow. After shoveling our driveway we decided to build a couch out of the snow in our front yard! We made a large pile of snow and did our best to form a large couch out of the freshly falling snow. We had a lot of support from people driving by, honking and cheering us on as they rolled pa

 There are many different social media platforms that brands can use to market themselves and their products. Facebook is a great platform for companies to use as it has the greatest reach of all social media platforms with over 2.7 billion monthly active users. Another reason Facebook is such a great resource for marketing is that it has a very well mixed community, reaching urban, suburban and rural users fairly equally at 73%, 69% and 66% respectively.  Facebook also reaches a multitude of income groups with an almost equal amount of users that have incomes of <$30k, between $30k and $74,999 as well as $75k and above. These statistics are helpful for companies looking to reach a wide variety of users which is what allows Facebook to really have a control of the social media marketing world.     Another important feature of Facebook's marketing dominance is the amount of data they can provide to the companies that wish to market themselves on Facebook's platform. For insta

     In Chapter 3 of our book, we learned about how to put formal social media marketing strategies and marketing plans in place. In order to understand how to put these two items together to maximize use of social media platforms, we must first understand the difference between the two terms. A social media marketing strategy outlines the tactics for how a company will incorporate social media into its business. The social media marketing plan  is a living document that outlines an organization's social media goals and guides the actions need to achieve these goals. Basically, the marketing strategy is how social media is used, while the plan is what needs to be done to reach the goals. Through the reading, we learned of the importance of identifying a target market and conducting a social media audit first. These steps are taken to understand who you are trying to reach, and why you may not currently be reaching them. After establishing this, its important to create goals that yo

For this weeks blog, I completed a Personal Brand Worksheet and wanted to share this work with you all. I know this is a bit more lengthy than my typical blog post but I felt this might be interesting for you to read. I hope you enjoy! Personal Brand Worksheet Step 1: Identify your Target Audience      I'm not sure where I want to work as far as geography, however I do know I want to work in financial services, specifically as a financial advisor and most likely at Northwestern Mutual.      When looking for skill sets, experience and type of candidates, I found out that recruiters often look for people who are good with people, able to communicate and present well and who are self-driven. The experience required is not not much, mostly companies would just like to see that you have some kind of college degree, although the specific field of study is not necessarily a concern.      Common keywords related to a search of "financial advisor" include; empathetic, communicativ