Keith Houser’s Blog

Here we are in our second to last week of classes and let me tell you the senioritis is coming back. My classes are starting to wind way down. Last week I only had class Monday and Tuesday because my classes got cancelled for the rest of the week. This made for really easy week sort of. When I say sort of, I mean I had to go home and help on the farm. We had some gorgeous days last week and the weekend. We started to get into the fields to start side dressing end rows with anhydrous. We apply the rest of the anhydrous when the crop has emerged from the ground because it is more effective. The reason we do the end rows before it is planted is because we do not want to run over as much corn. We also spread hog manure on our field that we were going to plant our hay crop on. We then planted that field after we finished spreading. We planted till about 12 a.m. until we ran out of seed. I will say that it was a relief that we ran out of seed, or we would have been planting all night long. T

This semester we focused our learning about social media through the textbook “Essentials of Social Media Marketing.” In this book there are 13 different chapters describing all the different types of platforms of social media and how you can use them to promote and sell the goods and services your business has to offer. Throughout all platforms of social media, the first thing you must do in marketing your business is creating a target market that you want to specifically direct your posts too. The next steps are pretty similar to all platforms because you then create your profile according to how the platform allows you to create it. You then need to schedule your posts and allow the public to view your profile and posts to get the most interactions. This book has been super helpful with giving all the helpful tips and tricks for each platform while explaining in detail how to operate the app. I would recommend this book to anyone looking into a degree in social media or really anybo

Here we are again with another crazy week in week 13 or 14 I cannot remember which one it is, but all I know is that I have two more weeks of classes then I am done for the year. As many of you probably know, It is spring time and we are finally getting some nice weather this week. Being a farmer this time of year is very crazy and super busy. The ground finally broke the 55 degree mark this week so that means we can plant whenever the ground is dry. This week though has been crazy. It started Monday with working on the manure spreader. We have to spread manure from our pig barn and our cattle barns on the fields in the spring and fall. We do this before the cultivator goes through the field before the planter so that we make sure we work it into the soil and do not get the planter all dirty. We then spent Tuesday and Wednesday tearing the pump apart because it had a leak in it so we had to fix that. Once it was fixed we were finally able to start spreading. But today it decided to rai

In chapter 13 we learned about Integrated Media Communications. This is the use of promotional tools and marketing strategies to help develop the best way to market your goods and/or services. Integrated Media Communications are effective because you can use different platforms of media based upon which demographic you are looking to market to. We also learned about social media campaigns. These have been more popular in the recent years due to the fact that social media is trending and getting better each year. You can even buy and sell things through Facebook on their marketplace and even Instagram has a new feature now where you can buy and sell items.

Here we are in another week closer to summer break. This week is a shortened week because of Easter. I do not have classes Thursday or Friday. This week has been a pretty laid back week for the most part except for Monday. Monday was a challenging day because I forgot we had an exam in business ethics. I spent most of the morning and an hour in the afternoon doing my homework. Little did I know I had an exam at 2 p.m. that day. I remember that I had an exam at about 1230 or 1245. This led to me to lose my mind and start stressing. I spent the next hour and a half studying for my exam. I was doing practice test after practice test just trying to retain the knowledge, I needed to complete the test. Once I got to the test my computer had really low battery, so I thought I was screwed but luckily I had my charger in my bookbag ready to go for the test. I then took the test and think I did pretty well but we will see in the coming weeks how I did. What has been your craziest moment this pas

We are on the discussion about Vlogs and Podcasts this week. Although these are not your typical social media platforms, they are very effective. It allows you to talk to anybody and everybody that is willing to listen and hear what you have to say, or you can listen to lots of other people as well. This week in class we did a podcast. We interviewed Coach Brandon Burge who is the strength and conditioning coach at Ohio Northern University. We asked Coach Burge a lot of questions this week. Our questions varied from- What made you want to become a coach? What is your favorite memory since becoming a coach? What is your favorite quote and why? Who is your idle or the person you look up to the most? What is your dream coaching job? Who is your favorite player Keith or Josh and why? I selected these questions to ask Coach Burge for my 5 minutes of the assignment. I am doing this assignment with Josh Andrews so he is going to take the other 5 minutes to ask Coach Burge some q

Here we are in our last month of classes. After this month is over, we only have a few days in May to take our exams and then we are off on summer break. I will be spending my weeks leading up to these exams studying a lot so I can keep my grades up. We just started our second week of spring practices this week. Things are starting to come to me quicker as I am still learning all the tag words and signals but overall, it is going well. This week my family and I have been planning our vacation that we are taking this summer and needless to say I am ready for summer. How is everyone else’s life going?

This week we are learning about Tik Tok. Tik Tok is a huge platform of social media right now. I would have to say that I probably spend more time on Tik Tok than I do studying for exams. Tik Tok is being used by people of all ages but mostly in the age group of younger people. On Tik Tok you can post funny videos or inspirational videos or really any kind of video that is no longer than 3 minutes. One thing about Tik Tok that is different than ither social media platforms is that everybody can see your videos on the for you page as long as your account is not private. Tik Tok has some huge benefits for marketing your business. You should first make an account using your business name and then put some things about the business in your bio this should include a website, phone number, or some other way to contact your business. Once you create the account you need to start posting videos about your business. You should make your videos according to the type of customer you are looking f