Sleeping = Optional

The last couple of weeks have been full of good news and bad news. Today, I am a 24 weeks and a couple of days (not much long until 25!) of my pregnancy. I am glad I have hit this mark, but I am not so glad that I am dealing with things I haven't had to deal with before. 

I went to the doctor today because lately I haven't been getting any sleep at night whatsoever. If I had to estimate the number of hours I have gotten sleep this week, it would be about 3.5 to 4 hours a night roughly. I know it can't just be me that has experienced this, but it is very frustrating when I am trying to be a full-time college student, hold a job, and stay healthy at the same time. 

When I asked my doctor what I could do to help this out, he joked with me and said, "Didn't you know? When you are pregnant and have a baby, sleeping is only optional..." 

This will be me

I literally froze when he said that. I think he noticed my panic because he instantly followed up with tricks I could try to get sleep. He knows I refuse to take any kind of medication other than prenatal vitamins, so he knew not to mention that! 

Here are some ways I am going to try to sleep through ONE night: 

1. Drink more water during the day
2. Reduce stress and anxiety 
3. Watch when and how much I eat 
4. Lay on the left side of my body to keep blood circulation going 
5. Buy a pregnancy pillow 

I think I am going to buy a pregnancy pillow first, because I already try to do half the things on this list. I have read plenty reviews so it better be worth it. 

This is the pregnancy pillow I want

I guess I never really believed in all of the "problems" that could occur during pregnancy. For the first trimester, although I got sick from time to time, I felt fine for the most part. But now I know better. I am trying to go with the flow, but I give pros to all women who are going or have gone through pregnancy--it's pretty tough sometimes! 

At this point, if you have read this and you have any other suggestions that I could try, let me know. I am ready to try almost anything to get a decent amount of sleep at night. 


In light of my situation, my aunt sent me a quote she thought would soothe me: 

"Everyone should have kids. They are the greatest joy in the world. But they are also terrorists. You'll realize this as soon as they are born, and they start using sleep deprivation to break you."

Now, I really can't wait...

8 Ways To Conduct Successful Social Media

This week my social media class discussed Chapters 5 and 6 of Measure What Matters by Katie Paine. I felt like I learned a lot in these chapters that would apply to my current National Editor-in-Chief position for Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA). 

One topic I found very interesting was how to conduct social media successfully. I think the top 8 steps I read about are some of the most crucial steps to take when launching a blog or some other type of social media outlet. 
 

 Here are 8 ways to ensure successful social media:

 1. Find the content. Find hosts of free monitoring services so you can keep track of what's in the news and what is going on. 

2. Determine the type of conversation take place. Quantifying the % of conversations that fall into each category.

3. Determine the visibility of your brand. Determine where in the post/video/conversation your organization was mentioned -Dominance vs. Prominence.

4. Determine who was quoted in item. If conducting a thought leadership program, tracking presence or absence of thought leaders is critical. 

5. Determine the sentiment and/or presence or absence of recommendations. Check the Sentiment (tone) Net Promoter Score to see if consumers are recommending your brand. Typical tones that are recognized are positive/negative/balanced/neutral.

6. Determine what, if any, messages were communicated. Categorize your discussion of your messages.

7. Determine positioning on key issue or battles. Good analysis will pull out recurring themes, complains, and messages

 
8. Quantifying the authority of writer or poster. Use Twitalyzer and Technorati to do this. 

Courtesy of Thought Pick

 

Out of all these steps, I found #5 to be the most fascinating. I never really thought there would be that many different tone categories for social media--I always thought it was as clear as the colors, black and white. These tone categories give a little gray area though--with positive, negative, balanced, and neutral. I feel as though giving a social media account a "neutral" presence would be hard to measure. I would rather have a positive or negative social media account so I knew what exactly to fix--neutral seems to "gray area" for me. 

Other than that, I completely agree with every step. I am trying to practice all of these steps to ensure the blog I run for PRSSA is credible as well as highly trafficked. 

I will take these steps with me everywhere!