The end is here: Your last post

Thanks to everyone for such a wonderful semester! We’ve gone from Twitter to BlogPulse to Quora, with several stops along the way. Through it all, you’ve blogged about the things you’ve learned in class and found ways to find your particular niche.

For your last post of the semester, share a quick post with the rest of the class your favorite part of blogging, your biggest challenge, and whether you think you’ll continuing blogging after the semester is done. Leave a link to your post in the comments section below.

Week Thirteen: Comparing to the Big Guns

As you start your final projects, you should be analyzing the blogs and other online presences of major brands or organizations. For many of you, your blogs have been about issues or subjects closely aligned with corporate interests or products, so you may be finding sites or social networking profiles useful to your own work.

For your post this week, look for a blog or online resource driven by a brand, company, media outlet or government agency that covers topics similar to your blog. How is this site different than your blog? Is it more or less credible? Is it transparent about who is producing content? How well does the blog engage its targeted community. Share your evaluation of this blog and let your readers know whether you think it’s worth visiting.

No Class Tonight

We won’t be meeting this week. Each team that has not yet been assigned a brand or organization for the final assignment should email me by Wednesday a.m. for their team’s subject.

If you are in need of a partner or if you have not emailed me by Wednesday at 9:00 a.m. to let me know who you’re working with, I will assign a partner to you and notify you via email.

Those teams who already know their assignments will present next week, all other teams will present the final week. Please let me know if you have any questions!

There will be a blog post for this week, please check the site later today or tomorrow for your assignment.

Thanks!

Week Twelve: Final Assignment

In teams of two, you will be responsible for completing a landscape analysis of a company or organization that I’ve assigned you.

As part of this assignment, you should use the tools and platforms we’ve discussed in class this semester to investigate the online and social presence of your assigned company or organization. Is there a corporate blog? How is it used? What sort of social networks or communities is it active on? What sorts of online conversations during the past year have featured your assigned subject and what types of influencers are driving those conversations?

Your analysis and evaluation is due in a 5-7 page paper, which should be turned in the night your team shares its findings with the class in a 10-15 minute presentation.

Week Eleven: Privacy and Data Security

During class this week, we heard from Andrew Howard, who shared information on the regulatory and communications landscape shaping the privacy debate. As part of his lecture, Andrew told us that a fundamental issue is that technological innovation outpaces lawmaking by a huge margin; as a result, self-regulation has largely failed (e.g., behavioral ads). In addition, in the U.S., there is a complex patchwork of state data breach notification laws and sector-specific federal statutes (e.g., HIPAA, FCRA) that complicate matters.

Be sure to look at the following websites for additional information:

Electronic Freedom Foundation’s When Government Comes Knocking

Global Network Initiative’s look at restrictive regimes

Facebook’sprivacy policy

For this week’s blog, do a little snooping on your classmates. Find another blogger from our class who features content similar to your own (sports, culture, fashion, etc) and write a piece that adds to or furthers the conversation from one of their posts.

Week Ten: Reaching People in New Ways

This week we learned that the increased use of digital campaigning, combined with more reliance on social networks for news and information, has raised the expectations of constituents seeking to interact with their governments. In fact, according to Pew Research, citizen interactions are moving beyond the website 31% of online adults use tools such as blogs, social networking sites, email, online video or mobile to find government info government information.

Most importantly we learned how leveraging new forms of content has become central to the evolution of governments’ social presences. For your blog post this week, feel free to write about whatever you want, but use two types of content you’ve never used before. Never posted an audio file? Here’s your chance! Share your post in the links below.

Quick Syllabus Change!

To accommodate our upcoming guest speaker’s schedule, we’re swapping weeks 10 and 11 on the syllabus. We’ll cover week 11’s topic on Nov 8th– please read the assignment listed under week 11– and we’ll now cover Privacy on Nov 15th. Thanks!

Week Nine: Mobility

By 2014, mobile will be the most common way of accessing the internet. Last night in class we learned that:

More Americans own Smartphones than hold a bachelor’s degree or speak another language in their homes.

Nine in 10 smartphone owners (87%) used their phones as Internet portals — about 78% of them did so every day.

Nearly a third of smartphone owners use their device as their primary Internet connection.

More than 10 billion apps were downloaded last year, and that’s expected to grow 10x by 2015.

We also discussed how mobile phones are now being tapped for gaming, content sharing, advertising and search, helping organize wealth of information and making that information easily accessible on the go. Google has seen mobile search grow at an exponential rate — it’s increased five-fold worldwide in the past two years. That rate of growth is comparable to the early days of Google’s desktop search! People aren’t searching for different things on mobile, they’re just searching at different times; mobile search tends to pick up in the evenings and on weekends, when consumers are on the go and ready to make a decision.

For your post this week, identify a mobile app or tool related to your blog’s subject matter (it can be one you’re already using, if it’s related) and review it for your readers. Post a link to your piece here.

Week Eight: Searchiness

For the past two weeks we’ve discussed the implications of Google’s dominance of search as well as how search engines act as gatekeepers, how the way we search is changing with new tools and technology, and that the meaning (and future) of search is largely dependent upon our expectations. We also took a look at some of Google’s core business strategies:

• Draw consumers and $$ follows: Google firmly believes that if you share great content that draws a wide audience, money and revenue will follow
• Provide specific tool to fill unspecific needs: Generate new products that leverage your existing expertise, then find the demand
• Let others work in your lab: Free access to tools and data allow outside developers to take Google to places it hasn’t gone before
• Expect failures: Just fail early, before you’ve invested too much

Beyond Google, we also discussed the relationship between Bing and Facebook, as well as alternative search engines that rank serve information in different ways. Make sure you check out DuckDuckGo and Blekko for a look at two new options.

For your blog post this week, consider Google’s mission: “Organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” From tags to linking to rich content, how are you making your blog more relevant to Google or those searching for you? Demonstrate your SEO and SEM savviness with your post.

Community Snapshot

Write a 4-6 page paper exploring your community, using the tools and tactics we’ve talked about in class– such as Quantcast, Technorati, AllTop, blog rolls, etc– to explore which bloggers and topics have prominence.

Provide an overview of the space your blog falls into, as well as the top bloggers and the subjects they write about. Which issues do they cover? What type of bloggers are they? Do they manage a personal diary or are they aggregators, or something else? Are they popular, trusted, engaging or influential? Where else do they have a presence and how do they connect that to their blog?

Papers are due Thursday, October 27 at 8 p.m. in my Gmail account. Please see the syllabus for other paper requirements and let me know if you have questions.