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Welcome to COMM 4610

Not a photo of actual students, but representative of the fun you will definitely have in this class. Welcome to CMM 4610, Social Media and Strategic Communication. Together, we're going to learn the fundamentals of social media and understand how businesses and organizations are using it to drive revenue and engagement. The structure is primarily a flipped classroom model in which I'll ask you to read and view resources about trends and case studies before class, reserving our class time for group discussion and to work collaboratively on projects focused on developing strategy, creating content, and understanding social media marketing analytics. Course material will be divided into five main areas: Context: social media basics, recent history, worst-case scenarios, and how we got here. Research: product, consumer, platform, competition, environment. Planning and strategy: goal setting, brand voice, media mix, calendars and scheduling. Implementation: content crea
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Recent posts

Taking My Own Advice, or Post 1

Daily reminder at my house. Be a Fountain Every year on Mother's Day, my family braves the unusually hot St. Louis-in-May temperatures to visit the annual art fair in Laumeier Sculpture Park . Some of us are there for the art while others are there for the food trucks, but we all enjoy it until we are sweaty and tired and have to be in air conditioning. I don't usually buy anything, but this year, I passed a booth with framed prints. They were simple, inexpensive, and yes, a little trendy (see palm fronds). I wasn't planning to buy, but before we left the art fair, I broke away from my family and went back to buy this print, which I hung in a place my family members were sure to see. Why I Need a Reminder Selfishly, I bought the print as a stand-in for me. I'm constantly reminding my kids not to complain, to be grateful, to be thankful, to be kind to others, to be giving, to be less selfish. "You are so lucky," I say to them. I  thought this w
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Good to Know: How Biased is Your Media?

Media Bias Chart, used with permission, from www.adfontesmedia.com While fake news is actually a thing and had a heyday in the yellow journalism of the early 20th century, the term has been co-opted and applied broadly, incorrectly, and unfairly to all forms of mass media. The mainstream media has been characterized as left-leaning with something of a liberal bias for several decades, though traditional media outlets (think the big three networks, for example) sought to remain neutral, relying on original fact reporting and a balanced, two-sides to every issue perspective.  As media channels proliferated, catering to all manner of niche and special interest, so too did the sourcing of material; the standards of journalism degraded the further one moved from established media properties. Today, anyone with basic access to technology can espouse and broadcast all manner of opinions, theories, and "news" online. As consumers, it is left to us to determine the
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Links to Course Readings

Online reading assignments through the mid-term.  For 8/31 The Psychology Behind Social Media Engagement Branding in the Age of Social Media For 9/5 The Complete Guide to Building Your Personal Brand For 9/10 Digital Marketing Guide from HubSpot For 9/12 Conducting a Social Media Audit For 9/14 Fake News, Hate Speech, and Social Media Abuse For 9/17 Developing Personas Exclusionary Personas For 9/19 What is the buyer’s journey? Why the buyer’s journey matters For 9/26 How to Advertise on Facebook For 10/1 How to Use Twitter Ads For 10/3 How to Master Twitter Marketing For 10/5 The Worst Social Media Fails of 2017 For 10/8 LinkedIn Top Company Pages of 2017 LinkedIn Advertising Guide
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What's the Most Powerful Word in Advertising? Free.

Photo by Vladislav Reshetnyak from Pexels One of the best things about social media is that most of the platforms and many content creation tools are free. Content creation does not have to be expensive or difficult. Below are some free resources that may be helpful as you produce your own social media posts. 16 Free Tools for Digital and Social Media Marketing Social Media Image Size Cheat Sheet GIMP - free photo editor Social Media Icons Pexels - rights-free images Pixabay - rights-free images Unsplash - rights-free images All the Free Stock Getty </>Embed Wikimedia Commons Have a free resource you'd like to share? Add a link in the comments.
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Blogger Resources

For this class, I'd like you to use Google's blog platform, Blogger, to complete weekly blogging assignments. I selected Blogger because users can add Google Analytics (GA) to their blogs for free and I'm going to ask you to do so. Though the Blogger platform is somewhat limited, it will work well for our class needs. Getting Started If you haven't used Blogger before, here's a brief overview at Lifewire  and, of course, Google offers Blogger Help pages . Adding Google Analytics Georgia Lou Studios has some helpful posts about Blogger. Here , they have both written and video tutorials for adding Google Analytics to your blog. You don't have to go crazy designing and perfecting your blog. In addition to loads of online resources, we'll cover Blogger in more detail in class. Note: as discussed in class, you are welcome to use another platform such as WordPress, Wix, or Weebly if you're already established and comfortable posting.
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