The assignment is to use "official corporate blogs" as a jumping off point for exploring the use of social media by companies. You'll start by reading recent and older entries from company blogs. Choose 2 organizations from those listed below — or find other corporate blogs of interest and follow those instead. Note that only “official” company blogs (including CEO blogs) count. No individual employee blogs (other than those who are blogging for the company) should be considered.
Once you've selected your companies, you'll read their blogs and analyze prior blog posts to see what you can learn about their approach to social media. You'll then explore their presence (or lack thereof) on Facebook and Twitter. Finally, you'll look for their official company website to determine how much they promote (or don't) their social media participation.
Following is a list of organizations and their official blogs:
Google (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/)
General Motors (http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/)
Ford (http://www.scottmonty.com/)
Boeing (http://boeingblogs.com/randy/)
Kodak (http://1000words.kodak.com)
Netflix (http://blog.netflix.com)
Yahoo! (http://ycorpblog.com)
Stoneyfield Farms (http://stonyfield.typepad.com/bovine/)
Dell (http://direct2dell.com/one2one/default.aspx)
Southwest Airlines (http://blogsouthwest.com/)
Microsoft Internet Explorer (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/)
37Signals (http://www.37signals.com/svn/)
You can also look at a "crowdsourcing" attempt to compile a list of blogs for Fortune 500 Companies at:
Fortune 500 Business Blogs (http://www.socialtext.net/bizblogs/index.cgi)
For the written assignment, respond to the questions below for each company. There are no page limits but I would guess this will take no more than 3 pages for a proper response to all 5 questions. As with the previous assignment, the writing does not need to be formal like a term paper. You can continue to use the style you use for your blog posts.
- How is the blog being used by the company? (Who is the author? How often do they post? Do they allow comments?)
- How is Facebook being used by the company? (Do they have a fan page? Do they have a group page? What type of content are they posting?)
- How is Twitter being used by the company? (Who tweets? How often? Do they @reply? Do they Re-Tweet?)
- How integrated does their social media strategy appear to be? Do they have links to their Facebook or Twitter presence on their home page? How visible is their blog?
- As you compare the two companies, what differences do you see? Why do you think these differences exist?
