Situation Analysis & Social Media Audit

Assignment Guide #1 – Situation Analysis & Social Media Audit

Students will prepare a detailed situation analysis of a company they think is currently facing an interesting corporate communications and/or public relations challenge. The analysis should be developed for a target audience of internal staff or an external PR agency team that is about to embark on managing PR efforts on the organization’s behalf and include:

  1. Basic company details, background, competitive position, etc.
  2. An overview of the issue or problem facing the organization,
  3. The impacted audiences/key publics an assessment of the organization’s reputation and overview of past press coverage (of both the organization and the specific issue)
  4. An examination of the competitive landscape and other agencies and related organizations/entities communicating in their “space”
  5. How that impacts the organization as it addresses the particular communications challenge chosen for the project (i.e. what is the impact of this situation)
  6. An overview of how this issue/challenge in question has manifested in, or been affected by, social media discussion (tone, topics, sentiment, etc.)

Please focus on the last 3 months and provide specific examples from media coverage, social media, etc. that illustrate your findings. Submit a list of references with your paper. Ultimately, I would like you to create a document that serves as an overview of the current state of public opinion about the organization, based on evidence found in the press/media and social media. You can organize the information however you see fit as long as your work address the SIX points of information listed above (in approximately 5 pages).

SOURCES OF INFORMATION FOR ANALYSIS: Owned Media: Company’s own website, blog Earned Media: Recent press releases Recent news coverage (print, digital, TV, etc.) Shared Media: Social Media Profiles (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Linked In, YouTube) and comments

SOME SAMPLE TOOLS: NexisUni (formerly Lexis Nexis); Social Mention (SocialMention.com); Buzzsumo Content Analyzer (Buzzsumo.com); Hometown News (http://hometownnews.com); Google News (http://news.google.com/), Insights (http://www.google.com/insights/search/), Trends (http://www.google.com/trends)