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:
- Basic company details, background, competitive position, etc.
- An overview of the issue or problem facing the organization,
- 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)
- An examination of the competitive landscape and other agencies and related organizations/entities communicating in their “space”
- 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)
- 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)