Short Assignment 2: Analyze three professional blogs; Write a professional blog post
Professional blogs are an increasingly popular means by which businesses and nonprofits communicate with their customers and clients. Many—if not most—companies today seek out writers who can succinctly but colorfully explain relevant concepts or report on relevant events for their organizations. The following exercises are designed to give you experience with a kind of writing that is highly in demand.
1. Spend some time analyzing some professional blogs that are considered especially effective by marketing experts, media specialists, and business communications professors. Follow each of the links below to a well-known company’s blog and read several of its most recent posts.
Pay close attention to the subjects about which the author of the blogs writes, the ways in which the material posted on the blog relates to the company’s image and its products or services, the tone(s) and style(s) in which the author writes, the genres to which the various blog posts belong, and the “visuals” (photographs and/or illustrations) that are incorporated into the blog’s posts.
Then write a 500-word assessment of the three blogs: what specific features or qualities of these blogs make them successful, in your opinion? What do these blogs accomplish for their companies? In what ways might the contents of these blogs be important to or meaningful for their readers? Explain your reasoning in making each of your evaluations.
2. Write a 400-500 word blog post for the organization at which you are currently working as an intern. If the organization has an actual blog, write a post that would be appropriate to that blog, in content, in writing style, and in design. If the organization does not have one, imagine what an appropriate blog might look like—what it would be about, how it would be written generally—and write a sample blog post that might convince your supervisor to launch a blog for his or her organization, and consider design choices as well (images, font, color, layout, etc.).
3. Include with your blog post an email addressed to your supervisor in which you explain why you wrote about what you did, in the style that you did. Also indicate what you think your post could accomplish for the organization and provide to the post’s readers.
Due: October 21th