Purpose

Whatever your future job might be, you will be in charge of producing some type of content, some or all of which will be distributed via social media. A Social Media Campaign (SMC) is a way to describe an organizational effort to create attention for a product or brand through the use of savvy rhetorical strategies on social media. For this project, you will create an SMC for an organization of your choosing, promoting a specific product, service, or simply developing a presence. Your central product will be a series of social media posts informed by suitable research, which you will outline in supporting documents.

In addition, each group member will provide their own “rationale,” which explains the rhetorical choices you made in your project and how you hope they affect your audience.

Tasks & Deliverables

1. Social Media Campaign and Pitch

For this assignment, you will create a Social Media Campaign (i.e., a way to describe an organizational effort to create attention for a product or brand through the use of savvy rhetorical strategies on social media) for an organization of your choosing, promoting a specific product, service, or simply developing a presence. Your central product will be a series of social media posts informed by suitable research, which you will outline in supporting documents.

Your SMC should contain the following elements:

Design plan/proposal, which identifies a client, philosophy, and goals for your project (500 words)
This element will be due earlier than the rest of the project.
Target demographic and audience analysis (~500 words)
Methods to measure success
Key Performance Indicators (KPI): How will you know your campaign did anything? Percent of sales increase, revenue changes, organizational changes, etc?
Metrics: These might include pageviews, shares, likes, etc.
Discussion of data: Where does the organization stand before the campaign? What specific improvements do you think your team can make? Base this on actual data.
Sample posts for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other appropriate platforms (4 total)
Social Media Policy that provides guidelines for posts after current campaign (~500 words)
Pitch Presentation (5-10 minutes)

Rationale

Word Count: 500+ Words

For this assignment, as a companion to your major assignment, you will complete a “rationale” in which you reflect on the choices you made in completing your work. Each Rationale should be a separate document of at least 500 words that explains your writing process, decisions made, and lessons learned over the course of a given project.

These assignments allow you to explore how you approached each of BTW 285’s learning outcomes, with special attention to #4: “Clearly explain, defend, and reflect upon your rhetorical decisions, processes, and products with regard to media and technology.” The metacognition required in these documents will prepare you for the sort of self-evaluation and justification you will need to do in the workplace and beyond.

Each Rationale must be over 500 words, but how you decide to frame these words is up to you. However you approach it, you should describe the following:

Your Goals: What did you want to accomplish with your project? How did you go about satisfying the assignment’s requirements while still making your piece work for you? Did you achieve these goals? Did you compromise on them, or complicate them along the way?
Your Process: What did it take to develop the final draft of your project? How did you move from an empty page to a rough draft to a final draft? How did this process surprise you or feel like other projects you’ve worked on? What technologies or practices helped you?
Your Choices: What decisions did you have to make en route to your final draft? Is there anything you would do differently? How did you know what the right choice was at a given moment?