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Chapter 1 Internet Marketing As Part of the Marketing Communications Mix Learning Objectives
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| bet | 15/16 | | Sana | 19.03.2017 | | Hajmi | 36.08 Kb. | | #260 |
Internet Exercises
1. See the discussion of the Internet Career Builder Exercise in the introduction to the Instructor’s Manual.
2. Select an organization (corporate or nonprofit) with which you are somewhat familiar that uses both online and offline channels. Discuss two or three specific examples of how it is taking advantage of the Internet in general and the drivers of strategic change in particular.
This is a good discussion exercise and could make a two or three page written assignment. If you want to focus them on a specific organization for class discussion, perhaps there is a local enterprise that has a robust website—the local newspaper may prove to be interesting. The American Red Cross and the Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals are two nonprofits that have good websites. The motor vehicle registration site of your state government could also be interesting. If you are going to do it as an in-class exercise, you may want to assign the students to visit the website before class so they can form their own opinions.
3. Select three different websites that you will follow for the semester. Your instructor may make several different assignments based on these sites, so you should choose sites of substance though they do not have to be large. Each should, however, be a brand site, not a site for a mega corporation. Following at least one not-for-profit site can add to the learning experience.
Signing up for free newsletters from the sites you select will help you understand the various elements of their online strategies and may also give you insight into how their multichannel marketing is carried out.
If the company has retail outlets nearby, you should also consider a visit to the retail site, looking for ways in which the firm is integrating marketing activities on and off the Internet.
I’ve used variations on this semester-long assignment off and on for several years and it works well. It is relatively easy to police it to ensure that each student has a unique set of sites and, if you feel the need, to keep records to ensure that students do not replicate the same set of sites from one semester to another. I do recommend that the site choices be submitted in writing for formal approval and that they not be changed without specific permission.
In succeeding chapters there will be several exercises based on this.
4. Consider creating a blog to record your insights and discoveries as you move through the Internet marketing course. Blogs will be discussed in Chapter 9. Directions for creating your own blog can be found on free blog sites like Blogger (www.blogger.com) or on the free version of WordPress.
Keeping a blog to document learning over the semester is a variant of student journals used in a variety of courses. Simply learning to do it is an interesting Internet marketing exercise. You can also let them choose a subject for their blog instead of making it a journal. Either way, you will probably need to specify how active the blog should be—a post at least once a week, perhaps.
The problem with this assignment is that blogs aren’t as much fun if people aren’t reading them and commenting on posts of interest. Alternatively, you could set up a team structure in which members of one team are assigned to read other blogs on a regular basis and make comments.
Another alternative is to have the class do something like a blog for the student marketing club that has information about activities and links to marketing career resources. There are a lot of possibilities, and Blogger takes you through the process of setting one up in a very easy and straightforward manner.
5. Consider getting together with several of your classmate to create a Facebook page to share resources and insights as you progress through the course. You might consider making it closed page in order to gain experience in work-related collaboration on a social network.
This sounds like a great idea, but the web is cluttered with Facebook pages that students of mine, in courses and programs around the world, have set up. They primarily do it because they’ve found their fellow students interesting and the content useful and they want to keep it going. It just doesn’t happen, at least for very long. That’s why I make assignments of things like blogs and discussion communities; otherwise they don’t last long. However, asking your students to do this would give them a powerful insight into how difficult it is to keep a social community going.
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