Week 2

1. Week 2

2. Audience and Demographics • Seminar questions: • 1). How do you develop a following online? • 2). To illustrate the impact of audience, imagine you're writing a letter to your supervisor to tell her/him about continuing your education. What details might you include? What might you leave out? Now imagine that you're writing on the same topic but your audience is your best friend. Unless you have a supervisor who is also considered your close personal friend, it's likely that your two letters would look quite different in terms of content, structure, and even tone.

3. Unit 2 project • Sample in Doc Sharing • The Project: • Select any topic of a blog or digital media communication effort you like, then select a target audience that is appropriate for the topic. Use descriptive statistics to define your audience and its characteristics and explaining why and how your topic and target audience fit, include information on the age of the audience, and at least two other relevant descriptors, such as region and income or gender and religion. • The age-related information should detail the age range (the difference between the youngest and oldest) of the target audience, and you should calculate the mean (average age). See Unit 2’s interactive glossary of this week's key terms for more details.

4. For discussion • What is the topic for your Unit 2 project?

5. Targeting an Audience Demographic: • Demography uses statistics to describe people in a designated group by a variety of characteristics: gender, age, income, race, political affiliation, religion, location, etc. Understanding the characteristics of a given audience is important and enables more effective communication. Sometimes you start with message, goal or product and work to identify who the best audience would be. Sometimes you start with an audience and try to understand the best message for your product or goal.

6. Demographic Characteristics of Your Audience • It may be useful to consider the possible areas of diversity in an audience. These characteristics include • Age • Gender • Ethnicity, race, and cultural background • Education • Religious and political affiliations • Economic status • Sexual orientation • Family background • Group membership

7. Resources • To learn more about demographic information within a specific U.S. locale, consider the U.S. Census Bureau at http://www.census.gov/. The Census sets the standard for stats sought by government leaders, educators, journalists, and industry experts. This comprehensive site offers a search engine plus multiple categories (People, Business, Geography, News Room, Special Topics). Also available are specialized sections such as Population Clocks, American Community Survey, and American FactFinder (which leads to Population Finder, Area Profile, Economic Indicators, etc). • U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics offers socioeconomic data at http://stats.bls.gov allows you to search your audience makeup by such categories as Area and Occupation, State and Local Employment and Unemployment Rates, Demographic Characteristics of the Labor Force, Industries at a Glance, etc. • The CIA World Factbook offers information about other countries at http://cia.gov/. At this site the World Factbook allows you to select any country in the world, view its map, then click on the nation’s details such as Profiles, Rankings, People, Geography, Economics, Military, and Flag.

8. AUDIENCE ANALYSIS QUESTIONS • A nalysis - Who are they? • U nderstanding - What is their knowledge of the subject? • D emographics - What is their age, sex, educational background? • I nterest - Why are they reading your document? • E nvironment - Where will this document be sent (inside/outside the company)?   • N eeds - What are the audience’s needs? • C ustomized - What specific needs do you need to address? • E xpectations - What does the audience expect to learn from you?(acronym devised by Lenny Laskowski  http://www.ljlseminars.com/audience.htm)

9. For Discussion • 1). How do you develop a following online?

10. 5 Tips for Building up an Online Following • 1). Be a Resource • 2). Be Active3). Spread Your Social Wings • 4). Online/Offline5). Be Yourself

11. Social Media Checklist: Where to Brand Yourself Online • Twitter • This incredible micro-blogging platform is fast becoming one of the most important tools for online marketing and branding professionals. Use Twitter to release information about your products or services, or simply engage in industry discussions. Don’t Tweet unnecessarily, making pointless comments won’t help your brand much.

12. Facebook • One of today’s most popular online social destinations, Facebook is one of the most important off-site areas for branding. With profile pages, fan pages and groups at your disposal, you can spread word of your products or services without spending a cent.

13. Blogs • Having a blog is one of the most important things to do towards the success of your brand online. But merely blogging often isn’t enough. Spend time reading and researching blogs which are similar to yours, and engage with audience on the comment boards and link back to yours – but remember to never spam. • Keep your comments on the blogs of others short, interesting and relevant to the topic – never use the opportunity to create a quick link. Not only is a spam-like link likely to be deleted, but it doesn’t portray a good image, whereas having an industry related conversation with a competitor helps both parties.

14. Social Media: Multimedia • Depending on your branding needs, you may be able to use some of the many audio-visual consumer generated media (CGM) sites out there to increase your online visibility. Some of these sites include Last.FM (music blogging service site), Flickr (photo sharing site) and YouTube (video sharing site). • Remember to keep all of your profile information consistent, and link between them for optimum branding success. Link each to your LookupPage profile so visitors will have all the information they need about you.

15. For discussion • 2). To illustrate the impact of audience, imagine you're writing a letter to your supervisor to tell her/him about continuing your education. What details might you include? What might you leave out? Now imagine that you're writing on the same topic but your audience is your best friend. Unless you have a supervisor who is also considered your close personal friend, it's likely that your two letters would look quite different in terms of content, structure, and even tone.

16. You try it: http://www.wordle.net/ • Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

17. Sample word cloud

18. http://www.wordle.net • From the Home page go to CREATE your own. • Paste in a bunch of text. • Use any desired editing features. • Hit GO