DUE Wednesday, Sep 29 – 4 points
(Thursday NOON deadline)

For this assignment, you will need to listen to the following audio recordings from the web.

• Bad Blogging (18:36 – 33:50)
  Paul Boag (the author of our textbook) discusses ten reasons why corporate blogs fail on his podcast Boagworld.

• Why Headscape Blogs (44:48 – 62:05)
  Marcus Lillington talks about why Headscape (the web design agency he runs with Paul Boag) produces Boagworld to support their business.

Once you have watched or listened to or read these materials, you will need to take a quiz of ten true-false questions. (These questions will be randomly selected from the questions below. You can retake the quiz up to five times. Don’t stress about getting 100% on these quizzes: if you get 80% or better, you will be ready to proceed to the next activity and I will give you full credit.)

All questions should be prefaced with an understood, “According to the author of the material … “:

1. T/F? Paul believes that many organizations blog because they really get blogging.
2. T/F? Paul believes that corporate blogs can be a powerful communication tool that builds brand awareness and nurtures a sense of engagement.
3. T/F? A successful blog has a regular readership being constantly reminded of your brand and products.
4. T/F? Running a blog is an easy, low-effort way to generate huge amounts of traffic for a company’s web site.
5. T/F? Only supplying an excerpt or teaser in an RSS feed is a great way to push users to visit your web site.
6. T/F? A majority of corporate blogs simply broadcast announcements to their readers instead of engaging them in a conversation.
7. T/F? A corporate blog should contain one post for every press release the company releases.
8. T/F? People want to interact with people, not with corporations or with machines.
9. T/F? Traditional marketing skills are well-suited for blogging.
10. T/F? Paul recommends marketeers think of themselves as editors for their corporate blog instead of as authors.
11. T/F? Companies should not run a blog if they believe their competitors are web-savvy enough to read it.
12. T/F? Marcus (Paul’s co-host) believes that many organizations blog because someone told them it would increase their search engine rankings.
13. T/F? Blogging/podcasting is the principle method Headscape uses to market their web design services.
14. T/F? Paul believes that one of the benefits of running the blog/podcast is that it gives him extra motivation (and even a deadline of sorts) for keeping up with the news in the web design industry.
15. T/F? Blogging/podcasting helps Headscape win new work, but it does not provide their existing clients any value.
16. T/F? Headscape noticed a large increase in work coming from the blog/podcast after just a couple of months.
17. T/F? Marcus recommends aligning your blog closely with your company’s brand by including it as a section of your main company web site.
18. T/F? One of the biggest questions people ask before hiring a service provider is, “Can I work with these people?”
19. T/F? One of the keys to running a successful blog is being consistent and posting regularly.
20. T/F? All companies should have a blog, whether they have someone who likes blogging or not.

DUE Wednesday, Sep 29 – 4 points
(Thursday NOON deadline)