DUE Wednesday, Apr 18 – 4 points
(Thursday NOON deadline)

This assignment covers the two diverse topics we will be discussing this week: engaging your site visitors in a community and giving public presentations.

• Engaging Your Visitors
  This eleventh chapter of the Website Owner’s Manual looks various ways to engage your visitors, from simple broadcast and feedback tools to running a full-blown community site.

• Training the Butterflies: Interview with Scott Berkun
  To prepare you for giving presentations on your final project next week, we’ll be discussing how to give public presentations. Scott Berkun is a professional speaker and has recently published a book on public speaking, and this interview has some tips.

• Moda Condos: How To Piss Off 1086 People With 1 Click
  This very short article demonstrates the importance of using your email software in a way that doesn’t violate your recipients’ privacy.

Once you have completed the reading, 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 mentions a study showing that repeat visitors are eight times more likely to make a purchase on an e-commerce web site.
2. T/F? A healthy community can provide many of the same insights into how your product or service as expensive focus groups.
3. T/F? Engaging with your site visitors and really listening to what they have to say is a powerful way to change how your brand is perceived.
4. T/F? Paul mentions an example of a blogger who write created a groundswell of negative opinion about IBM’s customer service.
5. T/F? Paul mentions Dell as an example of a company who has obsessional fans who promote Dell products with friends and family.
6. T/F? Running a community can reduce costs.
7. T/F? Community is primarily about technology: add forum or blog software to your web site, and you will have a community.
8. T/F? Most companies that run blogs grasp the full potential of blogging and put forth much effort to nurture a community.
9. T/F? When asking for feedback from your community, be sure to recognize that their time is valuable by offering them a reward or by at least saying thank you.
10. T/F? Interpreting the results of a survey is fairly straightforward since users with a wide variety of feelings toward your site will complete a survey.
11. T/F? You have a true community when you have a dialogue with your users using broadcast and feedback tools.
12. T/F? Paul recommends having ratings on small web sites.
13. T/F? Paul recommends having forums on small web sites.
14. T/F? Paul recommends having user-generated content on small web sites.
15. T/F? Paul mentions that for years newspapers have been providing a consistent identity while at the same time letting readers see the people behind the organization.
16. T/F? Bloggers should write blog posts that are definitive articles to which no further discussion needs to be added.
17. T/F? For all community web sites, submissions should be checked before release.
18. T/F? Negative comments can increase the credibility of your web site.
19. T/F? Paul thought it was a great idea that Netscape offered top Digg users $1,000 to post on their web site instead.
20. T/F? Paul mentions Innocent Smoothies as a company that has a vibrant community.
21. T/F? There are many documented cases of people dying directly from giving a public talk.
22. T/F? People often get laughed at and say something embarrassing in a public talk.
23. T/F? If you have a PowerPoint presentation, then your talk will most likely take two minutes per slide.
24. T/F? The web site for Scott Berkun’s book Confessions of a Public Speaker is a full-blown community site where visitors can meet others and share their experiences with public speaking.
25. T/F? Any email address put in the CC field of an email will be visible to all recipients of that email.

DUE Wednesday, Apr 18 – 4 points
(Thursday NOON deadline)