Communication

The owners of JHT know that any bad press – even word-of-mouth through social networks and media outlets – can be enough to jeopardize the success of a business, service, or product. To mitigate the damage to the company’s public persona from the delayed delivery issue, and to reach out to those clients who might be concerned about the reliability of the company’s services, the owners would like to launch a public relations campaign online to respond to and counteract the negative buzz.

So for this assignment you change roles again and work in the Sales and Marketing department, where you have been tapped as the social media specialist for the company. When you were first hired, you set up JHal Trader’s Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts, while also launching the company’s B2B (business-to-business) blog for current and future clients in the family entertainment industry. With the recent buzz, you’ve noticed more traffic on the these sites that suggest now is an opportune time to refresh the company’s message, stress the positive changes being made (without pointing at specific faults), and encouraging client loyalty by focusing on JHT’s successes in providing good quality but affordable toys, prizes, and games for any family-focused entertainment venue or event.

NOTE:  As indicated in Lesson 5 Instructor Commentary, you should position this blog in a B2B context.  B2B(business-to-business) means that you are a business that is selling a component to another business.  Although JHT can do business with individuals via its web site, its primary customers are business customers such as Wacky Jack's Family Fun Center.  Wacky Jack's buys toys as prizes from JHT and gives them away to customers at their prize redemption counter.  As a result, be sure to write your blog in a business-to-business context.

Requirements

For this final deliverable you will focused on developing an informative but promotional PR post for JHal Trader Company’s client-facing blog called Trading on Fun. You will be focused on some element of the company or industry that allows you to position JHT in a good light. The post should about 300-400 words long and include some kind of other medium besides text (audio, video, image, etc.).

You will use another rhetorical analysis exercise to get you thinking about appropriate messages for blog post, collaborate with a peer group about how best to approach a social media outlet like a blog, and draw on advice from the required readings and instructor commentary about how to use blogging as an effective social media in a business context.