This Assessment should include 2 parts: 1. Online Branded Community Some of the brands youve chosen for the project have owned online communities, but not all. If your brand hosts such a community, analyze its strengths and weaknesses using some of the best practices you learned about in this module. If your brand does not own a community, use those same best practices to analyze how it uses its social networks to create social engagement. Take about 1 pages singlespaced/3 pages doublespaced. 2. Overview of Projects assignment Now that you have identified the new product/service that you want to focus on, its time to think about how digital media might be used to support this. To accomplish all this, I need you to do the following: Write up a 1 page singlespaced/2 pages doublespaced overview of the project. Be sure to include a brief paragraph at the beginning of this document describing the new product/service/app. The rest of the document should describe ways you might promote it. Weve discussed a wide range of types of projects so far. Think about what type of project might best support the new product/service launch. Some of you are proposing a new app. In those cases, describe some of the features and functionality you are considering. Overview: In this module we consider different types of online communities in which consumers can communicate with brands about their liking, love and frustration for products and services, and where brands can gain knowledge from some of their most loyal customers. Some of the brands youve chosen for the project have owned online communities, but not all. If your brand hosts such a community, analyze its strengths and weaknesses using some of the best practices you learned about in this module. If your brand does not own a community, use those same best practices to analyze how it uses its social networks to create social engagement. Brands have an important decision to make regarding where their online community efforts should reside. Most choose to support community activities on their social networks. In fact, the vast majority of the brands chosen for the project in this class spend their community management time fostering communication with customers on their Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. pages. Its very possible to build a community across a brands social networks. However, as you will see, there are advantages to creating an owned community that exists outside of social networks. Regardless of where the online community is, the role of an online community manager has grown in stature over the last few years, so much so that, believe it or not, January 26, 2016, was the seventh annual community manager appreciation day. This job description (http://www.socialfish.org/2013/05/onlinecommunitymanagerjobdescription/) gives you a good idea of the kinds of responsibilities such a person would have. And here is some recent data regarding salaries (http://sproutsocial.com/insights/socialmediamanagersalary/) for online community managers. Take a look at the Lithium online community management platform (http://www.lithium.com/products/onlinecommunities/). Note that the platform allows brands to build an owned community but also integrates social media so brand managers can steer those conversations to communities you own. In other words, Lithium focuses on helping brands build owned communities. Read: Online Community: The Heart of Social Strategy Preview the documentView in a new window This report is a great introduction to owned brand communities. It explains why simply conversing with customers on social networks may not be sufficient, and theres a great table detailing different types of brand communities and key performance indicators for each. Read: The 2012 State of Online Communities Preview the documentView in a new window View in a new windowNOTE: For some reason, ComBlu has not released a more recent report after four straight years of publishing this series. This report covers the same territory as The Heart of Social Strategy but goes into greater detail. Some of you will find your brand discussed in depth regarding its online community. All of you will be able to learn about how your brands major competitors develop and, maybe, benefit from owned brand communities. Be sure to read through the appendices to see how they rate each brands community. There is a helpful glossary in the appendix too. Read: The State of Social EngagementPreview the documentView in a new window View in a new window Now lets get even more specific and more recent about what constitutes an effective online community and how you can measure its health. The Social Engagement Scorecard gives brands a way of to quantify how well its community and social engagement strategies