Select a Fortune 500 company that appeals to you, and search recent tweets and Facebook posts about it. Soon you will recognize trends and topic clusters that may help you organize the report content by criteria. For example, if you use the hashtag to conduct a subject search on Coca-Cola (i.e., #Coca-Cola), you will obtain a huge number of tweets about the company and brand. They will range from fan posts, buying tips, exhortations to recycle plastic, and specious cleaning tips involving Coke all the way to urban legends (e.g., the acid in Coke will completely dissolve a T-bone steak in two days). Many returned tweets will be only marginally interesting because they show up just because #Coca-Cola is mentioned.

If you explore Facebook, you will mostly find official pages and fan sites, most of which display favorable posts. You would have to look hard to find negative posts, partly because companies moderate discussions and often remove offensive posts according to their user agreements.

Your Task. Write either an informational or analytical report about the company you chose. In an informational report to your instructor, you could summarize your findings in memo form or as an e-mail. Describe how the tweets about the company are trending. Are they overwhelmingly positive or negative? Organize the report around the subject areas you identify (criteria). Alternatively, you could write an analytical report detailing the strategies your chosen company adopts in responding to tweets and Facebook posts. Your analytical report would evaluate the organization’s social media responses and provide specific examples to support your claims.