Every week and every new blog post I compose leaves me wondering how necessary it is to introduce the blog.  English 301, this is a blog about it.

The latest project our class has been working on involves what can be considered "communicating with the public."  Essentially we will be researching an institute and reporting our findings.  As with most assignments, it's a little bit more complicated than that. 

 Now we are working in groups of four.  This makes life pretty complicated.  Decisions are much more difficult to make.  In class we were tasked to choose an institute to do our report on.  I didn't really have much of a say on it.  I wanted to do the institute that had something to do with science but before I was even given a chance to say that it seemed like one or two of the group had already decided that they wanted to do research on the Institute for Humanities Research.  So i didn't really feel like trying to convince them otherwise so I just went with it.

So now that we've chosen an institute the quest for information begins. We will gather this info by conducting research.  Research will yield data which we can use in the report.  Our team will conduct both primary and secondary research. For my research I will go to the official website and record some statistics and other interesting data.

Currently I'm wondering what exactly this report is.  So I'm looking into the the text to learn more about it...

In the book it says that it is necessary for organizations to have accountability with the public (Markel 635).  Now a days people just want to know what an organization is doing.  They're curious and want to know who does what and how it all went down.  I guess I can relate.  I like to know who does what at Apple and I like to know all the inside info.  Unfortunately Apple doesn't like to share most of this information with me.

Also in the book we read about the impact public relations has on advertising and overall success.  Much of the advertising an organization gets these days is though word of mouth.  So if the public can easily find information about an organization then that organization will likely be talked about a lot.  On the other hand an organization like Apple kind of does the opposite but still gets talked about.  Perhaps because they're so secretive.

There's an entire section on collaborating with the public through social media (Markel 648). I think it's very important to know about this.  Social media is probably the most powerful venue of both advertising and sharing information.  For an organization to be able to use social media effectively is a subject of much interest.  Websites like Twitter and Instragram provide the public with a primary source of news from celebrities.  This is something with is pretty new.  In the past all information we read was secondary. If you knew something it was most likely through secondary research from a book, newspaper, or magazine. Today we can simply look at someone's Twitter posts to gain a direct quote from them.  Furthermore we can look at websites of organizations firsthand to gain information.

Another component to think about in this report is the audience for our report.  Typically I would have thought I'm writing this report for the general public.  For anyone to read.  But our team has decided that we will write it for an audience which is our supervisor.  So basically we are creating a report on the Institute and we will report our finding to our supervisor, or basically our teacher for the class.