Category Archives: Writing Across Platforms

Practice writing news headlines and news leads: Re-write the headline and lead of a news story by focusing on the most interesting part [in-class activity]

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News Headline Writing and Lead Writing Practice Exercise

News headlines – or the titles of news stories – and news leads are vital parts of a compelling news story or news release.

But, what makes for an interesting story? That’s an important question and if we are going to prepare our students to be professional communicators, we should be having this conversation with our students in many of our classes.

Continue reading Practice writing news headlines and news leads: Re-write the headline and lead of a news story by focusing on the most interesting part [in-class activity]

Here are my social media, communication research, persuasion and message design, strategic campaigns and writing across platforms class syllabi for this year

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This semester has certainly crept up on me. I had a very busy winter break. The realization that this semester has crept up on me has me realizing a few other things, things that have gotten away from me.

One such thing that has gotten away from me is keeping the syllabi on this blog up to date.  As longtime readers of this blog probably know, my mission here is to share what I’m doing in the classroom as well as what I am thinking about as it relates to teaching and learning social media and related fields. While my primary means of doing that is via blog posts, from the start I also set out to share syllabi. Yet, as we turned the page to 2019 I realized I have neglected to share syllabi from anything after 2017, sans my 2018 persuasion and message design syllabus.  Eek!

Continue reading Here are my social media, communication research, persuasion and message design, strategic campaigns and writing across platforms class syllabi for this year

Teaching PPC Ad Writing: The Mimic Search Engine Marketing Simulator Assignment (Post 2 of 2)

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Stukent Mimic Intro Software in the Classroom to Teach Search Engine Marketing  (PPC Ad Writing): Part 2

This is post 2 in a two-part series about teaching PPC Ad Writing with Stukent Mimic Intro. PPC Ads are also known as search engine marketing ads. See Post 1 which introduces how to use the Stukent Mimic Intro Simulator in class to teach search engine marketing / teach PPC Ad writing.

In the first post in this 2-part series, I introduced why I taught PPC advertising in my Writing Across Platforms Class. I discussed the Mimic Intro PPC ad simulator by Stukent, which is a classroom simulator for teaching search engine marketing.

Continue reading Teaching PPC Ad Writing: The Mimic Search Engine Marketing Simulator Assignment (Post 2 of 2)

Teaching PPC Ad Writing: Using the Mimic Search Engine Marketing Simulator in my Writing Class (Post 1 of 2)

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This is post 1 in a two-part series about teaching Stukent Mimic Intro PPC Ad Writing. After reading this post, see post 2  where I provide a Stukent Mimic Intro PPC Ad Writing Assignment and review Mimic Intro performance results. PPC ads are also known as search engine marketing ads. Stukent is a search engine marketing class simulator.

Stukent Mimic Intro Software in the Classroom to Teach PPC Ad Writing: Part 1

Last spring I decided to try something new with my Writing Across Platforms class: Teach PPC Ad Writing with the Stukent Mimic Intro simulator.

These past few semesters we have witnessed the rising importance of paid as part of the PESO model when it comes to PR.  With that, I’ve been seeking ways to bring paid into my classes. It is hard to do this, of course, without a class client and a budget. And sometimes that isn’t reasonable given the structure of a class.

Continue reading Teaching PPC Ad Writing: Using the Mimic Search Engine Marketing Simulator in my Writing Class (Post 1 of 2)

What’s Changing? Hubspot Social Media Certification, Persuasion Class and More!

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Fall 2018 is underway and I can’t believe it is already September! To keep the trend up, I’m starting the semester off by sharing some of the things that are changing this semester in my classes. As I look at former “What’s Changing” blog posts from past semesters, I’m surprised to see that I’m not changing a whole lot this year.  Still, some fun things are in the works:

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What’s Changing? Hubspot Academy, Google Analytics, Meltwater software and more!: Spring 2018 Class Updates

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I hope that everyone had a relaxing and rejuvenation winter break.

I’m going to kick off Spring 2018 with something I like to do on this blog at the start of the semester: Offer a preview of some of the changes and updates I’m making to my classes (Here are all past “What’s Changing” blog posts). Some of the things I will share below are items that I have blogged about recently. However, most of these items are new topics that I I hope to expand upon with blog posts during the course of the semester.

Continue reading What’s Changing? Hubspot Academy, Google Analytics, Meltwater software and more!: Spring 2018 Class Updates

What Happens When Students Write For BuzzFeed For A Class Project?

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Note: As noted in my previous post when I first mentioned this assignment, please know that this assignment is based largely on the work of Scott Cowley. See his post about when he ran this assignment in his class.

BuzzFeed in the Classroom Review

Earlier this semester, I wrote about a new opportunity and assignment for students in my Writing Across Platforms class: writing BuzzFeed community articles.

That post got a ton of shares and feedback. So I want to offer a follow up and reflection of how the project went. If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to first get some background about the assignment via my post “What’s Changing? My Writing Across Platforms students will write for BuzzFeed and More in Spring 2016. Oh, And here’s the syllabus!

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