Assignments & Grading

Attendance/Participation — 10 %

• Attend class
• Pay attention and refrain from playing games on your smartphone
• Ask questions and participate during in-class discussions

Homework — 40 %

• Create (if necessary) personal accounts on Twitter and LinkedIn (instructor presumes you already have accounts on Facebook and other major platforms); post at least one update each week on Twitter regarding a topic related to our class discussion (or anything else relevant to social media PR). You must include hashtag “#SocMedUCLA” on your course-related tweets in order for your work to be tracked by instructor.
• Contribute one post (minimum 250 words) to the crowdsourced course blog. Posts should focus on what you learned during your assigned week’s in-class guest speaker discussion. During the first course session on April 24th, the instructor will assign each student a specific guest discussion to cover. Don’t worry – this may sound complicated, but it’s not.

Final Project — 50%

• Create a basic social media plan outline for a company, organization or individual that captures your interest. You may choose to focus your plan on any such entity, so long as you can (with some intelligence) address its PR objectives, resources, etc. The goal is to encourage you to think about how specific social media strategies and tactics can be used to achieve measurable objectives.

All written assignments will be graded based on relevance, timeliness, inclusion of information discussed in class and adherence to instructions. Writing proficiency (format/grammar, clarity, etc.) will also be taken into account.

Deadlines: Late work will be penalized by one full letter grade for every day beyond the stated due date.

Overall course grades will be based on a 100 point scale.

Letter Grade Equivalent:

A 90-100 points
B 80-89 points
C 70-79 points
D 60-69 points
F <59 points