Activity Context

This assessment measures your development in the following course competencies:

1. Apply frameworks and theoretical concepts to systematically analyze business issues.

2. Communicate in a manner that is professional and consistent with expectations for members of the business professions.

In this assignment, you will demonstrate your growing skills in critical, ethical, and strategic thinking, along with your ability to clearly organize and articulate your thoughts in writing.

Activity Instructions

In Unit 3, you created an Annotated Outline that provides the basic structure and organization for your project. In addition, you submitted your Annotated Outline to Smarthinking for guidance on structure and organization, you posted it in a discussion for peer review, and you submitted it to your instructor for a grade. This week, use the feedback you received from all of these sources to help you create a first draft of your project. To provide additional depth in the topic, locate at least three additional articles (beyond the two you included in the Annotated Outline) concerning the business implications of the Internet and social media for this business in the future.

The paper you submit should be a solid draft. While you will have the opportunity to revise and refine your draft in Unit 5, you will also complete a PowerPoint presentation of your final paper in Unit 6. To avoid having to much work to do in the final week, you will want this draft to be mostly complete when you turn it in this week. Analyze your issues thoughtfully and present them in an organized manner, following this overall structure:

1. Identify the business you chose and describe the business and its industry.

2. Assess the company's current use of the Internet and social media.

3. Analyze the implications of the Internet and social media for the future of your chosen business. Highlight the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Use the five articles that you found to help support your analysis. Be careful to distinguish between your opinion and the voices of your academic resources. Remember to use proper APA formatted citations and references.

4. In your final project, you will also identify and evaluate potential ethical questions raised by this vision of the future. Since we do not take up ethical issues until Unit 5, you may simply provide a heading for ethical questions, leaving this section blank until after you complete the Unit 5 reading. If you think you have some ideas about ethical questions already, you may want to go ahead and draft something for this section now to get a jump on this requirement.

5. If you were advising this business on future direction, what actions would you advocate regarding their integration or further capitalization on the Internet and social media? Why?

Write professionally and in a manner consistent with expectations for members of the business professions.