There's a lot more out there in the optional and supplemental readings as well as the wide wonderful world of the Internet to give you a feel for the nature and effects of social media in business; the more widely you can spread your own information gathering net, the more effective your analysis is likely to be.

Your own social media experiences are likely to be useful sources of information as well. When you believe you have a reasonable feel for how social media are affecting business, you'll be in a position to prepare an effective short paper (or alternative-see below) on the topic:

Does the availability and use of social media on the Internet really provide businesses with new and different useful information? If so, how? If not, why not?

Special possibilities: Since this is a case about new media, it's only fair that you have some new media alternatives in dealing with it. So while you're perfectly free to write the same sort of paper that you've been accustomed to writing (as described below in the "Assignment Expectations"), you are also encouraged to think about using some sort of more creative social media application in response. If I gave you all the possibilities, it wouldn't be all that creative, now would it?

But by way of stimulus, you might consider: A video essay and/or discussion and/or presentation made available through YouTube. Using a Facebook page or related approach to formulate your response, either alone or perhaps working together with some of your colleagues.

Submitting your paper as a series of 142-character tweets through Twitter (see this module's SLP assignment)-daunting as a prospect, but theoretically possible.

Something else entirely. An unspecified number of points may be awarded for creativity of presentation as well as quality of ideas - but the ideas have to be there first, even if the medium is the message.

PLEASE NOTE: You certainly do not have to use any of these alternatives; it's perfectly fine just to write a paper as you are accustomed to doing. You won't be penalized in any way.

The alternatives are included here just to get into the spirit of the thing, if you happen to have a little extra time and a little extra tolerance for learning to use new tools under pressure.

Please do not feel that you will be disadvantaged in any way by not participating in this strange part of what's already a very unusual and experimental course! 5 to 7 pages