For this two-part assessment, you will create an Excel spreadsheet of credible sources to use when studying the impact of the Internet and social media on a company of your choice. You will then create a 5–7-page annotated outline of an Internet and social media strategy for the company, based on the sources you identified.
Note: The assessments in this course are sequenced in such a way as to help you build specific skills that you will use throughout your program. Complete the assessments in the order in which they are presented.
This assessment allows you to show your ability to research and to organize information, as well as to develop the outline of a strategy for application in a business environment.
By successfully completing this assessment, you will demonstrate your proficiency in the following course competencies and assessment criteria:
- Competency 1: Examine the use of critical, strategic, and ethical thinking in decision-making.
- Assess the ethical impact of the Internet on a business.
- Competency 2: Integrate the Internet, collaboration, and virtual environment strategies into general business management planning and decision-making.
- Assess the current use of the Internet by a company.
- Assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of Internet use for business issues.
- Identify existing technology for management’s consideration.
- Competency 3: Integrate business strategies into general business management planning and decision-making.
- Propose a business strategy recommendation that is well organized, professional, and persuasive.
- Competency 4: Analyze relevant global business concerns for the future.
- Assess the use of the Internet in a global environment.
- Competency 5: Communicate in a manner that is professional and consistent with expectations for members of the business professions.
- Communicate in a manner that is professional and consistent with expectations for members of the business profession.
Locating the Best Sources
In today’s marketplace, the ability to support operational and strategic decisions with solid information is a critical skill. Finding information is not difficult, but finding the most useful, high-quality information can be. Locating the best sources requires several subskills, equally important for business and academic work, including the ability to search for appropriate resources, to evaluate the credibility and usefulness of information, and to synthesize information to make evidence-based decisions.
To locate useful information, you need to know what you are looking for and understand the questions you need to ask to get you there. The assessments throughout this course encourage you to build skills in using the library, though the Internet is sometimes a better source for answering certain questions. For that reason, you should use both the Capella library and the Internet for your asse
Creating an Annotated Outline
While each person has his or her own process for writing, creating an outline can be an important early step in the process in all types of writing, even for seasoned writers. By creating an outline, you draft a plan that helps you organize your thoughts and to see gaps in your thought process. After building an effective outline, you can begin to complete your research and to flesh out your writing. If you experience writer’s block, as all writers sometimes do, an outline allows you to skip a difficult section and move on so that you can continue to be productive. An annotated outline is a document that organizes the main sections to be included in your assessment. The annotations are based on thinking and should create enough detail that anyone who reads the outline can follow your thought process.
Thinking About Business and Ethics
Hooker (2011) submits that ethical behavior is rational behavior. A popular approach to studying ethics relates rational behavior with rational self-interest. Hooker (2011) puts forth the proposition that the consideration of others is rational not only because of self-interest but because to do otherwise is “illogical and self-contradictory” (p. 1). His approach is anything but mere theory, as there is a real focus on the practical application.
In business, law and ethics intertwine. Do our laws flow from our communal ethics? Here the modified generalization principle and its four corollaries can be useful. Also significant for our purposes is fiduciary duty, the utilitarian principle that is consistency based, grounding it in the theme of ethics as rational choice as well as virtue ethics. You may also delve deeper into the exploration of ethics and research distributive justice and autonomy. The three key concepts here are utility theory, the Difference Principle of John Rawls, and the autonomy of rational agents.