Week 14: Social Media

The final week of ISM we we're faced with the challenge of completing an online Social Media project. Although the project is meant to teach people the all important lesson of working with a group it did little for my education. The group was designed to help us understand social media of a company in more detail .
Our group picked American Express. The nice thing about group projects is that the work load is divided into smaller, more managable parts. 
Our group, for the most part, work well together. One or two people were able to be the directors of the group and guide the rest of us that were not sure what to do. About an hour ago one member of our group logged on said he was unable to be in contact with the group and then copy and pasted my work and two other peoples work under that post. I don't know if that was by accident or not but it seemed a little odd...
I believe I remember this being the first semester of a group project of this kind.
I have taken MANY classes online and each one has had some type of group work on it. This baffels me. A big reason why people take online classes is because they have weird schedules or like the benefit of not having a meeting and do the class at their pass. Group projects, however, totally ignore those facts and force people to conform to certian times and leave the people with the regular schedules waiting on the people with the weird schedules.
Also, I got NOTHING from this project. I feel that this would have been more benefical as a singular project. My group told me to look on two different websites and give them feed back. I was never able to see the finished product and I do not understand the point of this lesson.
This class has been amazing.. up until this point. I'm still a fan of the class but I would say the group project thing needs some work.

***** I DO HAVE THE URL!!!!!
http://ism3004socialmedia.wikispaces.com/American+Express

Excel Project

This week we were able to learn more about Excel and varies functions that can be performed.  Simple functions of Excel are the varies formats for each cell. For example, when you type in 15% the cell automatically formats to percentage. The user can adjust the decimal point and how the percent will be used in the sheet.
As I worked through the project I reinforced the skills of adjusting the column and row width, inserting new columns, and formatting cells to reflect the correct data. A new aspect of Excel that I had been unaware before this lesson/project was the pivot tables. The pivot tables allow a user to compare data, find percentages throughout the data, and summarize by a sum, a count, an average and more.
An example of a pivot table would  be:

Here, my boss would be able to see the selected demographics- by age grouped into decades. Then she would be able to see that the average percent increase was almost ninety-one percent in females ages 20-29.
This can be useful in a business that would want to see average sales, or average time of work per worker, etc.
As you can see, the user can also make the table appealing by adding colors and fonts.

Week 7: Presentation

This weeks project was to find a business appropriate message. Early this week I found a foundation that was geared to helping entrepreneurs. They have done awesome working, including sponsoring the Epcot Innoventions learning center in Disney World. They have donated 25 million dollars to 8 different universities of the course of time.
I decided to take one aspect of this company, its FastTrac program, and gear it to entrepreneurs who have businesses but don't know where to go from here.
I was able to critiques someone elses presentation along with my own. In this presentation, there were alot of words. I realized then that Don McMillan knew what he was talking about.
As the audience I was able to see some of the things a presenter might over look. Becoming the audience is a good way to avoid the "curse of knowledge" that the Heath brothers talk about in their book, Made to Stick.
While this presenters information was good and meaty, I was overwhelmed by the words and very little pictures.
I learned in my listening class last semester that humans can speak up to 100 words per minute while the brain has time to think of 500 words per minute. Pictures help to keep those words in the "oh and ah" area and out of  the "man I'm hungry area, I wonder if this meeting is gonna have snacks at the end, should I wear blue shoes or red shoe... oo presentation, right" area.  
Now that I have critiqued someone else and gained a little perspective, Ibegan to focus on my critique.
My presentation was perfect! -I WISH!
I began to see that I had to many words and only one or two pictures.
So I reworked it. I added a story to help with the emotional aspect of the presentation and added more pictures. Now, my audience can have a visual of what Im talking about.
I feel that my flow at first was skewed, I didnt have alot of detail of the main point I was making. So i had to add more information about the program.
I anticipated simple questions such as and?, why? What?
I direct my first question at my audience instead of raddling off facts.
I feel like the cookies would spark someones interest enough to listen at first and then stay for the rest of the story.
I feel im clear that im sharing about fastTrac growthventure.
Claims are validated from my story.
There is no clutter on my slides.


You can check out my video by clicking the link below!
Presentation 2012