Larry Yelder

Professional Student Inspired For Success

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Donald Sterling - Los Angeles Clippers Owner

News circulating around Donald Sterling these last few weeks have been nothing but negative. After the NBA team owners comments were made public by his girlfriend, Vivian Stiviano; Donald Sterling has been banned from life and now sources have released news informing us that he has cancer. What will happen next in this case? Will Sterling end up selling his NBA team, currently competing in the NBA playoffs? Only time will tell  

Read more on TMZ

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Individual Social Media Project Research - Part 2

After researching the functions of public relations, I conducted research on risk and crisis communications. Through my research I learned how social media is utilized in risk and crisis communication. I thought I would teach my peers first how social media improves preparedness in a crisis situation. Social media can be used to immediately encourage an audience to take safety precautions. During the 2009 influenza pandemic in Kenya, tweets and SMS text were used to indicate where vaccination against H1N1 influenza were available. Social media was used to encourage the population to vaccinate and to indicate where the nearest place was to do so. Next I wanted to show how social media provides information and warning. Social media can be a way to provide information and instructions, with real time alerts and warnings. Social media like blogs can be used to provide advice by posting information such as emergency phone numbers, location of hospitals requiring blood donations and evacuation routes. Social media represents one more channel for emergency services to send an alert and warning. Next I wanted to show how using social media for risk and crisis communication can help to counter inaccurate press coverage or to counterbalance rumors. If an organization is not present in the social media arena, someone else can be who can speak for it, and damage its reputation. This immediate dissemination could be dangerous if the organization is not present to counterbalance the information provided. Next, the use of social media improves transparency and trust in public authorities. Developing a community of followers to whom to communicate hard facts and timely information to on disasters helps allows organizations to benefit and adapt to breaking news, improving trust among the audience over time. Lastly, In post crisis phases, social media can be used to send information about recovery and reconstruction. Social Media can also help identify where stress management is most needed in the recovery phase and to offer tools for managing stress through interactive platforms.

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Individual Social Media Project Research - Part 1

For our individual assignment is chose to teach my peers how social media is used in public relations, specifically in risk and crisis communication. First I began researching the different functions of public relations. Through my research I confirmed the many functions of public relations. In Risk and Crisis Management, the public relations professional develops methods and policies to be used when an organization’s becomes involved in an emergency affecting its public. This includes policies and procedures for the distribution of information to employees, media, government and other publics. During Relationship Management, this involves identifying key publics and establishing strategies for building and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with those publics. In Reputation or Image Management, planning and implementation of policies, procedures and strategies that demonstrate an organization’s commitment to public and social responsibility, ethical behavior, corporate identity and reputation with key publics are established. During Strategic Management, the public relations professional serves on the management team as a counselor. Helping the organization develop sound policies that are in the best interests of the public as well as the organization. The practitioner integrates an understanding of the concerns and attitudes of key publics into the organization’s managerial decision-making process. Conducting this research will allow me to teach the class some of the different aspects of a public relations professionals job duties. I will also include how the public relations career field and job task tactics have changed since the emergence of social technologies such as the cellular phone and the Internet.

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How social media is utilized in Risk and Crisis Communication

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Blood Moon - Lunar Eclipse

Did you get a chance to see the Red moon? If you didn't, hopefully you have internet access. During the early morning of April 15, 2014 the moon glowed red. Many believe that this is a sign of THE END OF TIME. While other take that info with a grain of salt.

It was the first of four coming eclipses where the moon will glow red in the sky, so three more opportunities to catch one are coming.The next three blood moon eclipses will occur on October 8th of this year, and then on April 4th and September 28th in 2015.

Click here to read more and to view more pictures

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Epilogue: The Social Future

Imagine being able to collaborate with people all over the world. Through social media, we have the opportunity to refer to many different people about various different topics. We have the capability to learn from each other through online collaboration. Imagine being able to participate in communicative interactions never before seen as possible. Organizations can now refer to their target customers by the mass. Organizations can directly communicate with its target audience with the simple click of a mouse. With social media and collaborative communities, organizations are increasing accuracy and becoming more efficient.

Transparency is what is changing the way organizations conduct business. Sooner or later, organizations will realize that collaboration create business value. The disparity between social organizations and Stone Age organizations is becoming more and more relevant. Organizations should have leaders embedded with ways to contribute to the organizations collaborative community as well as policies. An organization possessing the fusing attitude mentioned in earlier chapters is the end result of becoming a social organization. Organizations must view collaboration from the whole perspective. In the age of constant communication, organizations must realize that collaborative communities can and will produce business value, transparency, customer satisfaction, and overall increased efficiency throughout the organization.

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The Path to Becoming a Social Organization (Ch. 11)

Social Media is a phenomenon that has taken the world by storm! Every organization, if not currently, should be partaking in social media to some extent. Remember, social organizations develop over time. From the information we have learned, the ability to tap the creative knowledge of customers and employees comes from the correct social media attitudes and capabilities of the organization. A social organization must implement different tactics to become socially engaged with its target community. It takes more than adding a few social networking mediums for an organization to achieve successful collaborative community results. Proactive social organizations achieve success because of how differently they view situations.

Becoming a social organization starts when you formulate an attitude and realize that successful social media practices start with the six F’s mentioned in chapter four. These six attitude categories are as followed; folly, fearful, flippant, formulating, forging and fusing. Most organizations in the folly stage consider social media as having no business value. If your leaders believe that any efforts to conduct effective social media practices is useless or a fad, the organization is in the folly stage. There are many ways to help the organization view social media as a useful tool. If leaders in your organization are fearful of what may occur on social media, the organization is in the fearful stage. Leaders are aware of the possibilities of social media but believe that the negatives of participating in social media outweigh the positives. If the organization is flippant about social media, it doesn’t take it serious. This stage is very common among many organizations. The organization will practice a “provide and pray” mentality, with little direction and basic policy guidance; praying that a reputable collaborative community will arise from something that hasn’t had much effort put into it. Becoming a formulating organization is the process of becoming a social organization. This stage recognizes the potential of social media and begins to implement strategic needs at the same time generating changes allowing the organization to conduct effective social media practices. Organizations in the forging stage support and encourage community collaboration. Organizations in the stage have leaders who support mass collaboration and understand how social media can be used to create business value. Becoming a fusing organization is the primary goal for organization lacking collaboration. A fusing organization is lead by leaders who have collaboration embedded in their minds. These executives understand that without social media, the organization cannot function to its full capabilities. The fusing organization completely understands how business value can be generated from social media practices.

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Review: Adapting the Organization (Ch. 10)

As we read in last chapter, it is important the collaborative community is being directed in the correct way. Once the community begins to receive their results and begin the implementation stage, the organization must be ready to adapt. It is the leaders of the organizations job to begin implementing the findings the participants are providing. The book uses a great example with Loyola University, in Chicago. Loyola created a collaborative community of newly admitted freshmen, as well as members of the current freshman class in the university. The purpose of the collaborative community was to influence future students want to enroll at the university. They wanted a place where students could share info about themselves, connect with other students, participate in discussions, and complete the enrollment process. This collaborative community initiative from Loyola resulted to be a success from the introduction.

This example leads us into what a organization would have to do for its newly formed collaborative community. Based on the correct intended findings of the participants, management must begin to adapt the organization. First, the organization must be safe for community collaboration. Executives, senior leaders and management must be involved in mass collaboration. Management must implement formal process of organization change and governance to incorporate community results as “the way we do things”. The organization must work with HR professionals to incorporate collaboration into the desired profession behavior and proper conduct. It is important to work with the current CFO and finance to create a new budget, allowing the collaborative findings to be able to take place. Lastly, the IT leaders need to deliver the collaborative capabilities work with the enterprise IT systems, maintaining structure and organization. These are all necessary steps for a organization to being adapting from the collaborative community’s results

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New Communication App - Fire Chat

This new text based communication app is hitting the world by storm. This app allows you to connect with other smart phones through Bluetooth or wifi radios. Allowing subscribers to communicate without the need of cellular networks.

Read More

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Review: Guiding the Community’s Purpose (Ch. 9)

What happens when purpose and community don’t align? Guiding the community’s purpose is crucial for the organization to receive its intended results. The organization must make certain that the community is headed in the correct direction. The purpose of the roadmap, mentioned in earlier chapters is for the community to progress and achieve goals. The organization must step back and view how the community has interpreted its purpose and how participants interact. The organization must also look at what progress has been made in the wrong direction. Lastly, the organization should analyze whether anything has changed that would require the reevaluations of the purpose of the community.

If and when the organization realizes that it needs to make adjustments to its collaborative community, it can be gone about by taking one or a mixture of different actions. The organization can adjust its appeal to participants and productivity. Next, the organization can create and run social circles that encourage participants to interact. The organization can create social circles within the community for in-depth findings. Also, a spin-off community can be created, with a new purpose in mind. If adjustments are necessary, a mixture of any of these actions can help get the community back on track.

The authors also provided us with three questions to ask when deciding if a community needs to be redirected.

What is the relationship between the original purpose and the community?

What progress has the community made against the original purpose?

Is there a reason to reinvent the purpose or the community?

Once the organization realizes that they are not receiving the specific results they were intending, the organization must be quick to adjust and begin making changes that will lead the collaborative community in the correct manner.

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Review: Guiding from the Middle (Ch. 8)

What happens after a community is successfully launched? Will the results the organization is looking for come on their own? Chapter 8 goes over the necessary steps key to influencing collaboration in the newly developed community. What is the role of management in a collaborative community? First, a organization must establish some type of authority. Second, management must establish structure in the community. The organization must be careful when going about this. There are many dangers of too much management or the wrong kind of management. If the community has too much authority or too much structure, collaboration, creativity and contribution will be stifled.

  For an organization to receive their intended results, the authorial must be involved in the right way. In every successful group, there is an individual that motivates or pushes a common purpose. This individual will promote the best thinking, ideas, efforts and willingness of the members over looked. This is not the traditional role managers’ play. In a complex collaborative community, individuals have their own beliefs and ideas. The managers role is to guide participants into the direction where the organization will get the receive results.

  Along with the organization establishing authority in the collaborative community, structure must also be established. Without any structure, participants will not become engaged in collaboration, grow as a community or create any value. Community managers need to play three key roles to ensure collaboration. First, the manager must guide the participants, not control. Second, the community must be kept on track. It is the managers’ job to keep participants focused and productive at all times. Third, the manager must represent the collaborative community in the context of the organization as a whole. Too much structure will keep participants from sharing knowledge, experiences and ideas. Community managers can’t force collaboration. Individuals in charge must simply provide structure that will promote the intended collaboration of the organization. Without authority and structure in the collaborative community, say goodbye to any chances of receiving participation, purpose or performance.

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Review: Launching the Community (Ch. 7)

Chapter seven opens up focusing on three keys steps to a launch. The organization aiming at creating a collaborative community should be completed in a particular order.

1. Exploring and defining the participant experience.

This phase determines what the participants want and value. This is crucial information the organization needs to know. Having access to this information is the reason for the community collaboration. When this information is know, the organization can adapt to its participants wants. The Acosta example showed a organization must view the needs of buyers and social experiences.

2. Creating the right environment. Environment breaks down into three subactivities: Creating structure, delivering an ecosystem and using the right technologies. What is a collaborative environment that doesn’t influence collaboration? This process covers the necessary requirements needed to create a environment that is user friendly. The environment must have structure but not to the point where it negatively effects the creativity of the user. The environment should be simple to pick up and use upon first interaction. The collaborative community should be incorporated with the current life styles of the participants; if participants have to go out of their way to collaborate, the organization will not get the responses wanted. The participants should be able to navigate around the community easily. The environment should provide value to the participant upon entry. Lastly, the technology must be chosen carefully so participants can easily participate, seeming effortless.

3. Engaging the community. Engagement involves setting critical mass targets and rapidly driving participation to the tipping point.

Who are the participants who will contribute the most? Key participants must first be established to lead the conversation. A social environment cannot survive without the key participants leading the conversation. When community participation among users reaches its tipping point, it will able to sustain itself.

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NCAA Tournament Bracket 2014: PRINTABLE March Madness Sheet With teams, matchups, and dates.

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its that time of the year again. March Madness is here! If you havent already, establish your predictions of who will make it to the Final Four and ultimately who will win the Mens Basketball National Championship.

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Review: Refining Purpose by Building Purpose Roadmaps (Ch. 6)

Developing a purpose roadmap is essential for a organization looking to create a collaborative community. “A purpose roadmap identifies the target community and how it may change over time.” The purpose roadmap allows the organization to know who the participants are, what motivates them to collaborate, and how they interact. Through the purpose roadmap, the organization can plan for how the community can bring value and a way to approximate future investments. The book emphasized that having a single purpose for the community only gives a short-term view on future endeavors. Developing a purpose roadmap allows the organization to grow a social media environment and ecosystem over time to address new purposes. “As new purposes emerge and old ones may fade away, these changes are folded into the original roadmap, which becomes a continuously evolving picture of the community’s possible future.

The vision statement for community collaboration is to engage current/previous customers in development of vehicles to collaborate on solving current/previous product issues to increase customer value and fulfillment of upcoming models, enhance customer loyalty, desirability, and perception of vehicles, and provide us with critical information for vehicle evolution. A list of purposes for that statement could be; Induce a new age of customer loyalty to a American brand, Discover what appliances customers consider necessary, create awareness of vehicle development, and control the cost of vehicles. In addition to developing a purpose roadmap, developing a business justification that identifies the community’s tangible business benefits and costs is essential to the success of the organizations community collaboration efforts. The organization should build a business rationale for the community around specific business relevant purposes. In the situation with the American Automaker, it would be necessary to explore and document fundamental questions about costs, benefits, risks, and business value. Primary social principles at work are participation, emergence, transparency, collective and emergence. People connected to the organization participate in ideas collectively in a transparent atmosphere, contributing to an emergence of new vehicles. Social Benefits of the community forum is to grow a community where shareholders and stakeholders can collaborate openly together on how to improve company vehicles. Business benefits tells us that the American Automaker plans on the community providing product development effectiveness, market responsiveness and sales effectiveness. Business cost would cause culture change, leadership participation, process and system change for that specific vehicle. Lastly, business impact would result in revenue growth, market share growth, better profitability and a competitive position over other American automakers.

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Review: Developing a Strategic Approach to Community Collaboration (Ch. 5)

For the 5th chapter, authors Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald front the start dive right into the importance of having a thought out and purposeful strategy for conducting community collaboration. One of the most important concepts to understand about community collaboration is that in most cases a organization will have to chose who it will continue working with, and who it wont. This decision is made upon evaluating the communities sampled. The community that possesses the common trait the organization is looking for is the target, while work with the other collaborative communities ends until needed for another project.  Making these decisions is the function of the strategy. 

Before becoming a social organization, a co-existing relationship between the organization and the various communities connected to the organization must be established. Without the various communities input, feedback, crucial to the development and growth of the organization would be lost. When a community is decided upon, the organization develops a strategy, which identifies the communities the firm will investigate, sanction and support; when and how it will support the community; desired collaborative behaviors they want to exhibit; and the organizational benefits expected to flow from them. Building the strategy involves two main activities; intelligently deciding on a community to work with and determining where/when to invest in the community.

In the case of the North American automaker that wants to begin producing a vehicle based on the inputs of a targeted collaborative community. The automaker would first need to decide on a purpose for the strategy. Developing a purpose for a strategy takes creativity. The purpose addresses a recognized problem and is specific enough to motivate an identified target audience to participate. An example of a motivating purpose for the North American automaker could be: Engage current/previous customers of our vehicles to collaborate on solving current/previous product issues to increase customer value and fulfillment of upcoming models, enhance customer loyalty, desirability, and perception of vehicles, and provide us with critical information for vehicle evolution. 

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Drones on the Horizon. How would you feel about having something delivered to you by a Drone? Currently, the use of Drones for commercial use is illegal, but American companies such as Dominos and Amazon have already completed transactions through the use of a Drone delivery system. Is this something that can help our society? Is this something that can cause possible harm?

Read the full article on The Detroit News website.

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Review: Forming a Vision for Community Collaboration (Ch. 4)

Does the importance of a vision for community collaboration contribute to the success of an organization? A vision serves two main purposes; to articulate the belief of leadership and identify opportunities where collaboration can add value. The vision statement can provide clarity and direction, guide strategy, enhance buy-in, and inspire participation. When is it suitable for a organization to participate in community collaboration? In many cases, community collaboration adds value to the organization. There are also many cases where community collaboration is not appropriate.

Community collaboration is more appropriate when large groups of individuals act independently to contribute to ideas and information, leading to increased performance. Through community collaboration, organizations can gather information directly from those targeted around the focal point of the effort. Such as a shared interest, idea, concept, opinion, product design, political position, common experience, or medical condition. If information pertaining to the organization is sensitive and requires safeguards in its use, then it is not appropriate for community collaboration. “Community collaboration is less suitable for challenges that require deep analysis.” That information is better coming from the experts, who influence one another.

Imagine a new department is created within the communications segment of an American auto company. There job is strictly to communicate effectively with their community, with the purpose of learning what they want in new up and coming model generation. The department is divided into teams; each assigned a different model or class (SUV, compact saloon, mid size saloon, full size saloon, executive saloon, crossover etc). The teams are instructed to reach out to the community to gather ideas on different aspects of what they would want to see in the automakers new model generation. The automaker listens to the voice of the people. Evaluates which idea would make the largest impact, begins producing the vehicle with the best ideas gathered from the people, for the people and that American automaker becomes the leader of the auto industry in North America. Next, the automaker collaborates on a global scale and repeats the same success story, this time globally. This may seem exaggerated, but I believe this is something that could be done if conducted properly.