Social Media project - Walmart - Group 8

As part of the social media project in ISM3004, we were assigned to research a company's Internet and social media presence. Our group chose Walmart as our social media project company. Our group's research included analyzing Walmart's presence on the following Internet websites; YouTube, FaceBook, Google, Bing, Twitter, Twitrratr, Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest, Stumbleupon, and Walmart.com. I researched Walmart’s YouTube page, Wikipedia page, and their social media guidelines.  I learned that it is important for a company to have a social media presence, but more importantly a structured and customer-caring existence. It is good to see a company setting and sharing guidelines on social media use. It sets the bar in regards to what to expect from Walmart's social media presence and what is allowed to be posted on the Internet. My employer, Harland Financial Solutions, has an online presence on Twitter and YouTube, but I am unable to find the social media guidelines or policy. There are articles about social media, but no policy was found.

Our group was able to collaborate and bring together all needed content. Hawiane Tidwell was our group leader and assigned tasks to each group member to do with a deadline set for all research. I believe all group members participated in their assigned tasks. Hawiane did a great job at combing all of our research into the group Wiki page. We worked together well and our leader produced a well written report on Walmart's social media and online presence.

It is important for a company to have a social network presence to keep up with the multiple generations of buyers. With the combination of smartphones and social networking, the consumer is closer to the brand and company than ever before. Not only is it important and critical for companies to use social media avenues, but they must also have guidelines to follow. Without guidelines, the reputation of the company is at stake with everything anyone says about your company online.

Our group’s Walmart Wikispace: http://ism3004socialmedia.wikispaces.com/Wal-Mart

Database Project

Out of all the years that I've worked in the Information Technology & Security field, I have never used Microsoft Access as much as in this course. These past few weeks in this course have taught me many things in Access. Working with databases can be quite daunting, but with desktop database management tools such as Microsoft Access and FileMaker Pro, databases are manageable by non-IT gurus. Using tables, queries, forms, and reports allow for more efficient data management. Access allows for methods of answering tough questions and relationships in datasets.

In addition to the instructions given for the database project, a few more steps can be done to improve the Members database and make it even more functional. Inner-join, data field validation, and drop down combo box are options for easier form input and efficient output. Also, if there are membership dues, another table, form, and report can be made to track the payments. This additional membership dues table can be a relational link with the MemberID primary key. Using an "inner-join" a query can be run against both tables and provide a combined report as if it was a single data table. This can effectively be used to manage the membership database of this club.

Excel Project

Our class project for the past two weeks has been focused on Microsoft Excel. There are so many uses for this application.  This project got me intimate with Excel's various subject areas, such as data formatting, printing, formulas, cell addressing, functions, and pivot tables.  We began with an Excel "scavenger hunt", which essentially were about 30 tasks in Excel.  Then, we used the techniques and knowledge learned from the scavenger hunt to do data analysis and reporting for a large fitness center assessing the effectiveness of a particular workout.  The analysis of the data was enhanced by creating two pivot tables in this Excel workbook to aid in the owner's research.  One pivot table was to answer the question, "How many subjects reached their target heart rate during the 15 minute exercise window".  The other pivot table was to answer the question, "Which demographic groups got the most benefit from the exercise regimen".  A screen capture of the demographic results of this data is below in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Pivot table showing average increase by gender and age group.

This project, like all projects in this course, has gone above and beyond my existing knowledge. I now have a better understanding of Excel's multiple uses, including pivot tables, functions, and absolute and relative cell addressing used in conjunction with formulas and functions. Using pivot tables allowed me to take a huge amount of structured data and create specific and understandable charts for analysis.  Also, absolute and relative cell addressing assisted in creating more dynamic formulas and functions.  I use Excel in my career for data analysis tasks, but with the knowledge I have gained from this project, I will be able to apply it to my job and exceed expectations when analyzing and reporting on data.

Presentation Project

This presentation project turned out to be a rewarding subject.  My career is in the information security field.  Part of my job is educating others about information security and how to protect yourself and the company's data.  I am leveraging this project with the presentation that I will give while together with our Corporate Security Group in a few weeks.  The previous presentation that I made for this summit two years ago belongs in the PowerPoint "hall of shame".  This class has already proven valuable to my career.  After evaluating my submitted presentation tonight, against the evaluation rubric, my presentation lines up well, but lacked at least in one area.

I created a logical flow from the start with the "Top 5 ideas" flow.  I began with a question and ended asking for any questions from the audience.  I grabbed the attention within the first 30 seconds by starting out with a question to the audience rather than introducing myself first. I asked questions and brought up issues to the audience to spark interest.  The illustrations that were used related to the subject of the awareness tip.  More information could have been given, but time restraints only kept his list to five (5) tips and little explanation. I did not clutter my presentation slides.  As a learning reflection, before I took this class, my presentation slides were created with too much clutter.  Although, I did not give any websites to reference to find more information. 

URL of my presentation:  http://my.brainshark.com/ISM3004-presentation-project-BRADSHAW-Security-Awareness-636682325

As I watched another student's presentation, they had background music during the presentation.  Background music should be at a very low volume to ensure the speaker is clearly heard.  I leaned on the safe side for my recording and did not have any background music playing.  The peer presentation that I watched gave a well presented Credits ending.  After I viewed theirs, I realized that mine lacked in detail.  I should have credited websites on where to validate claims.