Okay, so here’s the break down of my coursework from Full Sail. Noted the program just changed, but as Alumni you can always audit a course to keep up.
I. Media Literacy and Research Methodologies
I knew how to do Academic research, but as far as business is concerned information that is vital for change may not be on the academic databases before a person can make a great decision on that new piece of information.
Twitter: For business reasons, this really made sense, but I needed this class to learn how it was effective for business purposes. Twitter is a quick message system that send messages to your team and can be used as a public relations service.
Linkedin: I had tried it before, but again did not know how it could be used to find jobs or get people on board a team to develop a project.
Diigo: This helped to link to groups that were finding different types of links that were focused on specific research focuses from topics related to the energy crisis to Japanese Anime.
Blogs: These helped me to start to develop an understanding of web presence. Blogs would continue to be a topic of discussion through the rest of the academic year.
Continued development of media literacy means to look out for websites that can help get a person closer to their goals. In this regard, sites to look out for are “Google +” and “Klout” because these two new service could change social networking in the coming years.
II. Executive Leadership
This was a great class that talked about the use and abuse of power. Unlike other leadership courses I had before, we studied the book the “48 Laws of Power” to look at the historical mistakes and successes of people such as Tesla, and how in our cotemporary society people can rise to power by getting others to reach their potential.
This class helped me develop and realize my leadership abilities. By working with people who work with or under me, we can get a desired shared goal by amplifying our skills. Given my time working with Diane Hyppolite, my assistant, and others, I have full confidence that whatever the job is I can build a team with the right people to get it done.
III. Project and Team Management
The overall goal here was to create timelines to reach realistic goals when dealing with a team. If that meant to create a project or event, the process was very similar. The most important assignment in this class was the idea of putting together an event. This involved developing a budget, a team, an event then getting funding for that event. After those steps, the final step was working with others in that budget. Unfortunately, this class only gave the skills to run an event team under a budget, pitch an event, and develop a sleek event business plan. The rest of the classes I needed came further in the program in regards to starting a business.
IV. Business Storytelling and Brand Development
This class real developed Guy Kawasaki’s ideal of make “meaning” or “mantra over mission statement”. In other words, how do you get people to understand what your brand does? Full Sail’s adopted the solution was to develop a brand’s story, a narrative that conveyed the history and reason why a brand should be supported.
Similar to inception, I learned in this class was not just how to sell an idea or concept but to get people to come to the decision why they should support an idea or concept. This skill I use almost every day with the business I am developing, and with others who need help developing their own ideas or concepts.
V. Entertainment Business Finance
An extension of Project and Team Management, This class got into the more meat and potatoes of business planning when it came to money. The Pro-Forma assignment help define costs, profits, and responsible spending. Now I can use Excel to create spreadsheets that show a proposed budget and how that money will be spent.
VI. Negotiation and Deal-Making
With reading on psychology of deal making from Harvard, Role-play assignments had us take different roles with different interests. These interests represented clients based on case studies who had psychological and practical fears. For example, in one assignment, I played a new director trying to get a former movie star who feared her age was factor and so demanded more money than what she was currently worth; moreover, she had gotten negative media attention related to drug chargers that caused her career to stop. At the same time, I had to get her on board within a proposed production budget.
The compromise that was made was helping the former movie star with her social networking in correlation to the film’s release. This compromise would help her get positive press for TV show appearances and bolster support for the independent film documentary. In other assignments, the role was switched and I was the talent who feared something, but wanted something else. These role-plays help me understand peoples need and wants, and how to create a deal that best represented all parties.
The compromise that was made was helping the former movie star with her social networking in correlation to the film’s release. This compromise would help her get positive press for TV show appearances and bolster support for the independent film documentary. In other assignments, the role was switched and I was the talent who feared something, but wanted something else. These role-plays help me understand peoples need and wants, and how to create a deal that best represented all parties.
In application, this really helped me consider how to empathize and negotiate with people who could have irrational and rational fears caked into wanting something I could offer. However, I find myself getting people to realize the benefits of working with us, and they usually agree. When we actually get results we confirm it was a smart decision and build trust with our strategic partners, sponsors, fans, etc.
VII. Product and Artist Management
Unlike “Project and Team Management”, this dealt with a specific event for a single product or artist. The major difference is that unlike an event, something or someone would be the highlight of the entire show. This was about developing a philosophy for real world situations. For example, a new starting out artist’s manager could demand a bigger cut of the ticket and music sales, but later as the artist becomes more successful the manager could ask for less of a percentage based on a larger profit margin. In this example, charging a starving artist more seems cruel, but the manager needs the money to be able to operate. Still it would make sense to most people to charge the successful artist more, but if the manager is not greedy, he can operate on a smaller percentage because the artist’s profit is higher.
Explaining the above example to a client before representing them is exactly what the class was about and a skill I picked up. I find these situations come up every so often with the business I started when it comes to contracts, taxes, and explaining why we charge X for something and Y for another.
VIII. Advanced Entertainment Law
I was no novice to trademarks and patents, but this class gave me a great free resource to look up case studies and lead me to find the actually document that describes natural trademarks in today’s internet. Now, if someone asks me about natural trademark on the net, I can point them to a government site and document, explaining the documents, and cite a case as an example.
Key resources from project:
Lanham (Trademark) Act (15 U.S.C.) Index (n.d.) BitLaw. Retrieved on April 19th, 2011 from http://www.bitlaw.com/source/15usc/
Marcus (2008) Natural Answers Inc v. Smithkline Beecham Corporation
April 9th, 2011 from: http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-11th-circuit/1206578.html
IX. Entertainment Media Publishing and Distribution
This class gave me the ability to develop traditional and non-traditional plans to market and sell different types of works. This added to my knowledge from such podcasts as “Webcomics Weekly” that explored similar topics related to free to paid content marketing.
X. Digital Marketing
Search engine optimality, social networking, email newsletters, and press releases were key concepts in relation to marketing budgets; however, “Conversions” was really the focus to this class because it helped create realistic goals to what wanted to be accomplish through the varying forms of internet media. For example, we learned to breakdown the cost of a digital marketing campaign and then measure how effective that campaign was in a certain time frame. The basic conversion was leads to sales, then other conversion could breakdown ways to measure these various successes such as emails to leads and so forth.
I now have the ability to develop an Internet marketing camping and correspond with a team to pull data to make decisions and implement a dynamic online marketing campaign based on trends. Also, I now can develop reports for clients, peers, or employers to make decisions on the success and fails of the campaign.
XI. Business Plan Development
This class started a reflection process and review of the ten courses and how in combination they could help us create a business plan. It helped developed the first half of a business plan draft. It developed a three-year budget plan in accordance to all the needs a business would need to be successful such as marketing and so forth.
In the class, I was able to consider weaknesses in my plan that needed to be addressed before showing it to investors.
XII. Final Project: Business Plan
A follow up to the Business Plan Development class, this class finalized a business plan draft, and covered applications of what we learned and how this applied to the jobs market. Other supplement topics of choice were personal finance and seeking investors. The course was a reflection and affirmation of the entire Full Sail Master of Science Program.
As a follow-up, I was realized the weaknesses in my plan needed more focus on the fine tuning the market research, developing more leads, and finalizing planned payouts to investors.
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