Focus: Follow the Leader & Follow the Follower
Objective: The objective of this assignment is to learn about leadership by doing. You will create a cohesive perspective or ‘story’ about leadership, followers, situations and the impact of social media influence on leadership effectiveness. The over-arching purpose is to create a 20 minute team narrative on how leaders can use podcasts to influence followers to achieve a common goal. Your team should choose the leader the first week of class. Start gathering information at the start of this course.
1. Identify an opinion leader whom they admire and follow that person on social media over the term (Twitter, Facebook, blog, etc.). Draft notes on what their leader is thinking and how influential they think she/he is.
2. While keeping up-to-date on what the leader is thinking and sharing publicly, track how followers are responding to the leader’s posts or tweets.
3. What messages are they retweeting? What is the public feedback to the leader’s posts? How many likes? Dislikes? How are followers promoting, defending, or criticizing the leader on social media?
4. Create a typology of responses (e.g., favorable/unfavorable of leader; favorable/unfavorable of a particular issue, etc.)
5. Identify different follower styles from social media posts? For example, who is a die-hard? Who seems to be alienated? Who is a pragmatist?
6. How does the leader respond to follower feedback, if at all?
7. How much influence do followers’ comments seem to have on the leader’s expressed attitudes or behavior?
8. What advice would you give the leader on how to better motivate followers or use the capabilities of the medium (e.g., Twitter–brevity, Facebook–networking, visuals) to influence people toward a common goal?
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