However…frankly, all of that nonsense pales into utter insignificance when compared to what else I recieved today…Modern Warfare 2! The game I have been waiting for for eternity. I even got some new headphones to play it with!
I have had precious little time to play, but I’ve borrowed sleep time to play it. I hope to complete it over the weekend. I’m AMAZED by the gameplay so far – it helps me forget my actual life.

Zombie Killing

So it was Halloween last night — I thought it was gonna be yet another boring day on my own, but I ended up being invited out to Rock City so I thought I had better make a bit of an effort. Being a zombie fanatic, I thought I’d go as a survivor, or rather, whatever I had lying around! In this picture I actually look as if I have seen zombies.
The rest of this weekend will be spent trying to get my laptop to boot into Windows XP setup from a flash drive; so far it’s having none of it. This is really doing my head in; it has no optical drive!

I guess now I can do fun stuff like get some gaming done, read magazines and tinker with my computer and listen to podcasts without feeling guilty of wasting academic time. I’ve done my best — my marks are now over to my tutors.

I also got my ‘Contemporary Issues’ assignment back today entitled ‘Marketing Under Threat’. I got 78% for that, so I’m well chuffed.
The essay does illustrate the way many companies implement their marketing and the way they perceive it. Companies think they know how marketing should be done and who should do it…and very often, they’re bang-wrong, especially longer-established companies who have become set in the ways of ye olde marketing. It’s described better in the article! My concern is that while I’ve been studying marketing in theortical terms, I’ve grown to think of it as an academic discipine, not one which actually happens in organisations. That is becuase the way marketing is done in real-life is probably NOT as exciting and interesting as it is in academia. But this is only because companies are not receptive to the prevalent theories and best practice coming from the journals, otherwise marketing would have changed its face many many years ago. The prophesising from the likes of Levitt, Kotler, Piercy and Porter are just not realised in real-life, and so appear to remain only of interest to academics. So my point is that a job in marketing might not be as exciting as the discipine is supposed to be, because of the short-sighted restraints and ill-informed superiors of those implementing it. I feel that my (currently non-existant) marketing job might not be about implementing these innovative, forward-thinking things I’ve learned, but more about fighting a loosing battle, trying to fly the flag for marketing 2.0.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to make the crucial first steps in getting access to SMEs for my research. My supervisor is talking to Zanox.de a small internet-based company in Germany with whom I can do my research.
My concern is that becuase they are a 100% internet-based company, I’m not sure how applicable my diffusion of innovations theory will be, because for them, Web 2.0 isn’t an innovation it’s just their method of business full stop.

Allow me to share my conceptual map (at least TurnItIn anti-plagarism can’t recognise that when I submit my work!!):

As you can see, my research will baically be looking (qualitatively) at those antecedents leading to innovations and specifically, how that differs to the adoption of e-marketing and new media in SMEs. My thinking is that Web 2.0 and e-marketing is lightweight and so may be adopted much more readily than other innovations. Basically, what are the characteristics of those businesses who HAVE already adoped Web 2.0?

I have another lecturer who’s contacted various of her contacts to ask if they want to take part in my interviews, but thus far (as I pessimistically anticipated) I have had zero response. I now have a couple of options I guess; do a case study on Zanox, or do this without using interviews.
I’m just waiting to hear back from my supervisor now about a contact with Zanox.de.

I wanna go outside but it’s literally tipping it down.

…gonna kill some time on Photoshop.

So, that aside, I now need to focus on my Conference presentation on the 14th. It’s where I’ll have to present my research project which at present bears the working title ‘Web 2.0 Adoption in SME’s e-Marketing Strategy’ or something like that. That’s a pretty consise definition really.
My presentation, while not made yet, will cover what I want to examine, my theoretical framework and my research philosophy.

Due to the nature of what I’m going to be finding out, I’ll be using a qualititative methodology, teamed with an interpretivist epistemology which gives me the flexibility to literally interpret what I hear in terms of its application to my research objectives and framework. It almost sounds like I know what I’m talking about, yeah?!

Of course, that sounds well confusing, but I’m hoping to find very clear outcomes.

This conference will be the last time before graduation I’ll meet with my fellow students so I guess I’ll post some pics next week – ’cause there’ll be many taken me thinks!

Here’s my Literature review as a Wordle Word Cloud:

I think out of all the academic works I’ve done, this one relied the work of Piercy a hell of a lot. I found his book ‘Market-Led Strategic Change‘ gripping (for a Marketing book!). He gave me so much material on which to comment and he writes in such a frank and to-the-point manner! Any marketer or anyone interested in Internal Marketing, Market Orientation and the like should read it!
It’s almost a book you’d read in your leisure time!

With the penultimate module behind me, we have now embarked on the last module of my MSc ‘Contemporary Issues’ which may be the contender for my favourite module after the strategy stuff. Once this is over at the end of June, I’ll be left to my own devices I guess to complete my research project – Adoption of New Media and e-Marketing by SMEs.

I’ll post more often now.