What a day it’s been today. Very long indeed.
It was the conference which we’ve all been looking forward to where we could present our papers and ger some feedback. Ran from around 10-5, but then we all split off and went for drinks and for a meal after. Didn’t get back until well after 3am, meaning I’d been out for around 19hrs. That’s mad – I never do that! But it was the last day I guess and wanted to spend time with my colleagues. It was good opportunity to get photos too, as I might not see some of my friends again. Hopefully, they’ll be back for graduation in November.
I was able to grab a word with a lecturer who may be able to get me access to some SMEs who I can ask questions in relation to their e-marketing strategy.
The observations made by the academics who were critiquing my paper raised a couple of issues relating to the sample and way I am going to compare them. As yet, I’m not really clear on how this is going to work, but once I have gathered the feedback form these companies, I’m hoping it’ll slot into place into the conceptual map and I can make some meaningful conclusions. I might even find new adoption criteria not previously expected. The issue now will be about staying motivated, even though university is OVER (and I experience that depressive, disconnected feeling all over again). This has been my life for almost a year, now it’s gone.
I’m looking forward to getting the research done, recorded, coded, analysed and written up so I can do well at this – I owe myself that. Then I can move onto the next thing…whatever that might be. Today has certainly given me new ideas for the future, and integration with so many foreign students has been an inspiration.
Like I said…today was great for photo opportunities [to follow]. My camera seemed to attract much attention.

Yeah I know it’s been ages!
It’s just that I’ve had a pressing deadline which followed shortly from my Literature Review deadline. I handed it in today…at last! I wrote an essay about Strategy Implementation covering issues of organisational culture, internal politics, structure and market-orientation. Ideally, each one of those could be the title of an essay to be honest…but oh no!
I’m concerned that it may have lacked focus, as the literature was pulling me towards adjacent areas of theory.

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.

Almost done now with this literature review. I did finally pursue the line of looking at Web 2.0 adoption within SMEs. The word limit is 4,000, but I have already gone over this and not yet arrived at a conceptual map. It’s quite difficult to pull together the studies since lots of the literature is quite fragmented around internet adoption in SMEs. Also, only a fraction of it relates specifically to e-Marketing, with none relating to Web 2.0 specifically. I need to get it all structured so I can arrive at a conceptual map from which to derive objectives.
I guess the fun bit will be doing the primary research among SMEs. Never done that before!

Well, as you probably don’t know (or will do if you saw my ‘research poster’ post, we have to do some primary research for MSc Marketing. I can never decide what I want to do with these things, but initially, acording to the poster, I wanted to look at the extend of reliance of consumers on reviews when buying computer hardware.
I have now decided, in light of my recent e-marketing research that I want to look at how SMEs use (or don’t use) on-line marketing channels to engage customers with Web 2.0 platforms or just use it at all. If so, I wish to know what metrics they collect, how they act on them and how many people influence the adoption of their on-line presence.
In return, I might just link to said companies to help out in a small way with their SEO. Let’s see how it goes….