October was busy. Very busy. This included a lot of firefighting, which I tend to find very draining. My #5pm pictures show that I spent a lot of time at my desk. But, unfortunately, only a minority of that time was spent on writing or, for that matter, on anything remotely related to research. Instead, my month was dominated by teaching, and teaching preparation, plus lots of data crunching and report writing related to my role as programme director for the MSc Marketing.
As usual, here are my highlights for the month that has just ended.
Researching
I worked really hard on a bid for a research grant for my work on the social media profiles of children, and managed to partner with three interesting researchers in other fields and institutions, as well as get a number of companies interested in the project. But, in the end, we did not submit the proposal for the call that we had in mind and, instead, decided to continue working on the proposal and target another funding opportunity.
I also continued my investigation of the use of social media in the business to business context, and compiled a number of really interesting (and varied) case studies.
Writing
Apart from the work on the research bid, I did not do much writing. Academic writing, that is. I did seem to do a lot of writing, but it was on programme-related, and this on administrative matters. As far as academic writing is concerned, I worked on some paper revisions. That was it.
But I did have a paper published. It is a piece looking at the handling of social media crisis, co-authored with Finola Kerrigan, Dirk von Lehn, Cagri Yalkin, and two of Dirk’s former students, Marc Braun and Nicola Steinmetz. It is available here, and it is open access.
November is AcWriMo and I am determined to go back to writing regularly and purposefully. I will write everyday: sometimes this will be a couple of hours. Other times, this will be just 15 minutes. But write, I shall!
Teaching
I ran a session on sentiment analysis for our final year undergraduate Marketing students. I have been running a module on Customer Relationship Management for our MSc Marketing students, and a module on Services Marketing for our MBA students. And while this may represent only 20 hours of delivery, it represents around 5 times that in preparation. And, then, there is all the admin, the marking (dissertations, at the moment), and so on. No wonder I did not manage to do much writing this month.
Learning
Unfortunately, I had to miss a couple of events where I was hoping to up my learning, like a colleague’s talk on ‘bounded systematic reviews’, or a meet up on optimisation.
But I learned quite a lot about privacy enhancing technology, while working on the research grant about children’s social media profiles. That was really interesting, and reminded me of why I love to work on interdisciplinary projects.
And I have been learning, or updating my knowledge, about various marketing topics, from second marking MSc dissertations – for instance, last week I read a dissertation about neuromarketing, which is an area that I am very curious about, but not very knowledgeable.
What were October’s highlights for you?
Ana Canhoto 