November 2015 round-up

What. A. Busy. Month. And so many strong emotions (the attacks in Paris and elsewhere, the continued plight of the refugees, sad news from a friend…).

 

At a personal level, I reached the end of November feeling very tired, but also very satisfied with progress made on some key projects. I am also quite excited with new projects taking form, and which should come to fruition in the next year.

 

Looking at my #5pmproject pictures, I seem to have spent a lot of time driving or sitting at my desk… and, let’s face it, I have run out of things to photograph there! December will be my last month doing this project, which is really bitter-sweet: I am looking forward to moving on to another project, but I also take great pleasure in going through my pictures at the end of every week… and it’s been a great conversation starter (it is a bit weird when my phone alarm goes of at 5pm, and I take out my phone, snap a picture and put it away!).

 

 

All in all, November has been busy. Good busy.

 

Researching

So many exciting things happening on this front!

 

I presented my research on the use of social media in the B2B environment at the Henley Centre for Customer Management, and it let to interested and interesting questions, and plans for a follow up study.

 

I also had a great meeting about the sharenting project, with lots of really good contributions and ideas about how to develop it. I am so excited about this project because it will really make a positive contribution to society (over and above the sheer delight of working with such interesting people).

 

The data collection for the SME project is progressing veeeeeery slowly. If you work for an SME in the UK, Ireland, Spain, Italy or Malta, please consider completing our survey available here.

 

 

Writing

November was AcWriMo and my goal was to write everyday. Overall, I wrote 23 days out of 30, totalling 2,250 minutes, or an average of 97 minutes per writing day. It is not much. When I am not teaching, I will easily do twice as much as that – but this month I have been teaching (lots), and I am really happy that I managed to write regularly and purposefully for most of the month.

 

The outcome of this writing activity included: two paper revisions, a couple of conference abstracts, and one journal paper. There were days when, honestly, I only sat down to write because of AcWriMo. So, in my book, November has been a win as far as writing is concerned.

Teaching

Phew… where to I start?

 

I taught a workshop on segmentation for our MBA students, and continued to run the MBA Services Marketing module. I also continued to teach my CRM module, and I prepared for, but ended up not delivering, a session on social media profiling

 

And, there was marking! Dissertations marking, presentations marking and assignments marking. And reading chapters from my PhD students.

 

Learning

I am learning lots and lots about machine learning and privacy technology, because of the sharenting project. And, at the workshop that took place at the Henley Centre for Customer Management, I learned about customer experience at the Disney Parks, and how every single thing that happens in their parks must abide by four rules: safety, courtesy, theatre and efficiency (in this order).

 

What were November’s highlights for you?