Web Summit is a global technology conference hosted annually in Lisbon. In 2016, more than 50,000 attendees from over 165 countries will fly to Lisbon for Web Summit, including over 20,000 companies, 7,000 CEOs and 2,000 international journalists. Speakers will include the founders and CEOs of the world’s largest tech companies as well as political leaders and major sports, fashion and music personalities.

I'm excited to be taking part in the first Digital Marketing Conference at the University of Reading. The theme: Digital Disruption Where? The University of Reading - Palmer Building When? 11th March, from 5 pm   Overview of the conference: Digital Disruption is...

In Chapter 6 of the second edition of Research Methods for Business Management, I expand on how the Internet and Social Media can be used to gather both primary and secondary data to answer many (if not all) of your research questions in your business dissertation.

Once again that time of the year when students across the world need to find a marketing dissertation topic is looming. I recently delivered a guest lecture at Henley Business School about the future of marketing, and many of the questions were related to finding good...

Social influence marketing employs social psychology principles to achieve marketing and business goals. It draws on the fact that as potential customers make a purchasing decision, they are being influenced by various forces. Within the field of social psychology, the concept of ‘social influence’ and its effect on individual behaviour, attitudes and beliefs is widely studied. Social influence has also of interest to marketers as consumer-to-consumer interactions are believed to affect consumer behaviour, attitudes, and feelings towards a product or brand. Trends towards brands being present in online environments, plus the innate human need to anthropomorphise objects to facilitate interactions with non-material objects make brand-consumer interactions within social media subject to similar effects.

I was invited to give a talk on Facebook fan page engagement at the Social Media Summit in Dubai. This was based on part of the research that I have done for my PhD and some other new research avenues that I am currently investigating. What was interesting from this event, was how much relevance social influence marketing is having among marketing practitioners.

For the second time I was part of the organising team of the UAE Inter-School Business Challenge at Heriot-Watt University, Dubai Campus. On this edition the interest was even greater than the last year, with over 200 students, 40 teams and some of the most prominent...

There is an increasing pressure to use digital resources in an efficient manner, especially from an SME perspective. Making sure that the business outcomes from digital marketing activities are positive for SME owners can ensure future growth and increase customer...

As you conduct any type of academic research, finding a research gap will become central to your endeavour. Journal editors will remind you of the importance of having a relevant research gap. If you’re writing your dissertation, your supervisor will push you to...

In my opinion, literature reviews are crucial to the definition of a research project like a dissertation. As soon as you have defined the area that you want to do your research, and have some broad research questions, doing a literature review will help you refine...