Europe’s largest technology market place is around the corner: 7000+ UK tech and business leaders to descend on Lisbon

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.

Two papers from our 4th year Management students accepted into ICOM 2015 in Abu Dhabi

During the summer period, two of my dissertation supervisees decided to turn part of their dissertations into conference papers. I was very pleased to learn that the two papers were accepted to be presented in the upcoming International Conference on Organization and Management (ICOM 2015) in Abu Dhabi.

How to make money online?

If you’re looking to make money online, you need to understand the different revenue models that are available. A revenue model describes the process by which money can be earned. Choosing a revenue model for your online business will help with decisions regarding how many resources to invest in your business.  There are four main revenue models: selling content, selling information, selling advertisement space and selling services

#HenleyDigital is now over – reflections and future directions for my digital marketing modules

For the second year, I had the opportunity to teach the Digital Marketing modules at Henley Business School at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. I called the module #HenleyDigital, and some students have engaged with the hashtag on Twitter and...

Top hints to consider before developing a mobile app for your business

With a significantly higher penetration of smartphones than other countries, added to reduced organic reach in social media channels, revamping your mobile marketing strategy with a mobile app can be the way forward for many SMEs in the UAE. Isabella Leland and Dr Rodrigo Perez-Vega discuss key elements you should consider before investing on a mobile application.

Increasing Facebook fan page engagement: on being attractive, social, and visually appealing to your customers

Communication through social media is becoming increasingly sophisticated, with an accompanied growth in research on the strategies to increase online brand engagement behaviours. A bulk of this research focusses on consumer reviews as a determinant of hotel...

Interview at Business Breakfast: Generating positive engagement on Facebook fan pages

I was invited on the 26th of June to the show Business Breakfast in Dubai to discuss a bit about our paper "The influence of brand immediacy in consumer engagement behaviours: A revised social impact model".  I spoke about how social immediacy (who you're friends...

How to find a good marketing dissertation topic

t’s that time of the year when MSc students around the world start thinking about their marketing dissertation topics. A few years ago I wrote a post on “How to choose a dissertation topic in marketing” for INYIYD. I decided to create an updated version of that post...

Online Research – Using the Internet and Social Media

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.

AI and Marketing: a few thoughts after the 51st Academy of Marketing conference.

This week I went to Stirling to attend the Academy of Marketing conference. I took part in a workshop that looked at the intersection between AI and Marketing. My interest in AI derives from my innate interest in technology. Almost 8 years ago, when I decided I wanted...

Read all posts

A guide to social influence marketing in online environments

A guide to social influence marketing in online environments

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.

read more
Engagement behaviours on Facebook Fan pages

Engagement behaviours on Facebook Fan pages

Facebook offers companies several options to contact and communicate with their customers. Four behaviours are possible for a Facebook brand page user. Users can decide to look into a page of a brand and “Like” the page, which will lead to being able to see further messages from the brand later in his Facebook newsfeed. Furthermore, once that content is displayed, the platform allows users to “react” to the content, leave a comment on the content, and share the content with others. This post examines more in detail all these engagement behaviours.

read more
Building customer relationships one tweet at a time

Building customer relationships one tweet at a time

The landscape of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has shifted markedly in recent years, fuelled, by amongst other things, developments in technology and the rapid expansion of social media platforms. Social media use among Internet users and businesses is now widespread. From an SME perspective, companies have looked at social media channels as a cost-effective marketing tool, and consequently many organisations, big and small, have jumped onto the social media bandwagon over the last decade. True, early social media platforms allowed businesses to market directly to their potential and current customers at almost zero financial cost, however with a push towards monetisation and changes in the algorithms in many of the mainstream platforms is making this channel a more pay-to-play one. We propose that looking at social media not only as a marketing tool but also as a space where companies and customers can build meaningful relationship is the way forward.

read more
#STEP2016 Reached over 22M users on Twitter

#STEP2016 Reached over 22M users on Twitter

One of the most important conferences for start-ups in the MENA region took place this week: STEP 2016. The second edition of what it is very likely to become the hippest start-up gathering in the region had a combination of big players in the region (“the unicorns”) and very enthusiastic entrepreneurs that are looking to become the next big thing. The conference had also a very interesting line up of speakers from the region and beyond.

read more
The journey to successful content marketing in a highly cultural diverse setting: insights from Dubbizle in the UAE

The journey to successful content marketing in a highly cultural diverse setting: insights from Dubbizle in the UAE

A couple of weeks ago we had the pleasure to host Nadia Zehni, head of marketing at Dubbizle, the leading classified website in the UAE as part of the guest speakers invited to talk to our IMM students. Our Advances in Digital Marketing class had the opportunity to see how real organisations develop and implement their content marketing strategy, and to see that in fact the models that are taught in the lectures are implemented in marketing practice (you know all this set clear objectives, choose content types, measure results, etc.).

read more
Consumer engagement as a key performance metric in social media

Consumer engagement as a key performance metric in social media

The concept of consumer engagement is used in advertising and among marketing practitioners, ranking consumer engagement as one of the top priorities of online marketing activities. Among the reasons behind this interest are that consumer engagement is associated with consumer trust, satisfaction and loyalty and commitment, all of them strong indicators of long-term sales, word-of-mouth and brand advocacy.

read more
Share This