Job hunting...

This process of job hunting in academia is interesting. Each day, my husband and I search the Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as our individual career sites. The big site for marketing is the AMA site, and the big site for PR is AEJMC. His area is management, so he searches the Academy of Management site for job postings in his field.

Since we want to live together as a family, we are concentrating on schools in the same city or schools that have openings for both of us.

Even with many faculty retiring, this is not an easy thing to do.

Curves Managers Can Create Buzz

As I did my rounds at Curves this morning (it is my new morning class), I huffed and puffed listening to the talk of the morning--movies. When one of the ladies asked our manager, Tracy, if she had seen Superman, she said "no" and the conversation waned. It was then I realized that movie marketing execs should be giving Tracy free movie passes to see everything as soon as it comes out. Tracy (a superb manager), loves to talk to every single person at Curves. She knows all of our names and she even knows something about each one of us.

Just think if Tracy had seen every new release and could talk it up to the rest of the ladies at Curves--this is not "sweatin' to the oldies", this is "sweatin' to the movie reviews." What a gold mine to create buzz.

Progress...

My goal for the summer was to write 25 pages toward my dissertation. But, today I've written 31 pages of proposal and another 33 of IRB-related appendices. Not bad for a summer split between the pursuit of knowledge and fun (with my children).

I'm still not done enough to turn it into my advisor, but it feels good to stop every now and then and to feel like I'm making true progress.

Why not stay an adjunct forever?

In these past two years, I've often met people who wonder why I would give up the adjunct life to go back to school to get a PhD. It means taking classes, studying, writing papers...essentially no life. I guess next time someone asks, I'll have to pull out this cartoon I just discovered on Inside Higher Ed by Matthew Hall. This one says it all.

Corporate blogs to build buzz...

Sometimes in academia, we write things, convinced our research rings true, yet wondering if the rest of the world will agree.

The paper I presented at the Academy of Marketing Science was about how companies should embrace blogging in order to build buzz from the inside in order to connect with customers. It was based on a presentation and paper I developed in my online communities class taught by Paul Jones.

An article in MediaPost agrees with me! This article cites a Jupiter research study that finds that in the coming year, almost 70% of companies surveyed will start blogging. Not all of them know how to use blogs to generate word-of-mouth, but at least it's a start.

Love notes at the meat market...

The job market is starting to swing into gear. For academics, it means we look for jobs now for the Fall of 2007. It seems early to start looking, but we're already getting our curriculum vitaes ready to go.

My husband and I are both going to our annual conferences where there will be many interviews for jobs. Some call it the "meat market", where you get your 15 minutes with each university to tell them how wonderful you are, yet some also describe my meeting as one where you'll get lots of "love notes" from prospective universities asking to set up an interview.

Those two terms don't seem to go together--am I entering a meat market or will there be love notes? Maybe it's a bit of both--I'll know more in August.