2 Mar to 8th Mar

After the quiet of last week, this week was a little more exciting.

Reading

• Reinventing sustainability: Why brand talk about responsibility is cheap. I’m working on some sustainability projects at work and slowly adding to my reading. This reflects research that we have done, in that you need to act and do it in a way that means something, not just add a few green things to your activity. It needs to be at the heart of the business and Marks and Spencer Plan A and Unilever Sutainablr are great examples. (I love that if you search for Marks and Sparks you get the right webpages 🙂 )
• Blogs outrank social media for influence. A little stating the obvious but too easy to forget for many when it’s all about Facebook and Twitter. Blogs stay out there and don’t disappear into the mists of the timeline, so good for getting information out there that can be searched for!
• F1 Take 1 A lovely piece about the first F1 race in Austin. Having gone, i recognise many of the things being talked about, including the recognition that most fans are not international jetsetters spending loads of money, which seemed to be a theme of much of the local press before hand
• 9 reasons you should use Brand Advocates (Social Media Examiner), 12 ways to build brand advocates (12 Most), The Power of Brand Advocates (LBi). Yes, being doing research on brand advocacy and pulling together a little more research and positioning

Doing

• Went shopping! Yes, not that much of a strange activity for most, but for me to volunteer to go shopping with friends is very, very unusual. It was all to do with getting out and trying on some new sized clothes, as I appear to have lost about 2 dress sizes so far this year. (well, at least in some stores). Bought one top, but had a great time trying things on, then drinking fizzy stuff, which is the only sensible way to finish off a shopping trip
• Work dinner at BAFTA, A chance for the senior team to get together and let our hair down a little, even if it was a Monday night. A lovely full service dinner was pulled together plus a few drinks. A few of us even ended up in the Ritz, some place I’ve always wanted to have a cocktail in, even given the slightly large price! I was sensible and went home relatively early, others were not so and ended up not very well the next day!

  

The rest of the week was the usual round of work, a bit of gym, and that’s about it! I was saving myself up for the next few buys weeks I think.

Sat 23rd Feb – Fri 1 Mar

You’d think i could do this, wouldn’t you. One post a week, that’s all I need. But no, I end up doing other things over the weekend and then at work time and the one post gets left behind until major catch up sessions like this one! So what did I do way back at the end of Feb?

Reading

Not a lot. I have no saved links for this period, so it must have been quiet!

Doing

• The weekend was spent washing, tidying and sorting things out after a week away. And sorting out all my photos to organise the F1 ones into teams. One of those non-exciting housework weekends.
• The rest of the week was fairly quiet too. Well, except for being a person down in the team,, so we were covering that work. And I was finalising a slight re-organisation of the team. And I was reviewing the interview results from the previous week, where the first round interviews for my replacement person had been taking place. We decided who to invite back and set them a brief to respond to, concious that by doing so, we probably compromised their next weekend!
• On the Friday, I went along to ‘An Evening with Joe Saward‘ who’s an F1 journalist. It was set up as a Q&A session where the audience just threw out questions and Joe answered and told stories based on his long experience with the sport. It was interesting how different the crowd was to the other regular F1 event I go to (#badgerbash, more on this later in the year) with the audience being primarily mature men with very few women. I think that’s a result of who the journalist is.

Well, that was a quiet week (outside of work!).