Hello friends! After the Blog Every Day in May challenge, I feel like I’ve taken a long blogging hiatus, even if it’s only been a couple days! We’re still recovering from a whirlwind trip through Barcelona and Paris – and our first day of moving out of our New York house. We got back to the house late on Monday and almost immediately had to unpack, do laundry, and repack all the things we don’t want the movers to take – so to say things are busy around here is an understatement!
I’m still very excited about the responses we’ve been getting from our presentation at the Reputation Institute’s conference in Barcelona! In a typically practitioner-heavy conference, we were one of only a few academic papers accepted, but we still garnered a large and interested audience who gave us some great feedback on our work.
The project focused on creating a system dynamics causal loop model to explain the influence relationships between spokesperson actions and reputation and corporate actions and reputation, something that has been prominent in the news lately {two words for you: Lance Armstrong}. For system dynamics, it wasn’t a particularly mathematically rigorous model, but it was a brand new application both for systems engineering and for media and marketing, which is exciting! If you’re interested in what we presented, I’ve shared the slideshow here:
I really enjoyed getting a chance to present professionally with family and friends – my sister and often collaborator Karen, Sabrina and Monica who have been longtime friends and were among my bridesmaids, and my friend and colleague from West Point, Christy – and I love that we also share enough work interests to work together!
Even though I’m not in the field of reputation and communication, I’ve absolutely loved being able to attend the Reputation Institute’s conference. I attended my first one in Beijing in 2008 to watch Karen present and was hooked. Since then, I’ve been able to attend and present at the 2010 conference in Rio and while I couldn’t attend Milan in 2012, Karen presented our work on using value models to construct and identify the best crisis messages on social media. For Karen, and for you communications professionals out there, it’s a must-go conference. It’s her sixth one! Hopefully we can add number seven to her presentation list and number four to mine next year in Miami!
