Whatever i submit this Friday for my dissertation proposal will dictate what i spend the next 4 or 5 months working on. So it’s a tough decision… i don’t play chess, but it’s like a game of chess only with words…
Social Media
I’ve decided already i’ll be doing something around social media. More recently i’ve narrowed it down to CRM & social media. How businesses can use social media to interact with customers and increase loyalty, strengthen relationships, generate new leads etc… So in terms of a title, i believe i have one. I have about 100 other backup titles too.
What’s it all about?
When it comes to nailing down exactly what it is i’m going to focus on in a series of bullet points, this is where my mind is playing chess with itself. I’ll give you an example… i was going to say that i’ll create a social media strategy for a business. Alarm bells.
You idiot. What’s a ‘business’? How big is this ‘business’? What’s a strategy? Can any business use this strategy? And we’re back to square one…. so then i try to cover myself…. i’ll create a social media ‘best practices’ strategy for an irish SME.
Yes, that’s better, but still not good enough… again, i snooker myself with my choice of words. Can this be used in any irish SME? How do i define ‘best practices’… back to the drawing board. Right now, i’ve scrapped that entire idea because it’s what i’d call a hole digger – i could go round in circles all day not moving forward. It’s a seemingly impossible idea to rephrase my way out of.
Over-thinking
Now of course this is just me over analysing things but the way i think of it is that spending a few hours avoiding these problems now will save me a lot of time and energy next year when i actually have to carry this out. It’s amazing how clever you can be when wording things if you know each word can potentially snooker you. If you can’t see a way out of it, don’t play the shot… that would be my view. And that’s exactly what i’m doing here.
The only problem is, the clock is ticking and sooner or later things have to be set in stone, so i don’t want to rush things and hand in a hastily written document either. It’s a tricky one and i suppose this is what dissertations & thesis are all about – not necessarily being smart but being able to justify and defend every single word you publish. It’s a very different ball game to blog posts where the handbrake is off and i’ve a licence to say whatever i like even it doesn’t make any sense.