Research internship at Sanoma Media

April 19, 2011   •   By Antonio Thonis   •   Comments 0

I’m extremely happy to announce that this week I will start my (research) internship  at Sanoma Media, the biggest multimedia publisher in The Netherlands. The coming months I will be working at the Online Strategy and M&A department where I also will be writing my master thesis on Alliance portfolio management and open service innovation.  An excellent opportunity to gain experience in the field of acquisitions in the most interesting online/ditigal industry. I’m very grateful for this opportunity and would like to thank those who made it possible! Now I’m off to prepare myself for the reality of a just almost graduated MBA student with Excel tutorials.

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Spss tutorial guide for students

March 25, 2011   •   By Antonio Thonis   •   Comments 1

This guide presents a full walk-trough tutorial from how to load your survey data into SPSS, to preparing the data, validity and reliability testing and finally theory testing with correlation and regression analysis. The guide is a collection of SPSS  instructions from the Research Seminar course at the VU university. Goodluck with your quantitative thesis or research!

How to get ThesisTools questionnaire data into SPSS

Thesistools is a free survey/questionnaire website that most of the Dutch students use to create their questionaires. Importing your Thesistools data into Spss can be done by following these steps.

1.       Go to the ThesisTools website > Modify Questionnaire. Login, click ‘Results’ and download the data as an Excel file.

2.       Open the Excel file (if you get a warning, just click ‘Yes’) . Delete the Page, Title and Legend rows.

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The five levels of delegation for managers

March 12, 2011   •   By Antonio Thonis   •   Comments 0

As we get closer to the end of the academic year many of the master students prepare for the next big step in their life. Meanwhile the recruitment frenzy has begun with companies searching for talents  and talent searching for the right companies and traineeship programs. With this next step in mind it would be a good idea to learn from the experience of other starters. One interesting story I came across was that of the five levels of delegation on Michael Hyatt’s blog. This is an important concept to understand when tasks are delegated to you by management or when you find yourself in a management position.

As a leader, whenever you delegate a task, you need to make it clear what level of authority you are conferring to others:

  • Level 1: Do exactly what I have asked you to do. Don’t deviate from myinstructions. I have already researched the options and determined what I want you to do.
  • Level 2: Research the topic and report back. We will discuss it, and then I will make the decision and tell you what I want you to do.
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Managing M&A experience and potential synergies pre-formation

January 31, 2011   •   By Antonio Thonis   •   Comments 0

For our MBA course on Alliances, Mergers and Networks we held 12 interviews (of which I did 2) with M&A managers, M&A consultants and founders of acquired firms. This resulted in 6 papers focused on the pre-formation process of acquisitions. My paper looks at the acquisition experience in the pre-formation process and combines theory with methods found during the interviews which experienced firms use to leverage their acquisition experience.  Acquisition experience in the pre-formation process is found to have a positive influence on potential synergy realization and is moderated by target similarity. Based on the 12 interviews a management matrix is developed that can be used to by managers to reap the benefits of acquisition experience.

I really enjoyed the process of the research as preparation for the final master thesis. The field of M&A presented to be a fascinating world! Enjoy the read or skip to the management matrix to find how you can best manage acquisition experience in the pre-formation given your level of current acquisition experience.

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Article in Avenir Magazine: Online networking for students

January 8, 2011   •   By Antonio Thonis   •   Comments 1

Last month I was approached by our economics and business administration study association Aureus to write an article on online networking and blogging for our monthly student magazine Avenir. The article is in Dutch only. It tells my story as a student on how I got my latest job offered trough Twitter and presents particle tips for students on personal branding, blogging and networking online.

avenir student magazine article

Netwerken en bloggen voor studenten: Er liggen veel kansen online.

Netwerken tijdens je studie wordt van oudsher gedaan door je aan te sluiten bij een studentenvereniging, studievereniging of een bestuursjaar te doen. Online kan er tegenwoordig ook veel gedaan worden. Een wondere wereld vol nieuwe kansen.

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Leveraging Social Media with mashups and website integration

October 12, 2010   •   By Antonio Thonis   •   Comments 2

Social media icons on the frontpage of a brand’s website are often an indication of the level of social media integration within the company. While this seems like a small step many brand haven’t even reached this point, where social media is an integrated part of their online strategy. The next step for these brands is to fully leverage social media by integrating it as part of their website.

Brands should start to use social mashups to leverage social media beyond just participating in conversations on external social networks. Integrating conversation mashups surrounding a brand on the website  can create trust like reviews do for products. Mashups can bring the conversation to the website and give fans a voice or stimulate them to participate in the conversation. Creative campaign types of mashups -that are useful for the customers- can also function to increase traffic.

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