January 2014

This is the time when you look back at what you have accomplished in the past year and you turn and look onwards at what’s coming in the next months.

2013, first: after almots 10 years teaching digital marketing to tourism and hospitality professionals, I set up a Diploma of “E-marketing and social media manager for tourism, hospitality and restaurants”, officially recognized in Switzerland by the leading association “hotelleriesuisse”. It’s been immediately a huge success, “sold out” weeks before the beginning. The full training leading to the Diploma has taken place two times in 2013. It’s been a big amount of work defining the objectives, skills to be developed, what kind of work to deliver for the exam, the evaluation criteria, …. But it was worth the effort, the quality of the training having been highly rated. And, above all, the participants were enthusiastic! I really enjoyed these experiences.

In parallel of that, I’ve been myself following a training program and have obtained a CAS (Certificate of Advanced Studies) of trainer for adults. I decided to continue and I am currently heading towards the “Brevet Fédéral de Formatrice d’Adultes”, basically a University level degree, in the professional field (not Academic), allowing you to have your own Training Institution, with quality labels, or more generally to be responsible of or to set up and engineer training programs.

The third domain I’ve been active in the past years, and still in 2013, is innovation, with the continuous development of Solo: Solo Mobile has become a service, fully cloud-based, it still is, and more than ever, a highly innovative service and I am proud to be member of the team and member of the board. In 2013, we launched solocloud.ch, from scratch: strategy, communication strategy, brand identity, web site, social media, sales collaterals, etc.. Before the creation and launching of solocloud, we spent a lot of time imagining the Business Model, with the precious help of the Business Model Generation method (I am proud to have the first generation book, with a beautiful paperback.. I love that book!).

And since things tend to follow naturally, I got a very nice and stimulating mandate: to help set up and teach at a CAS part of an Executive MBA in Tourism Innovation (mandate of Prof. Schegg). The CAS is about Etourism – TIC-Driven Innovations. The official EMBA program is HERE. It hence perfectly rounds up my main activities of the past year: Innovation, Etourism, Marketing, Adults Training.

Other projects for 2014, besides obtaining the “Brevet” include developing new training programs in digital marketing and some consulting mandates.

As you may know, I am a believer of the #genflux mindset, so I also share here bits of personal projects:

On a more private level, 2014 will see a trip to Boston (Feb) (mixing professional visits to private ones), starting with some running trails, like this one: Trail de la Vallee de Joux, and some cycling tours.