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7/9/09 Ninth Week

On Monday I had a half day deep dive into the capabilities of Microsoft’s new Operating System, Windows 7. I’d been using the programme since I started even though it wasn’t due out for quite some time. It was great to see how many new features were in this OS and what can be done with a bit of training, its a great improvement on Vista and unrecognisable from XP ( in a good way). I’d suggest to anyone to buy it. As a student you can get it for £30, that’s 90% off the retail price, just go to www.ultimatesteal.co.uk/student11

On Tuesday evening I had a team meal at Madonna’s favourite Italian restaurant in Mayfair. It was to welcome Paul, a new member of the team and myself, but also to celebrate the great year the team had had in the previous fiscal year. The restaurant was unbelievably swanky and 6 courses later I was full, but not bloated and rather impressed, as well as being pissed.

The rest of the week was taken up with preparations for 2 offsites, one was the Data Management Conference I was helping to organise for 600 people in London in a few weeks time. The other was an offsite that I had organised at a trendy cocktail lounge in Reading. I had been asked to organise an event where I could get all the stakeholders within the business in one room at the same time to discuss their plans for the upcoming financial year. Although stressful and not without disruption the event was a success and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves… especially those who decided to stay for the cocktail competition I had arranged for that evening.

14/9/09 Tenth Week

This week was a relatively quiet one, I spent the week just getting on with my projects namely, exploring how my team could exploit social media to a greater extent, helping to organise the Data Management conference and continuing the work I’d started on improving the connection between sales and marketing.

On the social media project I hooked up with two Microsoft’s foremost authorities on social media to discuss creating an ‘etiquette guide’ to online interaction for beginners. It’s a big topic across the company to start using social media more, but for it to be successful there are some simple guidelines that need to be followed. For many of the employees at MS Social Media is a bit of an intriguing mystery so the plan is to create a guide to help people make the most of this curiosity.

21/9/09 Eleventh Week

This week was pretty much devoted to the final preparations for the Data Management Conference (DMC) to be held next Tuesday. Odd jobs and final drafts (and final redrafts) were the order of the week. In addition to this I continued my exploration into social media and also helped Paul to create the shared marketing campaign calendar. This was to be a document hosted on an online share site called ‘Live Mesh’ (really handy). It would be the place for all the product managers to update the news about the campaigns they were rolling out to promote their product. For example the money they planned to spend on a series of telemarketing, the expected feedback from this and the return on investment. One thing I looked to implement was a graphical view, to allow easy visualisation of the financial year to see the past, current and future campaigns. This went down a treat and it’s now really easy for us to see the leads we need to be chasing up and when we need to begin preparations for an upcoming event.

Friday came around all too quickly again and my housemate who I get a lift off into work from was flying out to Milan to play for the Microsoft Football team (lucky bugger) hence why I started a bit later. I arrived to the office to find it the usual Friday Microsoft morgue (everyone’s ‘working’ from home). That was until I reached my department where David and Ian were rushing around to get ready for the conference call with all the speakers for the DMC. I joined this meeting after setting up and clarified what I’d arranged in terms of social and digital media for the event. I filled the rest of the day with sourcing gifts for all the speakers (laptop accessories, an Xbox and booze) and finalising how I was going to get all the collateral to the venue.

Catch my next blog to see how it goes!