Post # 6

Hours: 9.00-17.00 Thursday (8hrs, 56hrs total)

My mentor didn't come in to the office today, so it's a one day week I'm afraid. Thursday saw the creation of a new marketing tool for trade shows: chotskies, in the form of 1GB USB thumb drives, loaded up with a bunch of marketing material including an analyst video from Gartner. I had to figure out how to get a hyperlink into the video, which was not easy. I ended up calling on the Flash skills I got at MSAT to come up with a solution. That was the creative part. Then there was the not so creative aspect of copying the content onto 100 USB drives. With the aid of a Def Leppard album and a cup of coffee, I finished in just over an hour.

Post # 5

Hours: 9.00-17.00 Thursday & Friday (16hrs, 48hrs total)

The Cloud Services press release went out early this week, and what d'ya know, I was quoted in itexaminer! Technically Barry Shurtz, Director of Marketing was quoted, but I wrote it! As another marketing team person told me: for a writer, it's publish or perish. 

I started a new project: reworking some of that big old 15-page white paper into a series of blog posts. It is amazingly difficult to translate something an engineer has written into comfortable, readable English; it's worse than legalese. The engineers themselves are nice guys, but there is an underlying mutual distain for marketing and sales that has apparently existed since the beginning of time (see Dilbert). It's all good and professional though.

Much of the middle part of today was taken up with the monthly lunch with the extended marketing group at Skates on the Bay in Berkely (the fish and chips are really good). The company paid for it, but there wasn't much business discussed. I suppose it's important to have events like this to keep up the moral and team spirit of the group.

Post # 4

Hours: 9.00-17.00 Thursday & Friday (16 hrs, 32hrs total)

This Thursday, I did a bunch of work on the press release for Sendamail Sentrion Cloud Services. Basically, it's a service that allows some of the computing to be done off-site, which cuts down on costs for the customer. I continued doing the scan of the Fortune 500, and I started writing the report. I'm learning to appreciate the need for high-level data when presenting to high-level executives. It's been good doing an in-depth analysis of the F500, I've learned a lot about the companies (I had no idea Boeing moved its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago). 

I've begun to sit in on the weekly "product meeting", in which issues about Sendmail's products are discussed. Today, it was announced that we lost an important customer in the UK. Not so good. Another UK company wants to continue to use Sendmail's software-only product, even though it is being phased out. They're a big customer though, so we'll accommodate them.

Friday saw continued editing work on the Cloud Services press release, and rewrting of a big old 15-page white paper. I also did a somewhat menial job: moving a bunch of files from the "old system" to the "new system". It was a bit boring, but I got the chance to see a change in progress and learn more about the ways Sendmail communicates with customers and "leads"(prospective customers).