Corporate Marketing From the Ground Up

After just over a year on the Student Audience Marketing team at Microsoft, I came to the conclusion that I had gained a great deal of knowledge about the inner-workings of Microsoft, but had no real desire to stay there long-term.

This lead to my decision to pitch the executive team at Exsilio Solutions on the idea of me running corporate marketing and PR. This position did not exist, but I knew exactly what needed to get done, and how to do it.

I started by putting together a deck on all of the elements that needed to be in place for Exsilio to successfully build their brand and market themselves as a full-service technology solutions provider. I presented my plan, which included high level strategy as well as a tactics, and I was awarded the job.

This is really an amazing opportunity, as Exsilio has needed this for over a year now, to the point of it being a thorn in our sides. I have the chance to build Exsilio's brand and help win new business, by implementing a basic marketing and PR plan, and doing so completely from the ground up, with no existing framework or guidelines.

We're about a month into it now, and I've led the executive team through marketing and brand planning exercises, where we've determined mission statement, pillars and goals, target audiences, value propositions, tactical elements, and more. I'm having a great time and I can't wait for what's next.

Microsoft Student Audience Marketing

Over the past 9 months, I've had the pleasure of working under Amy Strande, director of the Student Audience Marketing group at Microsoft.

In this role, I manage four of our main digital properties and two associated campaigns. Our goals are to create awareness around our digital properties (drive traffic) as a resource for students to learn, work and play. In this role, I manage content additions (project management) by working with various development vendors, as well as strategy for how each channel should operate, and the connections between each channel. I also manage the content and sending for the monthly student newsletter (80,000 subscribers ww). Through leading the newsletter, I've also been fully trained to use ExactTarget.

I've written a whitepaper on how best our team could leverage social media (it was also meant to be an informational/educational resource for Amy). I've written a plan on how to utilize our Student Lounge--the only social networking site from Microsoft just for students, and grown Twitter to over 1,000 followers in 7 months. Here's how I introduced my plan for Twitter.

We're hitting our traffic goals on all digital channels, and we're excited to see what next year holds.

Our channels:
Microsoft Student Experience site
Microsoft Student Lounge
ms_student on Twitter
Student Experience on Facebook
Student Experience on mobile