My Beer Blog is Getting More Views...

I fear my [just updated] beer blog is getting more views than my work story. So goes, for a busy professional, I fear.

While I may not like the absence in between my posts, it's not for lack of events.

Since the last time I wrote a blog post, nearly two years ago, I have continued to work on exciting projects.

My favorite is the Microsoft Imagine Cup. Not to neglect Exsilio Corporate Marketing - we've done a lot; we're going to our first ever tradeshow in July, we're doing bus advertising, we've got an ad on Alaska Airlines, and we've hired Jeff Brown, to head our marketing team in Redmond.

So - back to Imagine Cup. This project is fun because it's different, not typical Microsoft.

Imagine Cup is a worldwide technology competition for students - from Microsoft's Developer and Platform Evangelist (DPE) Group.

Imagine Cup doesn't make money for Microsoft - it does build relationships with tech students, winning them over to be long-term Microsoft product evangelists. Over 300 students, from 85 countries have participated in this past year's Imagine Cup. I was part of this project to lead the advertising and marketing plans.

I had a year of experience with the student audience under my belt, after working with the same group in 2009.

My advertising planning started with research in to student-frequented sites that were also reputable and wouldn't cause conflict with the Microsoft brand. I steered clear of any sites that served questionable content. Unfortunately - that accounted for many perfectly-targeted sites.

After clearing the list past the client, we set up a large media buy, in two parts. The first part included sites like Pandora, Grooveshark, Cliffsnotes, Sparknotes and Skype. We utilized testing for this first round to help inform the second round of buys.

After evaluating performance of this first round, we set ahead with the second half of the spend. The second half was without the lower performing sites, and included additional sites not on the first half.

In all, the media buy helped to drive the client's registration goals by 20%  Very happy with this.