At my internship, I’m part of the team that is responsible for the launch of a brand new internal marketing tool. It’s a database that stores all our Reference Customers along with a list of their referenceable products. At the moment, whenever a sales person needs to find a reference customer to close a deal, he blasts an e-mail to all of Sales Global (which for some reason includes me in the Customer Marketing department I guess) with a one-liner question. With our new database, sales people can just type in keywords and will have the information right in front of them. For an industry-leading company, I’m surprised it took them this long to start this kind of program.
As usual, I’m going off topic.
The internal launch for the marketing department is less than a month away and our biggest problem is making the launch for a not-so-exciting tool exciting. The Consultant, Kelly, brought up that companies like Cisco are starting to use Second Life as an internal tool, but that was all she knew about it. Her and my supervisor, Betsy, (both way over 40) turned to me with expecting eyes and I blushed as I had to remind them once again that my technology knowledge was limited (sometimes I can’t believe I actually got this internship in the first place). They shrugged and were happy enough to give the research to me as a project.
So here I am, reading up on the “virtual reality” craze that has companies like IBM, Cisco, and Oracle jumping on the bandwagon and I’m getting pretty juiced. Even though we were only planning for the launch, I started to think about how it could benefit the company as a whole. Using a virtual world is like putting IM, LiveMeeting, and phone conferencing all under one screen and something that would definitely be used to its advantage here. My daydreaming thoughts began to wander as I envisioned myself presenting this to my supervisor’s boss and him falling in love with the idea thus offering me a permanent position even without a degree. Hey, a girl can dream, right?
Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten as far as even setting foot into the “in world” due to technical problems that I can’t seem to understand for the life of me. I don’t get it; I’m registered and logged in, but after uninstalling and reinstalling the Second Life software three times, it still says that they haven’t recieved my “login packet.” At every failed login attempt, my fantasy of instant permanent employment was diminishing.
I’ve got two days before my next meeting with Kelly and Betsy. Hope I can find something else more promising by then.
