It has been suggested I write more about my day. As the Marketing Services Manager for a mountain/ski area/attraction (sometimes I hate putting a title to it – it seems so limiting), I know many people are curious about how I spend my time. The truth is, it depends on the day and it depends on the season.

In reality, though, it’s not all resort marketing I guess; I do marketing for Grouse Mountain, but also for Whistler Water and Polaris Water ever since the owners purchased them in 2004.

Mondays I work at Whistler Water, so I’m not actually at the mountain today. It doesn’t much matter, though, because I could really work from anywhere and get the same stuff done – ah the beauty of the interwebs! Well, except that I’m most efficient while connected to the Grouse Mountain network for my email, files and FTP setup etc. I work on Grouse Mountain stuff from Whistler Water and Whistler Water stuff from Grouse Mountain; I also work on both from home when required.

Spring is a time of planning for me, so in amidst the regular marketing execution stuff are some larger projects, proposals, reports etc. to prepare for the year ahead, starting with the summer season. To make things more interesting, my colleague – the Marketing Specialist I work VERY closely with – is on a well-deserved vacation for over 3 weeks (two more to go) and I am doing a little more of the stuff she usually does while she’s gone: website edits, graphic layouts for ads and collateral materials, fulfilling logo and photo requests etc. so this is just today… tomorrow will be entirely different.

So here’s how today went down:

Work started around 8:30. I checked my email. I start with Twitter follow-backs because each adds an email to my inbox. As soon as they’re taken care of I can get the emails out of my inbox so I can see the actionable items facing me that day. I then check my Facebook fan pages for new wall posts or messages for Grouse Mountain, Grouse Mountain Terrain Parks and the Grouse Grind. Found the cutest posting from a guy who obviously developed a little crush on someone last time he came to the mountain. I love those kinds of messages I’ve seen so many proposal stories, wedding stories, relationships starting, first dates… my second date with my husband was on the Grouse Grind, incidentally.

After deleting the new Twitter follows I’m down to 11 emails in my inbox. I’m a little neurotic about filing emails.

I find an email from Google letting me know I need to renew my site search so I process the renewal but the credit card doesn’t go through… I re-process on another card. Now I’m hoping it doesn’t go through twice in the end. I file the emails for when Accounts payable wants to know what I bought before paying my credit card bill and then send an email to AP as a pre-emptive measure anyway.

I find an email that was sent to me Thursday evening asking for an ad to be prepared and submitted by first thing Monday morning; originally when I read it (from home on Good Friday) I read that it needed to be done ON Monday morning, not BY Monday morning… such a small but important detail. So I prepared the ad in InDesign (I use CS3) and submit it by about 10am.

I then checked my voicemail and realized there was something I should have called back about on Thursday. Oops. I have no idea how I could have missed a voicemail or left the office with one still on my phone, but such is life. Honestly, the phone is my least favourite communication tool; sometimes forget it exists. I like email; and I respond faster that way. I also get a running record of everything I’ve discussed, assigned or agreed to.

Next on the day’s agenda was updating the new Whistler Water community site with info about the Adopt An Athlete program and have the navigation updated throughout Whistler Water’s corporate website to take visitors to the new site.

I then make a quick update to the Grouse Mountain website with a message about the main Red Skyride maintenance beginning tomorrow.

While I’m doing web edits, I remember the next item on my outstanding to-do list: rebuilding a web page I built last Monday for the Polaris Water site. It is a little improvement to the private label water pages. I managed to lose almost 2 hours of work without saving… this time I CTRL+S’d in Dreamweaver a few times during the process. As an aside, if anyone is interested in ordering their own private label water, just let me know…

Sidetracked: Discussion with co-workers about Jian Ghomeshi’s interview with Billy Bob.

Finally I finished the Polaris Water website updates and moved all the updated files to the live site, then ate lunch at my desk while working. Lunch was way too small. Booked a yoga class online for tonight.

Had another conversation with my colleagues about art and music – one of my colleagues is a fairly well established singer/songwriter.

Stopped to check twitter and found the latest post from VanCityAllie on her surfing trip to Tofino for the Easter weekend – couldn’t help but indulge in a little read…

That was followed up by a long conversation with my colleagues about the differences in promotional needs for selling bottled water vs. selling a resort lifestyle experience. Definitely deep and definitely interesting, but not fodder for my blog.

It’s now coming up on 3pm.

After getting side tracked checking Twitter and Facebook and then checking the GrousePark admin for new posts and stats while I was in there, and then reading How to Make Money with SEO from Seth Godin, I am now working on an e-commerce requirements report. I would like to get it finished and sent out for estimating soon. I’ve finished most of how I want the e-commerce stuff to work, but I’m working on writing out the CRM elements I’d like to include.

Now it’s 3:10pm and while the E-Commerce report is begging to be worked on, I think I’ll go get a cup of tea before I start… Can you tell I’m stalling? Why is that?

Oh yeah, and I returned a call to someone from a large resort not to far from here who will be involved in a major world-scale winter event in the not too distant future in our general locale, who wanted to look at cross-promotional ideas. Now my brain is pondering hiking and wind turbines and all sorts of upcoming stuff rather than e-commerce and CRM. But I digress…

Before I start adding to my report, I read through a bunch of info on CRM Trends to make sure what I want is actually what I want. And, woah, now it’s 4:30. Lots of good info there interspersed with some comical conversation with my boss about ears on posts, mobile payment solutions and bathing cats (thanks to Jess Sloss for the cats link).

I almost don’t have any time left to actually finish writing the CRM portion of my report, but I sure do have more things to think about and include.

Tomorrow will be an entirely different day. Here’s the agenda:

• Morning meeting about Tourism Vancouver’s new online advertising
• Vancouver Restaurant Awards in the afternoon
• Conclusion of staff day on the mountain after the restaurant awards
• Try and finish my e-commerce/CRM report
• Work on my social media report (that’s a whole new blog entry on its own)
• Process a bunch of outstanding invoices before my accounting department freaks out

I’m not sure if it’s interesting or not. I do know, though, that the variety of different areas my job touches on keeps me excited. There’s a great variety between quick and easy check-them-off-my-list types of tasks and bigger projects that require a lot of deep thought. It also allows me to use my love of communicating with people as well as my technology-prone curiosities to solve probems… I consider creative problem solving one of my biggest strengths to be honest.

So there you have it. Hope it was interesting to you.

I’d love to see some track backs to a day in the life at your job…