Putting on the finishing touches

Whew!  What a week.  Anyone who thinks that working remotely or working from home means less work doesn't really know what goes on behind the scenes.  Our team has had a really productive week, even though we've been at the hotel most days.  Monday and Tuesday we had to work from the hotel because of the ongoing ash cleanup, but by Wednesday, things were more back to normal and we were able to go into the office.  We spent Thursday and Friday heads-down working on our final materials.

The Intro to Social Media & Strategic Marketing presentation that we intended to hold last Friday was rescheduled to Wednesday morning.  The Tourism Authority invited a bunch of other key stakeholders here in Yogyakarta who also focus on tourism, so we ended up with a great crowd in attendance.  Many of the audience members asked us questions and everyone seemed very engaged and interested in our messages.  We structured our presentation to introduce basic strategic marketing concepts, then gave an introduction to social media and ended with some real life examples of Yogyakarta's existing presence on tourism social media sites.  Thanks to everyone who filled out our traveler survey.  We'll be sharing the results of the survey with our client next week, but we gave our audience a sneak peek and used our survey as an example to show how quickly things travel on the internet and via social media.  They were amazed to learn that a survey originally disseminated by our small four-person team was completed by 50 people within a half hour of the link being sent, by 300 people within 12 hours and by 550 people within 24 hours.  It was very eye opening to them that we could gather so much information so quickly, just via use of a free online survey tool.

Here I am presenting the basics of Social Media

Our audience members were very engaged during our presentation

The rest of the week we spent putting the finishing touches on our final presentation, which is scheduled for this coming Monday at our client office.  Many of the tourism groups here in Yogyakarta have been invited to attend but we're never quite sure how many people are going to show up.  To work this week, we scouted out a little private corner in the hotel - but our location was compromised mid-week when a group of several hundred businessmen came to the hotel for a conference event and they also started finding ad-hoc work areas such as the one we had commandeered in the upstairs mezzanine.  We also noticed that the internet connectivity of the hotel plummeted while they were in town and there were days when we'd be trying to do internet research and would have only 1Mbps to 5Mbps connectivity.  They also filled up all of the elevators and smoked outside my room at 1am, so I am happy to have a quieter weekend in store now that the hotel has emptied out.

Today, our task was to finalize our presentation and also finalize an accompanying detailed document that we will be leaving with our client for future reference purposes.  Throughout the week we've been collecting various office supplies at local stores and bought a few binders and 20 CDs.  That was no small feat as each store carried at most 5 to 10 CDs at a time.  Our next challenge was to find somewhere to print a 40 page document and then copy it several times.  Our hotel has been very accommodating and did us a favor by printing it in the back office (granted it cost me $20 US, which is a huge amount of money here), but we had a lot of challenges with formatting and just explaining what we needed help with.  Such is part of the challenge of being here trying to make our way to our final product result.   It puts things in perspective how I take for granted my quick laser printer at home, reams of paper, staplers, and just general access to anything I'd need within a 15 minute car ride.  We eventually got everything printed today and will be spending some time later tonight and tomorrow burning CDs and putting together the materials in our binders for distribution on Monday.

This weekend we have a few sightseeing trips lined up.  Unfortunately the big temple of Prambanan is closed due to the ash clean-up, but we found some other great things nearby to see.  Tomorrow a few of us are going back to the town of Kota Gede (it was mostly closed earlier in the week when we went) and a small pottery and craft village called Kasongan.  On Sunday we have a bus trip planned to go see a local waterfall, then will be going cave tubing in the Pindul Caves and then to one of the beaches on the southern side of the island.  It's sad that this is our last weekend to explore here, but I'm starting to get excited for my vacation after the assignment as well!