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Myself and other members of the Microsoft Advertising Community team will be in Cannes in a couple of weeks for the International Advertising Festival which we’re sponsoring.

Do check out our Cannes Lions 2009 community site which includes blogs, photos, videos and Twitter feeds – as we ramp towards the event we’ll be adding more content and will be streaming Steve Ballmer live from our business forum during the week!

As Steve picks up Media Person of the Year we’d like to ask him some questions from our Twitter audience so follow @MSAdvertising and fire off some things you’d like to hear!

I got sent this cheeky photo and just had to Tweet it – http://twitpic.com/6jm02

[giggles]

A snapshot of Walt Mossberg’s interview with Steve Ballmer at All Things Digital – Yusuf Mehdi does the demos which draw gasps and cheers from the crowd.

Take note from Steve on how exactly to say BING!

Any online marketer should be using Twitter to data mine for what’s being said about their brand, product, service or even their competition.

It’s a given!

Twitter Search is great for finding out what’s being said out there and they’ve now integrated the functionality into the tool to make it easier to search and check out trending topics.

Now however, the guys from Mix Online have come up with the Archivist which is a very cool tool for mining for Tweets, saving them and exporting them to Microsoft Excel for reporting purposes!

They point out that Twitter will not keep these nuggets of insight for ever, so it’s crucial you save them somewhere.

As an example – Microsoft adCenter upgraded over the weekend, so I did a search on that found 328 tweets for that keyword.

There are a couple of “views” – the actual Tweets and avatars like above, or a trend line like below where you can see the spike in activity because of the new release.

A simple click of “Export To Excel” and you have a .TXT file you can open in Excel and play around with till your heart’s content!

Nice huh!?

Check out the documentation and download it here!

Now live at: http://entertainment.uk.msn.com/tv/realitytv/big-brother/

Check out videos, photo galleries, news and blogs!

The Summer starts now! 🙂

I get the funniest emails through from my blog:

Hello ,
Am XXXXXXXXX and would like to make an Order of Hand Dryers from you and would like to know the types and sizes you have as well as the prices and the types of payment method that you accept.Thank you and Waiting to hear from you very soon,
Regards
XXXXX

How do you respond to that!?

Was just pinged about this by Gavin from TSW!

Nice little viral with frighteningly good impersonations of Ricky Gervais and others from The Office!

Check out all of them here: http://www.k3scs.com/the-factory/

Nice idea from the Office 2010 guys!

http://www.office2010themovie.com

33 seconds of fun which give a hint as to what’s to come in the new program.

To be honest I can’t imagine “No Return” “No Undo” and “No Control. Alt. Delete.” So goodness knows what they got in store.

They’re on Facebook and Twitter too…

Just been given the heads up on a new tool to make it easy to add a map and directions to a meeting request in Outlook 2007!

The guys at Multimap have built a mapping Add-In to Outlook which, with a few clicks, embeds a map into a calendar meetings, contacts and emails which saves time adding links and generates an “easy to access“ map you can view or print plus find directions and transport links.

• Download the add-in and it’ll add a button to your Outlook program.

• When you want to add a map just – you guessed it (!) – click on “Add Map” and a little box pops up.
• Jot down the address or postcode and click GO.
• Then – you guessed right again (!) – click “Add Map to Meeting” and that’s it!

It also let’s you click on the Bird’s Eye view – my favourite feature so you can see exactly where I work! 

If you have Office 2007 check it out and let us know what you think!

Oh….and before you ask it works in the US too! 🙂

I’ve just designed a site for the Budleigh Salterton Art Club in Devon!

Me….a web designer?! Who’d have thought?!

I used Office Live to do it and it took about an hour to set up and launch!

You get to register a domain for free for the first year and you get free web hosting, free design tools and templates to create and edit your site and, to cap it all off, you get free support by phone and email – not that I needed it because it was so easy to set up the site!

You can pretty much add in anything you want at a click of a button:

Seeing as it’s an art club I added a photo gallery but you can have a multitude of modules including contact forms, event calendars, stock lists and even a quick fire map & direction section!

The navigation look and feel is very much like Microsoft Office, as you’d expect being called Office Live! But my point is it’s so easy for the web novice to find their way around and get a new half-way decent website up and receiving traffic in just a couple of hours.

Check out the 3 Step Guide on how to get started and see how other companies have got on with the system at their customer gallery!

It may not be as super-pretty as something a professional designer could whack out, but in these cash-strapped times there is a bunch of retired budding Van Gogh’s in deepest, darkest Devon who are very happy with the result!