Welcome Kim!
A few months ago a good friend of mine who is also a resident of SL and my current SL partner told me that SL could only improve if it were bought by Blizzard. It hasn't happened yet but if you were hired, he should be glad his prediction was indirectly correct.
I know that marketing has little to do with technical support, generally, and my business experience tells me that the two departments actually tend to clash when it comes to times of release to market, but I frankly still wonder why LL is reducing expenditure on development and technical support, axing Community Gateways, merging the Teen Grid with the Mature grid and hiring a VP of Marketing instead of a VP of Research and Development.
Or rather, perhaps I know why this is happening, and this is even sadder: so far, LL has made an awful lot of bad, bad, bad marketing decisions AND did not improve the product at all. Someone must have decided it is time to straighten all this mess up, but it might be a tad too late for a product that has lost a lot of its original allure.
You have a big challenge ahead of you: convincing us and the rest of the world you are marketing an excellent product. The current reality is: it is not an excellent product, it is beta software, it has been since 2003 (and seven years of beta testing are out of the question for most companies that want to remain in the software business) and we had to live with it in the delusion it would improve somewhat, a delusion that has been ingrained in LL's staff from top management down until Philip Rosedale snapped LL out of this delusion. It is ironic that he is the same man who created this delusion back in 1999-2001.
More than luck, you need a lot of balls, pardon my offcolor language. I know a few women in the business who are really tough for the job, I do sincerely hope you will knock us all out.
Sandor