← The Digital Marketing Podcast
The Digital Marketing Podcast
Top Collaboration Tools
00:27:19
Are you struggling to stay on top of your email inbox? Is everyone else in your company in the same boat? Maybe it's time you reviewed the collaborative communication tools you provide your teams. Target Internet is a distributed company, so we...
Loading summary
Transcript57 lines
- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.
- [00:18]
B
And I'm Daniel Rolls.
- [00:19]
A
And today, Daniel, we're going to be talking about our top collaboration tools.
- [00:23]
B
We are. So, as you may or may not be aware, top target Internet is what we describe now as a distributed company, which sounds marvelous. It basically means we don't have a central office and there's been a real shift change of this. So the idea is that everyone kind of works from home or from another kind of working space they find useful. And then we collaborate through online tools and we do that a number of different ways and then we do get together face to face and actually that's a really important thing to do still. But it makes life a bit more flexible. It means that physical location isn't such a problem for us. Now. What's really interesting to me is, is that a lot of the big clients we work with, if I'd walked into them five years ago and said, yeah, we don't have an office, where's your office based? No, no, we don't have one at all. You don't have an office? No. Right. And that would be the end of the conversation. It would have just been a bit like you're not even big enough to have an office. We're just not gonna work with you now that, oh, you're distributed. That's amazing. What a cool thing. So a lot of it has kind of changed in people's perceptions, but actually not having people in the same space has its own challenges as well. So what we found is there are a number of different tools and techniques that you can use and we're small enough that we can adjust it by the individual in the organization. So, for example, if you want to contact me and engage with me, if you send me an email, that's great. But it might take me a day or three to get through to that email. Just because the flow of email is such. If you SMS me, I will reply straight away. But actually if you direct message me in Facebook Messenger, I am shocking at replying to them because I just don't want to it. And if that possibly the worst possible way to message me is a LinkedIn message just because I don't check it that regularly at all. And actually things kind of get lost in it. So we know for different individuals in the organization. So Susanna, our commercial director, she'll have Skype open all day and if you Skype message, she'll respond to that when it suits kind of her. So it's not an immediate thing, but you'll get back. Whereas actually I don't have Skype on most of the time. So we can adjust it. We all know each other well enough, we know what channels and we learn and we kind of adjust accordingly. For bigger organizations, you need to set boundaries and rules to these things. We expect you to use these channels in these ways. I think this is also a reaction to email being a bit overwhelming. And the data we looked at a while back and said that for every email that you send, you get 1.7 emails back, which means it's a never. It's a battle you can't win. And actually the more active you are, the worse it gets. So it's trying to minimize the amount of stuff that you do by email and finding other ways of doing it without being overwhelming.
- [02:50]
A
And if you've ever been in that position where you've actually literally spent an entire day just trying to deal with your email inbox to get it back.
- [03:00]
B
To, that's all the time for me.
- [03:02]
A
It's not a productive way to spend your time. It's certainly not particularly proactive. And what I always found is the bigger the organization I'm working with, generally speaking, the worse it gets because there's so much BCC and CCing going on with the messages and copying people in to make sure everybody's aware of everything and a little bit of in some cases people just wanting to make sure that their things top of the pile. And I think certainly in my experience having some agreements on just some protocols. So when should you actually copy some someone in or when should you message them directly? Who should you be copying in on? These messages can really, really help to cut down the noise within that channel. But there are much more efficient ways and much more efficient tools for communicating. Everything doesn't have to be done within email. And that's really where today's episode comes in.
- [03:58]
B
It does. I just want to ask one question of the audience as well, which I think is quite funny. I have noticed a trend of some people who and only a small percentage just not responding to emails anymore. You send them emails might get response, but they just generally don't bother responding. And then you send them another chase and they might respond to the chase or you have to phone them. And I'm thinking this might be a good idea. I'm kind of thinking that the only problem is it relies on other people's efficiency to chase you up in the first place. But I know there are certain people that send me an email and I'm like, I'll get around to that next week. And then they send me a chase and I tend to react a bit more quickly as well. So that builds a culture of me saying, well, I don't need to respond to stuff. And they're there chasing it. So it's good and it's bad. There's the classic Tim Ferriss thing where he just didn't respond to any emails and then worked out what happened, what are the consequences of not responding to anything. And I think he missed one small deal. And there was one problem that got dealt with urgently cause they picked up the phone. So it's not suggesting you stop replying to your emails, but more just thinking about are there better ways of working and actually how much time are we just wasting on this kind of admin of email? So let's get into these collaboration tools before I go on and on about how much I dislike email.
- [05:02]
A
Yeah. Although it is one of our pet subjects. So, you know, if you want to take this offline or just phone us up and have a chat about it, we're there.
- [05:09]
B
But don't send us an email and.
- [05:11]
A
Certainly don't LinkedIn message us about it. Right, so let's talk about shared planning and task management systems because, geez, I've used a lot of these in the past now. I think I found my new love in this area. So let's start with that. My new love in this area is Asana.
- [05:30]
B
Okay. I'm interested in this because I had a play with Asana and I didn't get on with it immediately as well. So just tell me what you. So if you're not aware, Asana is one of the several task management tools out there. You have different lists, you can assign people to these kind of lists and they have sets of tasks they're working on. They kind of collaborate on those tasks and can mark them as complete and so on as well.
- [05:48]
A
I think what I love about it is it's beautifully uncomplicated. It's one of the simplest systems that I've used and gosh, I've used probably half a dozen different systems in this space. There are lots. Yeah, we're going to mention Trello as well in a second. But yeah, with Asana, it's just ridiculously simple. I also quite like the fact that you don't have to sign up and sign your life away to get started on it. It's got a really great freemium Product, which I think is particularly good for kind of getting you into it. It's got all the features you would want, so you can email tasks to yourself if you want to. And there's an app on all the different devices, so you can access it via your phone. But it's just simplicity itself, really and it's got great granularity. So if you want to create subtasks and share those and kind of stage things, you can even import a set bunch of tasks from a spreadsheet just using a browser plugin, which is really, really great if you're planning up a, you know, a whole series of things and lots of different people are involved. And then what I also particularly love about it is the calendar integration is really, really good. So you get a really nice visual view of all of your activity. You can organize everything into, you know, different, different projects, which you'd expect. And you've also got a, like a cards view, which is much more like Trello, where you can literally see a gigantic planning board and arrange things into columns. So as well as being simple, they've got lots of flexibility for different types of tasks and how you might want to do them. So it's definitely for a planning process. I've always found Trello particularly good for that because it's very visual. If you've listened to previous episodes, you know, I'm a big fan of Post IT notes and bits of paper. And actually for me, for a long time Trello was my go to digital space where I was able to do that collaboratively online. But the fact that I can now do that within Asana as well, I just. Yeah, I love it.
- [07:43]
B
I should just add to that this Post it notice session has been proven completely correct about two weeks ago. So, as you know, if you listen to previous episodes, Kieran has now joined the team. He's our marketing director. We were doing a content calendar planning and I got an Excel spreadsheet out and Kieran kind of gave me a sideways look and we went down, got to a massive table and got Post IT notes and bits of paper on a calendar and actually there would have been no way of doing what we were doing in any other way. I don't think that would have been quite as efficient in that you could take things up, move them around really easy. Now there are equivalents that you can do digitally, but there is just something about the ability to jiggle things around very easily collaboratively looking something that did make a big difference.
- [08:22]
A
Yeah, it's the ability to see everything in One space. And literally, if you want to have a go at doing this, maybe we could certainly put up the templates and stuff that we use. Hey, we'll do that. We'll share those. It's a tool that I've developed over the last six or seven years or so, but I'd be delighted to get your feedback on it and what you think. But basically every single idea or concept has its own post it note. The other nice thing is that when you're brainstorming this through, anybody can write a post it. So it's not down to the person that's holding the pen and holding the meeting. Ideas flow really quickly so you can get them down onto post its and then you rearrange them so that you start daisy chaining different ideas and making sure the order is in the right place. It's just a really flexible and fluid way of getting stuff knotted out.
- [09:12]
B
I think we should move on. I just realised as well, because people have got digital marketing podcasts. Brilliant. Tell me about digital collaboration techniques. And we've got bits of paper.
- [09:19]
A
But you know what, I would argue this is a digital collaboration technique because what happens is once you've got it into some kind of order and shape, that's when it then gets condensed down into the spreadsheet or into, you know, Trello, whatever it is. But it's just you can't do that to the same capacity that you can on a large table. Screens aren't big enough yet and if they were, they'd hurt your eyes too much.
- [09:42]
B
Yeah, I think that's it. So, okay, brilliant. So Trello, I mean, the main thing is the planning and the visual kind of side of it, right?
- [09:48]
A
Yeah, I think so. And also, you know, having a robust planning management system, you need to be able to assign yourself tasks, assign other people tasks within projects, particularly if you're working collaboratively and not in the same same room because you, you don't have the luxury of going, oh well, have you done that? And checking in all the time? Yeah, actually so much more efficient if you can just see what's been done as it gets gets done. And that's, that's where these tools really come into their own.
- [10:12]
B
So Asana, we use it for a number of different ways. We use it for editing, copywriting tasks, see if those have been completed. We use it for the marketing activity, but also for our developers. So for the techie side of things, it's very much planned out in Asana, it seems to work really well for all those different things.
- [10:27]
A
So the next tool we'd like to discuss is a kind of tool category really collaborative document editing. And I would say my experience, there's lots of different ways of doing this, but one of the best ways I found of doing this is with Google Docs.
- [10:43]
B
I see now, ah, I don't like Google Docs.
- [10:46]
A
You really don't, do you?
- [10:47]
B
I've got a real thing with it, so. And I'm really happy to be educated otherwise. I met some of the people from Google work and there've been some really clever thinking about collaborative working. I think I have a general problem with Google interfaces other than search, so I think it just everything feels a bit clunky. And the fact that we don't have all our documents in Google Docs is probably the problem that we use Dropbox for sharing files. And because not everyone is using Google Docs, it's not set up. So I think it's one of those things that if you're going to use it, you need to adopt it throughout the organization. Everything needs to be done that way to some extent. I don't know what your your opinion of it is.
- [11:24]
A
I've always gone a little bit rogue on this, if I'm honest, purely because most of the organizations I've worked in haven't adopted Google Docs. But for example, even if you work within a large organization that is very centrally office based, you do have to work with other satellite teams. So agencies is a really good case in point. And I've not found an agency yet that doesn't love a good shared Google spreadsheet to manage tasks or priorities or things that have been assigned to different members of the team. Because unlike detailed shared planning and task management systems, it's very low barrier of entry. Everybody, anybody can create a Google account and get access to these tools. And it is really, really great for not only all being in the same spreadsheet and making changes at the same time. There are ways of doing this a little bit with Excel, but you always hit a problem with people changing the same stuff at the same time. I've never hit that with with Google Docs, but also you do have full auditing of who changed what when. So you can go into the history and see and you can roll back to earlier versions of a document so you know when you having a little bit of accountability and who did what when. It's brilliant and it just works. A number of meetings I've had where you know, be working on a Google Google Doc and maybe be on the phone all chatting about it at the same time. It's good. Give it a go.
- [12:54]
B
Yeah, still not quite there. We may be. May get there, you never know as well. We'll see how that comes. Chris is Dropbox I'm a big fan of Dropbox for file sharing from this point of view as well. Slightly different obviously as well, but you can do rollback in Dropbox for previous versions of files and so on. So we use that quite a lot collaboratively as well. So what's the next one?
- [13:12]
A
The next one is. I'm sorry, it's a pet love of mine again, collaborative mind mapping and my collaborative mind mapping weapon of choice is Definite Cogle. That's C O G G L E. If you go to C L g g l e.it coglit and you can create. If you've got a Google account you can create a free access. There's a premium version as well, but it just enables you to mind map things out. And as you know, I'm a big mind map fan but it's one of the best sources of online collaboratively mind mapping stuff I've found. So when you're not in the same place, really, really great to see people's ideas go down and be able to take different nodes and reorganize them and rest have lots of people in there at the same.
- [13:58]
B
It's the only one I've seen as well that works particularly well on mobile. So just before this session Kira had sent me over a mind map. What we're going to be talking about today made it really easy to kind of think about it, but also it just worked well on my mobile device as well. So I would recommend it as well. And I've been more persuaded these kind of mind mapping tools recently because we're trying to deal with so much complexity at the moment in terms of the amount of content we're publishing and where we're publishing it and all those sorts of things and it has been really helpful so I would recommend it as well.
- [14:24]
A
Definitely, definitely has its place. The other thing I love about my map is they tend to be bullet pointed. It's difficult to write too much on them. And that's good. That's really, really good. Less is more when you're dealing with lots of complex things, you just need holding places for different thoughts, etc.
- [14:39]
B
Exactly.
- [14:40]
A
Next up is a really important one. If you're not all in the same building and that's video conferencing and screen sharing and there are a number of really great systems.
- [14:51]
B
What should we start with I am still a fan of Skype, strangely enough. So because most people have got Skype and have a Skype account an awful lot do we find it very useful for the team Skype through have a good chat, the audio quality in the video streaming, they seem their technology has got better and better. So it's very. Doesn't take a huge lot of bandwidth anymore to do some of those things. And the screen sharing does work reasonably well as well. So I quite like it from that point of view. So that's the kind of default for me. But that's more through habit and I've got it therefore I use it than anything else as well.
- [15:23]
A
It's now part of the Microsoft stable as well. So you know a lot of big businesses that have adopted office technologies, they're integrated with that, which I think is a definite plus. Definitely.
- [15:33]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Now there's some others that some new kind of. And these are kind of crossover into webinar platforms to some extent as well. So just tell us about a couple of those.
- [15:40]
A
Before we do that. I wanted to give Google Hangouts a little bit of a plugger. My best experience with Google Hangouts was when I did the Google Squared course. And actually in terms of mimicking a natural meeting and natural language and how your eyes shift to different people as they speak, I think the way Google Hangouts work is brilliant. So if you haven't used it before, basically you can have a number of people in a meeting. It's very easy to schedule and set the meeting up. Everybody will need a Google account in order to do it and it'll share and everybody has their own little video stream and whoever's speaking, they get center stage and all the other people will be kind of in a row down the bottom if you like. And actually as different people speak so they come centre stage and it's clever. It does mimic that face to face contact as closely as I've seen. Really it's not as good as a real meeting but I got to work on some very complex projects with people who I have never met. And guys, if you're out there, still want to meet up, so keep in touch, it'll be great. But you know, really got to know people on a different, different level. I think there's some, you know, important things to say about working remotely with teams and that we always used to, we found as groups it worked better when we took a little bit of time just to chew the cut and you know, share some fun stuff. Share what's going on, you know, be a little bit human. It's all too easy at the start of an online meeting to just go straight into it. Not really know, you know, the various different shades and colors of people's personalities, which is really, really important in terms of getting to know them actually as people. But I'm a big fan of it. I think it's got. It's good if you haven't given a go. Definitely, definitely do. Particularly if, you know, you never get to meet these people face to face. I think it's got value.
- [17:30]
B
I've realised why I like Skype as well now, based on what you've just said. The thing is, having Skype open in the background, I'm not scheduling a call like I would maybe with, with Google Hangouts. I know you can do it impromptu as well, but with Skype, because I've got the direct chat kind of instant messenger open at the same time as well, I can shift between typing video and audio very quickly and I think that's why I quite like it. So it's just understanding how the other platforms can do the kind of impromptu conversation as well. So it's kind of like the person's always there. An email feels like a bit of a formal request to do something, whereas a kind of live chat request means that you can answer it when you get a chance, but I don't expect you to stop having a lunch halfway through. And I think it's that cultural element that's quite. Seems to work quite well for me, for Skype.
- [18:11]
A
Now there's a pet I hate, I have with all of these platforms. I say all, all but one, as I've discovered, and that is that if you want to have a meeting, the other person has to have an account or at the very minimum, some software downloaded onto their. Onto their laptop and that becomes problematic. Problematical if you're at the other end. So having worked.
- [18:32]
B
Problematical.
- [18:32]
A
Problematical.
- [18:33]
B
It's a new word.
- [18:34]
A
Is that a new word?
- [18:35]
B
Problematic. I like that. I like problematical. Sounds good.
- [18:38]
A
I'm from the Isle of Wight. We talk slightly differently. Problematical. Daniel. Okay. The problem is very often IT systems are locked down, so you can't just go installing stuff.
- [18:49]
B
Yeah, no, no, no.
- [18:51]
A
So you get a situation where as an organization, if you're adopted one of these technologies that requires a download or an install, you send your meeting invite, people are busy and they clock that. Yeah, that's all fine. I'll do the go to meeting or whatever the platform is, and then they go to do it. Literally two minutes before or two to three minutes after, as many often the case and can't install it and the time that gets wasted and it just is not good. So if you've ever suffered that, take a look at join me. And that's what I love about that platform. To host a meeting, you have to have software installed on your machine. But anybody joining it just needs a web address, nothing more. Web address and a web browser. Everybody's got that right.
- [19:35]
B
It is brilliant. I think it's a really great idea and I'm surprised it's not more well known yet. So take a look. It's very, very good. Now, similar, while we're on the topic of kind of more rather than one to one communications or one to a few, the kind of more webinary style of things, of having lots of people as well, one of the things that I found with these is they're quite expensive. If I want to do a webinar for 100 people, most of the systems I were looking at, we were talking about having multiple hundreds or thousands of dollars a month accounts. But you just showed me something else.
- [20:06]
A
Yeah. So it's called Zoom. And this was something I discovered this week actually, and I was really blown away by it. So went and had a little look at what else it does. And basically it's video conferencing solution. But you can screen share on it. And the screen sharing was really, really good. Audio quality is really, really good. They've got a lot of focus and tech to deliver this. I did one with the States and it was seamless. But then it had some other really nice features as well. So if you're signed up and paid user, you get recordings of the sessions. I think that is much more aimed at the kind of webinar market and they give you a little bit of cloud storage from a podcasting perspective. It gives you separate audio files for each person each end, which I thought was really, really good. But then it's also got some really great webinar features. So polling features built in, you can have up to 100 or more. Actually, if you pay a little bit more people using it, it goes right up to 500, I think.
- [21:07]
B
Yeah. Off top of mate, I think up to 100 was about 12, 1199 or $12 and there was $16 for 200 and so on. So it was. It's really low cost for what it does. So I was quite impressed. And I do like a webinar. Yeah, I think there's a huge value in webinars which is quite odd because actually recording it and playing it back, there wouldn't be a huge amount of difference. But that opportunity to actually go in and do live Q and A is fantastic as well. So I would definitely take a look at that now. I just want to off piste for a second.
- [21:34]
A
Yeah.
- [21:34]
B
You might have noticed these things when we're talking webinars. They go, sign up for our course that will teach you to become an Internet billionaire in four weeks. There's a lot of those about that and similar kind of things. And it says, sign up for our webinar. You think, well, it's free. I can't really. I wouldn't mind being a billionaire in four weeks. And it says, we've got a webinar running in two hours, one in 12 minutes and one in four hours. And you think, there's one in 12 minutes. I might as well just go in and do it. And then you sit there thinking, do they just do webinars all day long? And. And then you go in and there's loads of people chatting, oh, this is gonna be great. I can't wait. I'm really excited to hear about this. And there's questions going in real time. And then the person comes, goes, oh, I'm really good. There's somebody here. There's more than we expected. And, you know, I might not get to all your questions, but if I don't, I'll follow up with you directly afterwards as well. They are recordings. Well, I think a lot of people don't realize, and it's quite clever that you're in a webinar platform that's got lots of other people interacting. All they've done is they've mined your email address now, because you've given it. And then if you ask any questions, they will then follow up at the end of day and go, did anyone actually ask any questions that was real? And I think this is horrific forms of scams, because it is directly lying. It is saying something is happening live and there's other people there when there aren't. So anyone that does these. And there are some big names using these tools, you are charlatans.
- [22:50]
A
Shame on you.
- [22:51]
B
Yeah, I'm not impressed by it at all. Even if it's really good quality content. The argument I had with someone the other day who's quite well known said, yeah, but I'm giving them good value content. And they feel like they just not on for me. I think you are deceiving people. So, anyway, I'll move on after A.
- [23:05]
A
Little rant, Consider yourself told who you are. So the final one that we threw in was a great questionnaire tool. And this isn't so much about collaborating with each other, but it's more about collaborating with your audience and your customers.
- [23:19]
B
Yeah, I think there's one that collaboration with customers is more important than ever before. Actually a little bit of internal anonymous based questionnaire is not a bad thing as well. So the reality is that finding out more about customers is great. But there's two kind of approaches to this. One is the kind of survey monkey type approach, which is a really good platform that allows you to go through and to collect questions from people and you can build them any number of different formats to questions and then you launch them yourselves. So you're going to take that and put it in front of people. There is one that we use that I forget the name of now is built by the team that did WordPress automatic and we'll put it in the show notes because they've got a really great, great tool as well for doing those questions. But the other way of doing it is one that allows you to ask questions but also puts it in front of the right people for you, like Google Surveys as well. So something like Google Surveys will allow you to basically define a demographic audience that you want and to essentially say, I want people in these particular location. And it's quite detailed in some locations. In other locations it's not so good, but it will put those questions in front of those people. Now the other way of doing it is if Google Surveys doesn't have the right people is to use something like SurveyMonkey but also to go through and to use Pay per Click or the Google Display Network or some of the paid advertising platform to put those surveys in front of the right people using the targeting options that you've got there. So you can use these a little bit more creatively in some cases as well. So you are limited with things like Google Surveys and the, the detail of the audience they'll get you access to.
- [24:55]
A
It doesn't have to be a tool actually when you think about it. Actually any social media manager worth a salt will be asking questions of the audience. I do question how often those insights that are given get shared with key people within the organization. It's seen much more as a social media management technique because it encourages engagement and therefore extends your reach. So actually if that's you do do a little bit of soul searching and questioning as to how you might be able to make use of some of those insights and what processes do you have in place to actually share some of those customer insights and strong feeling or surprise reactions when you get them? Because all too often they remain siloed within the social media team.
- [25:37]
B
I think that's such a huge point, is that if you ask questions there needs to be a process of doing something different afterwards. So the whole process piece is probably worth trying to think about before you even ask the questions because without it it will just disappear into the ether. Exactly as you say. So those are some of the collaboration tools that we think are great, that we've used, that we're learning over a period of time. I still think you never really replace face to face because of the nuance and so on, but there's lots of ways of taking the advantage of being in different locations and then filling those gaps. And I think still getting together on a regular basis you get a certain level of serendipity in terms of ideas coming out when you're face to face, but actually filling the gaps, working in ways that work for those people around you. Now we really want to hear what you're using and what you found works and what doesn't work as well. There's probably some pet peeves and hates because certain organizations work in certain ways. Let us know. We won't necessarily name the organization you as an individual, but we want to hear what you're thinking as well. So thanks for listening and we'll see you again on the Digital Marketing Podcast.
- [26:39]
A
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you'd like to get more information on the show, get hold of back issues this podcast, or get details on any of the links we mentioned, please visit our website at www.targetinternet.com. if you've enjoyed the show, we would love to read your feedback. Please rate us in itunes or even better, write us a review. Or if you have any questions, please get in touch. We'd love to.