Herding Cats

I am getting so frustrated with email, the duct tape of today's electronic age.   Marketing projects are never tidy.   They involve people both inside and outside of the company.   And the players change as the project moves forward.  Lots of information needs to flow and the main tool we have is......  email.   Problem is trying to find anything, or better yet have someone else try to find something.  But Bruce, you say (or Bill says), there is always SharePoint.   The Ulimate in collaboration tools.  Yes, but do you have the IT staff and budget to implement this and administer it?  And get it running this week.   I know I don't.

So to keep these projects on track and make sure everything moves together I have some superglue and baling wire to add to the mix. 

First off I use a free tool called "EverNote" to collect all the random information and put them into catagories. Not only can you cut and paste, or type into it, you can also install it into your email and browser to quickly clip information (I use Thunderbird and Firefox).  It's a snap to find anything.

So far so good, but how do you get this out to everyone else?   Even if you are in a big company, you can grab your own domain name (think tacking on "projects" to your business name).   For less than $100 / year you can pick up 10gigs of web hosting with domain name registration.   Then you create a subdirectory on your website for your project.   Password protect it.   Use the free wordpress blogging software included from the host.    Give the password freely to those you want to view (but they cannot post). For people you want to let post, give them an additional password.   Put all the good information on this blog (copy from EverNote).     Team members get posting and commenting rights.   

Using the same concept create a subdirectory on the FTP site.    This is where everyone puts all your documents.   But people aren't that good at FTP, so in the blog, create an ftp link directly to the document.   Click on it, and you're there.   

When a new person comes on board, just send them a couple of links and the directory password, and they're up to speed.   In the end you have up to date information in one place while you control edit and access.   And it's outside of your internal system for a price less than 2 IT support calls.    It's not fancy, but it does get the job done.

Comments

[Mary Schmidt]

Ah, but then what happens when you get a technophobe client? You can spend more time explaining how to get to the info than you do actually working ;-)

Seriously, thanks for the tips - and let's not forget the plain ol' fashioned (land line - not cell, so we're incessantly yelling "can you hear me now") phone for discussion/decision points.

Some days I miss the old days of snail mail, teletypes and carbon paper - truth be told!

[brucefryer]

Agreed, but you usually can get them to click on a link to look at something, which is handy to get them background information. And I don't miss getting the carbon paper smudge off of my fingers. Or white out (which I bought by the case).