Technology Tips for Personal, Team, and Client Use

Submitted by brentshiely@hot... on 11/24/2011 / 0 Comments

As a technology person with a marketing background, I’m often asked about technology tools to achieve business goals. Every client goal is different, but these tools comprise my tool belt. I share these out of a spirit of helpfulness – and I’m totally open to suggestions for alternatives.

I’ve separated these into several different categories. As any multifaceted professional, we use technology to bring personal results, team results, and results to our clients. The objective of sharing these items is to Elevate Talent – the core objective of MIMA.

Personal Desktop Productivity

·Browser: The best browser, by far, is Firefox. Firefox has a robust developer community where add-ins galore are available. Internet Explorer used to have this community, but I perceive Firefox to have surpassed it.

·Web Debugger: Fiddler is a Windows-based Web debugger which permits me to view back/forth traffic between my computer and a web server. This tells me each image, form, data element, etc. if it was received and how long it took. It’s the first tool I open when someone says to me, “this website is slow”. I open Fiddler, start listening, browse the site, select all sessions and look at the Timeline tab to view where the bottleneck is. An alternative tool is Pingdom – a server-based choice. The drawback with a server-based choice is the time is measured from their server – not your computer.

·Business Diagrams: Just this week, I’ve made three Visio-based charts to illustrate a very complex business relationship between five parties. Microsoft Visio is a killer toolset for quickly drawing flowcharts, business processes, and other complicated stuff.

·Remote Access: Have you ever wanted to access your computer from another computer? There is a free way to achieve this – any RDP client. The included application within Windows is Remote Desktop Connection). RDP stands for Remote Desktop Protocol. RDP is a protocol written by Microsoft – so it only applies to Windows-based computers. There is a free Mac-based RDP client – search for it. The challenge to connect is two-fold; Network and DNS. You’ll need an IP address or a name for your computer to access it correctly. DynDNS is a terrific free solution to resolve a name to your host. Additionally your network admininstrator will need to enable the RDP protocol in routers within your local network and your internal firewall.

·Desktop Search: The built-in search within Windows is not great. I use Windows Desktop Search – a free tool from Microsoft. I’m kinda married to this for I have some code that shipped with it (a content filter for Windows Media files). There are many to choose from – there is no bad choice. Just as web-based search has changed the way we learn and research – desktop search will change the way you remember your work items.

·Google Web Search: Back in the day when there was Usenet, Google made groups.google.com and permitted the ability to search Usenet. Google has figured out how to seduce me in finding stuff. Google is the best place to find code snippets, research, or anything. One of my favorite things to add is the “-“ attribute in a search. For example, search for “Minnesota Vikings –favre” and you’ll see all content that doesn’t mention Brett Favre. Then again, I thought the Favre acquisition was absolutely wonderful.

Personal Mobile

·Device: I had some personal skin in the Windows mobile business. This was hard for me to do, but I switched to iPhone. Wow – what a tool! Great features include the embedded GPS, third party applications through the App Store, and a touch-based operating system. This may be obvious to many of you. I am sorry I was so late to the party.

·Mouse: I use the Touchmouse utility to use my iPhone with my presentations. When I need to use the mouse, rather than grabbing a mouse, I open this utility to operate a software-based mouse. This is super handy for a myriad of situations – especially for my Media Center computer.

Getting the Message Across

·Show Them A Picture: With so much of our work, you have look/feel items you wish to share with others. SnagIt is a terrific utility to select, highlight and edit ‘what you see’ on your computer. It’s almost cliché now – so many mails I get have a screenshot attached – yet so many lack a highlight, arrows, or additional information. SnagIt permits you to add this information to get your message across.

·Show Them With Video: This has become a crutch for me. Complex issues that have multiple steps before seeing a result are difficult to write without me looking silly. I have lately resorted to recording my desktop and storing the video in the YouTube cloud as a private video with CamStudio or using Jing. It has been a great leap forward in reducing the reply to all spam that happens in our business. I also don’t get the, “I don’t see that on my computer,” response anymore thanks to the video usage.

·Show Them The Traffic: Many clients have an idea of what they want to achieve and the content story they want to tell. Knowing the keywords to include in your content strategy is a key step of merging content supply with audience demand. Using the Google Adwords External Tool is a terrific way to show clients the demand for the keywords relevant to their content. You can then start conditioning your clients to think about the science behind their art. Once it comes time to posting that content – that’s where a great Search Engine Optimization mindset can come in to ensure GoogleBot crawls and categorizes content in the free (i.e. “earned”) results correctly.

·Show Them The Trends: Some clients don’t respond well with integers – they need a picture. When you are demonstrating what keywords to target, Google Insights for Search and Google Trends are two terrific tools to demonstrate keyword trending and volume.

Team Productivity

·Collaboration: Some projects get super hairy. It’s difficult to keep up with the volume of email and phone calls. Basecamp is a terrific SaaS solution which permits you do to keep up without changing the organic process.

·Software Development: I know this will raise some stink. Nothing beats Windows Client & Server to get talent and advanced things done quickly. The drawback of this platform is the expense of the enterprise tools. There are less expensive options for startups and agencies. Visual Studio (the development environment) and SQL Server (the database environment) have Express versions that are robust and FREE. It really confuses me as to why people dismiss this stuff as expensive…

·Mindmap: Brainstorming is an essential part of developing your agency and your team. Keeping notes and permitting the discussion to grow organically is critical. I use Mind Mapping software to keep flow with the ideas yet document all the ideas generated. Reminder – don’t let the biggest loudmouth in the room bully the group.

Getting Results for Clients

·Content Management Services: When possible, use a content management system for your clients’ interactive activities. Try to stay in the box as much as possible – and use third party modules. My systems of choice are Drupal, Wordpress, and DotNetNuke. Don’t spend your clients’ money on rebuilding something that’s already been done.

·Creative Tools: Adobe’s Creative Suite product is so incredible. Need I say more?

·Analytics: Once you have something online, measure it! Google Analytics is a great free place to start.

·Free Earned Traffic: Your online experiences need to find an audience. Google Webmaster Tools is a free way for you to get your site found, crawled and categorized by Google. Once you get it into Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, and other search engines must follow – and each have their own way to submit.

·Concept Testing: Version A or Version B – which is better? Instead of the biggest opinion in the room, try Concept Testing. To understand concept testing – visit WhichTestWon. See if your intuition is as good as proven A/B tests. Once you understand concept testing, check out LiveBall, Optimizely and Google Website Optimizer.

I hope you find this useful for your work with your stakeholders. Please add your comments of alternatives or items I missed you feel add value to your work.