productivity Archives - Page 2 of 2

[Communications Report] for June 12th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

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Mobile Uploads Spur Facebook Video Growth – Facebook’s nearly half a billion users are now uploading 20 million videos each month, many of which are shared through mobile phones.
10 ways to keep tabs on ‘live’ hashtag chats on Twitter – Twitter chats are increasingly growing in popularity, providing participants with a specific time and place to discuss pertinent issues and share knowledge. Before you can get stuck into these lively sessions, you need to consider which application / tool is best suited to the format in question.
21 Rules of Engagement in Social Media – While businesses now have access to these rich channels, the true promise of social media however, lies in the direct connections that are forged between people who represent companies and the people who define markets of interest.
Social media monitoring review 2010 [report] – In-depth review of the leading social media monitoring tools.
Top 5 Social Media Ethics Concerns for Lawyers – The people in charge of lawyer ethics oversight in your state see social media either as just another form of communication, or as a special threat to client confidences and attorney decorum. Do you know what rules apply to you?
Costolo: Twitter Now Has 190 Million Users Tweeting 65 Million Times A Day – Most users, says Costolo, don’t Tweet at all, but rather use Twitter as a consumption media. How many of those 65 million Tweets are automated spam is not clear.
How Consumers Interact with Brands on Social Networks – eMarketer – The social networking audience in the US has reached critical mass. eMarketer estimates that 57.5% of all US Internet users, or 127 million people, will use a social network at least once a month in 2010. By 2014, nearly two-thirds of Internet users will be on board.
Building Trust with Empowered Consumers – The top three sources that influenced purchase decisions for US Internet users were friends and family sought out for their opinion (53%), friends and family who offered their opinion (49%) and online research (49%).
Social Media No. 1 Emerging Channel for Lead Gen – Lead generation was marketers’ first priority, with 66% saying it was their greatest concern for 2010, compared with just 17% who chose brand awareness.
The State of LinkedIn – The most represented industries are hi-tech (16%), finance (12%) and manufacturing (10%), while engineering (15%), sales (11%), administrative (9%) are the most common job functions.
Klout is the standard for influence – The goal is to accurately measure that influence and provide context around who a person influences and the specific topics they are most influential on.
From Facebook, answering privacy concerns with new settings – By Mark Zuckerberg (CEO Facebook)…
Official Google Blog: Search more securely with encrypted Google web search – Good or bad for analytics, tracking, etc. ?
Use LinkedIn Effectively – LinkedIn is the de facto online social network for business types. The thing is, lots of people are “on there” but aren’t necessarily using it to the fullest.
The best creative marketing examples on YouTube – YTShowandTell’s Channel.
100 Incredibly Useful & Free Mac Apps – Some handy ‘Productivity’ and ‘File Sharing and Transfer’ apps.

How to use Google Calendar as Project Management Tool

Featured on Lifehacker Top Stories

Do you need a great tool to better manage your team, timelines, deadlines, relevant project’s data for you and for your clients? Here’s how Google Calendar can help you out.

Create a calendar for each project – To preserve client privacy I temporarily changed the title of each calendar you see in this first screenshot. The syntax though remains the same, ‘year’ (11=2011, 10=2010, etc.) and then the ‘name of the project’. Using a proper syntax helps you to keep your calendar in order and makes them easier to browse/search.

Sharing – Share the calendar with the members of your team involved in the project. You can even share calendars with clients if they express the need to monitor the stream of activities and project deadlines. I’ve been in this situation a couple of times.

Timeline – By placing the tasks on the calendar you’ll automatically turn each calendar into a detailed project’s timeline. I found the ‘agenda’ view particularly valuable because it gives a clear overview of the upcoming deadlines you have set.

Manage client access – Like I said above when I was talking about ‘sharing’, sometimes you can plan to give (or the clients want to have) access to the calendar/timeline. A problem I faced is that in complex projects you might want to create two versions of the calendar. One for the team with the technical details they need/want to edit during the project development, and a second one for the client with all its relevant information (periodic results, deadlines, key data, meetings, etc.). On larger projects you can create dedicated calendars for multiple teams, too.

Problem solving – With every project comes a good number of problems, roadblocks or issues. Often these issues are spotted by members of the team while they are taking care of their tasks. What can be done? The member of the team that is facing the problem writes it in the calendar as an ‘all day’ entry adding his/her name next to it. Other members of the team, that can/know how to solve the issue, take care of it or write on the entry tips on how to solve it. Once the problem is solved the entry will be marked as FIXED. If at the end of the day the problem is still not fixed, it can be moved (click & drag) to the next day or to a different date. I know that at first this might not sound easy or natural but I can guarantee you that, once you get into it, it will help you working faster and better with your team. It’s like an open and on-going problem solving channel. Of course, the internal organization of how and who takes care of solving problems can change from company to company and team to team. You can really take this to the next level by enabling your team to add the ‘mobile’ component to it (check the links I shared at the end of this post to learn how to sync these features with your iPhone).

(again, to preserve client privacy I temporarily changed the date and subject of these entries)

Hashtags # – I mentioned the use of hashtags for internal data management in a couple of other posts but I’ll bring it back in this one, too. Google calendar is searchable (I’ll never get tired to remind it!). This is very important because it turns our calendar into a database. Using hashtags in our calendar’s entries helps us in searching and tracking specific items over time. Use a unique hashtag for each project you work on. The tags are the same I use with my team in tweets and shared content (photos, video, etc.). Result? Whenever I search for a hashtag I’ll get a complete list of the performed tasks with relative date and time. Here’s where things get interesting, go on reading the next point…

Export data (PDF) – Every calendar, search results or specific layouts (day, week, month, 4 days, agenda) are printable and therefore exportable in PDF format. This is really handy when you need a summary of the work you’ve done (you can get it by searching for a specific hashtag related to a project) or for the list of future tasks of your project (printing/PDF the ‘agenda’ layout is what works at best for me). Believe it or not there might still be occasions in which people will ask you for a PDF version of the data. It happened to me with external teams and clients (especially government and public organizations, they often still need something to print out on paper. Well yes they could access it online but… you go and figure that out).

What makes Google Calendar a great tool is its simplicity. I’m sure there are many other ways it can be used to help with project management. In this post I shared my tips & suggestions, what about yours?

If you liked this post you might be interested in also checking out:

Smart Use of Google Calendar

Why and How to Sync Google Calendar – iCal – iPhone

How do you use it? How does Google Calendar help you in better managing your projects? Go ahead and share your experience in the comments here on the blog or via a quick “comment-ready-tweet” @vascellari!

Andrea

[Report] for January 27th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

Forrester’s Social Technographics: Conversationalists get onto the ladder – Two and a half years ago, Charlene Li and I introduced Social Technographics, a way to analyze your market’s social technology behavior. The big addition this year is “Conversationalists”: people who regularly post status updates to places like Facebook and Twitter. This re-design by Mike Arauz makes the findings a little bit clearer, and also compares 2009 to previous findings from 2008 and 2007.
The Maturation of Social Media ROI – The debate over measuring social media investment inspired many brands to cannonball into popular social networks and join the proverbial conversation without a plan or strategic objectives defined. At the same time, the lack of ROI standards unnerved many executives, preventing any form of experimentation until their questions and concerns were addressed.
Led by Facebook, Twitter, Global Time Spent on Social Media Sites up 82% Year over Year – According to The Nielsen Company, global* consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. In addition, the overall traffic to social networking sites has grown over the last three years.
Ten Ideas for the New Decade – An Edelman Digital White Paper – Downloadable PDF + Video.
Video Interview: @Scott Monty Ford Motor Company (via @SteveRubel) – In this four and a half minute video, which I shot yesterday, Scott talks about what he does in his day job, how social media is integrated into Ford’s communications engine (pun intended) and how he works with his executives.
Why The Agency Of The Future Looks Like My Fantasy Baseball Team – Clever.
World’s First Computer to Human Marriage: London Girl Weds Laptop – My friend Hermione is getting married. I wish them the best.
5 Top trends in online PR for 2010 – Online PR enthusiast predicts the next big thing after Twitter.
The 5 Reasons You’re Failing In Social Media – Short and spot-on.
Healthcare Marketing: 5 Social Media Examples – More than ever, it’s essential for hospitals and health providers to rethink their healthcare marketing mix to include social media. The proof is in the numbers: 34% of consumers use social media to search for health information, according to research data from How America Searches: Health and Wellness.
WooRank Screens Your Website, For Free – WooRank is a brand new service designed to let website publishers and marketers evaluate the SEO-friendliness and other aspects of their Web sites on the fly.
Uploading any file : Uploading and exporting – Google Docs – Now you can upload all your files without converting them to Google Docs. You can use Google Docs to open these files anywhere and share them with anyone.
12 Surprising Things Holding Back Online Video Advertising – Few things to keep in mind if you do online video.
Twitter’s Answer To Facebook Connect – Twitter is preparing to launch a new set of tools that will let third party websites easily integrate Twitter features directly into their web sites and services, multiple sources have confirmed. In a nutshell, this is their response to the massively popular Facebook Connect.
10 Musts for Marketing on Facebook – This post was initially wrote to target women only, but I think that some of theses tips can apply to other audiences too. Facebook has done a great job of giving marketers a powerful tool with its Pages product, but like most things in life, it comes down to execution.
18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business – You may have occasion to bring your work home with you, or require frequent access to your to-do lists, notes and documents on the go…I do, always.

Smart Use of Google Calendar

Productivity – Google Calendar is more than a simple calendar. Here’s how it works for me.

I create different calendars and use them for different purposes like:

Do/Done list: In this calendar I write what I have to do everyday. What I can’t accomplish in a certain day is moved to the next one or to a different date. At the end of each day I have a list of tasks that I completed and a list of upcoming tasks that I’ll have to take care of in the next days/future. I usually mark the entries in this calendar as ‘all-day’, I don’t set specific time or place.

Meetings: In this calendar I save all my meetings – virtual (via Skype, Adobe Connect, Cisco, Google Hangout etc.) and in the real world (face to face). All the entries have detailled information about place (for virtual meetings I mention a specific URL or on which platform they’ll run), time (including the corresponding time for participants that live in other countries. Here’s a handy tool that can help you setup your meeting time) and alarm notifications.

Use hastags (#): Google calendar is searchable. By using hashtags in your calendar entries it will be easier for you to search and keep track of certain items/lists over time. I use #tags for all sort of activities in my calendars (work, sport, shopping, etc.)

As you probably noticed in the first screen-shot (above) some of my calendars are named as ‘project…’. In the next post dedicated to tools I’ll share how you can use Google Calendar to help you with your project management. Stay tuned by subscribing to this RSS feed!

Did you know that you can manage and sync all your calendars on the go? You might find interesting:

Why and How to Sync Google Calendar – iCal – iPhone

How to use Google Calendar as Project Management Tool

How do you use Google Calendar? Share your tips and ideas in the comments or via a quick “comment-ready-tweet” @vascellari!

Andrea

Why and How to Sync Google Calendar – iCal – iPhone

Why?

I’m always on the go and I need to have access to my calendar/s from wherever I am and whenever I need it. Instead of calendars I look at them as sets of data related to the projects I’m working on. During the last years I tested a good number of tools but I got the best out of the ‘Google Calendar – iCal –iPhone or iPod touch‘ combo.

How?

Enable Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal (this will work only on Mac OS X v10.5… or newer)
Sync your Google Calendar with your iPhone/iPod Touch (by default only your primary calendar will be synced to your device. To sync additional calendars see next point…)
Sync your additional calendars with your iPhone/iPod Touch by visiting https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect from any browser (via desktop or mobile device) or For Google Apps users: https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/YOUR DOMAIN NAME/iphoneselect
When you sync your iPhone/iPod Touch on iTunes make sure to select the calendars you want to sync (in the screen-shot below I synced all my calendars). iTunes > iPhone/iPod Touch > Info > Calendars

Advantages?

Your data doesn’t live anymore on single devices like your computer or you mobile phone, it lives in the cloud. Devices are used to simply edit or interact with your data. This means that…

after you edit one of the calendars (iCal, Google Calendar or iPhone) the changes will reflect in realt-time on all the others. Basically you use ‘one ring to rule them all’.

Tip: If you are using an iPhone/iPod and you don’t have wifi/data connection when you are on the go…no worries. Keep updating your calendar and the when you’ll find a connection (or when you’ll plug your iPod/iPhone to your computer > iTunes) your calendar entries will sync automatically!

you always have an online backup of all your data. So there’s no problem if you lose your phone or your computer crashes.
if you don’t have with you or you can’t use your phone or computer, you can still access your data from any other device connected to the internet. (I’ve been in this situation once… and this literally ‘saved me’)

What appears to be a simple synchronization actually opens up a huge number of new doors on how you can better organize and manage your life, work and projects. Give it a try!

If you liked this post you might be interested in also checking out:

Smart Use of Google Calendar

How to use Google Calendar as Project Management Tool

Meanwhile… Do you have any related tips you want to share? What advantages you find syncing with the cloud? Questions? Ideas? Special requests? Feel free to share them in the comments or via a quick “comment-ready-tweet” @vascellari!

Andrea