There are so many aspects to being a social and digital professional. We often analyze campaign results but how does it all get done in the first place? The answer – tools. Use them to share new ideas, create plans with your team or organize the structure of your campaign – there are endless tools for marketers to increase your productivity and effectiveness.
Jira
Most software developers or IT agile scrums will have a love for Jira for social and digital marketing campaigns. Jira works perfectly for those who operate in an agile way. The interface (albeit a little backdated) allows you to prioritize tasks that need to be done in order to deliver a social or marketing campaign.
Although it may be a bit archaic and quite often it only operates on certain browsers and devices, Jira is a great system to use to control workload, backlog and have an overview of incoming social and digital campaigns.
The systems allows you to create a team kanban (progress) board, attach an avatar to tasks you are working on. It effectively creates a record of how a social or digital campaign has been delivered and which members of your team have contributed to the campaign.
Trello
This is a simplistic version of a Kanban board. Similar to Jira, it allows you to move tasks along a board from \”to do\”, \”in progress\” and \”done\”. It is generally more helpful for a personal workload rather than a team workload as it clearly demonstrates what you are working on at any moment in time.
Kanban Flow
This board does what it says on the tin. It has aspects of Jira and Trello and is really helpful for groups. You can prioritise tasks by colour or by where they sit in the column and assign avatars to each one.
It’s really useful for having a view of how all small tasks can come together to create a great social or digital marketing campaign.
Yammer
Rather than a way of documenting tasks that are currently happening or are planned to happen, Yammer acts as a great hub to post suggestions, ideas and articles. Generally Yammer-ers post about previous social and digital campaigns that have hit the big time and how best to ‘borrow’ ideas.
Yammer is effectively a social network for your organisation. A place where bragging about social shares and time spent on your website is cool. It’s also a great way of keeping a record of cool stuff. If you’re in need of inspiration for your next campaign then look no further than your Yammer news feed. That is if your team are engaged and in the habit of looking for cool industry news.
Slack
Remember the days of MSN messenger and the phrase G2G? No? Well, let me enlighten you – MSN basically worked as a chat room for all of your friends so it was easy and simple to get as much information from as much people at any one time.
MSN’s flaw? It completely wiped your conversation once you logged out so you couldn’t refer back to what your friends had told you anyway. You’d have to log back in with the excruciating cacophony created by a combination of the dial tone and your sister attempting use the phone at the same time. All of which, just to ask the same questions you’d asked before. Slack is like MSN. Improved MSN!
Slack allows you to communicate with your team all at once -‘Who knows where the images for last month’s social posts are stored?’ – and it keeps a record! Therefore, like an email chain you can easily reference information or easily notify people with what you’re doing at any time. You can also share documents and it has an app.
Basecamp
Basecamp is similar to Slack but more organised. You can sort conversations by subject or project so that you can easily find documents or conversations that you are looking for.
In a nutshell, it’s an email chain on a fancy system so you can easily filter by date, person and document and in turn, be a lot more productive.
Therefore, whatever tool takes your fancy can really improve your inventiveness, efficiency and how your team interact. Why not try out a few and find out what’s best for you? If you’ve been using a bunch of useful tools yourself, please do share them with us!
