I finally got fed up with using a text file on an encrypted disk image to manage all my passwords. I figured that there must be good Mac software for managing passwords and I figured it might even sync with my iPhone which could come in handy when I’m on the road. Sure enough there are many, but one of them costs a fair bit more than the rest. Being a believer in “you get what you pay for” and figuring that the cost of losing one of my or my clients hosting control panel passwords would be pretty huge, I went for the most expensive one, 1 Password. It also had the best reviews. I did the 15 day free trial and I was not disappointed. This app ROCKS and once you’ve used it you will wonder how you lived without it for so long.
When I was a Windows user I tried using Outlook’s Task feature. It never quite worked for me the way I wanted to so I often went back to managing my to-do lists in a Word doc or an Excel spreadsheet. But then I switched to Mac and saw an ad for Things and decided to try it. I have never looked back. The interface is beautifully designed and the Cultured Code guys really understand how a busy person thinks as they are trying to organize their lives. For example I love that there are Areas of Responsibility that you can create like: Personal, Job 1, Job 2, Sports Association, Father, Husband, Church etc. These are different from Projects which can overlap with Areas of Responsibility. I also love the Today, Scheduled, Next and Someday buckets. A pretty key feature is that it syncs with my iPhone so I can organize my life on the go or make lists on my Mac and then have them with me when I’m out.
I often want to grab a section of a webpage or an image, add a note with say an arrow pointing to something and then email it to someone. I need to do this a lot in developing websites: fix this, move this, make this white, delete this etc. Skitch is the best way to do this that I’ve ever found and the free version is what I use. If you are a Windows user try Jing.
I’m a consultant so I use Billings every day to track all my time, billable and non-billable, and then do all my invoicing to clients. I use a bookeeper so I don’t need my own accounting program, but I do need to track my time and invoice clients and Billings does it perfectly. It has beautiful templates for invoices and reports and it has a nice iPhone version as well. I tried Freshbooks for a while but for a one-time cost of $50 and the ability to use it without a web connection, Billings was better value for me.
Daylite is the CRM program I use for managing my sales funnel: prospecting phone calls, meetings, opportunities, revenue forecasting etc. It’s like salesforce.com except much cheaper and with nicer interfaces. It’s a very powerful program and I use only a fraction of what it can do. It fully integrates with all things Mac like iCal and Mail in a very slick way and it has an iPhone version as well. It will also do Project Management.
I used Cyberduck, a free Mac FTP program, for 2 years but I recently switch to Transmit because I use FTP so much and all the Mac web developers I work with use it. The main feature I’ve discovered that I really like is the ability to edit remote files right in Transmit (sweet!). So I can navigate to a .css or .html file, open it in Transmit without downloading it, make a change, hit Save, refresh the browser and voila – done!
I use Jungle Disk to manage remote backups of my Mac Laptop to a Rackspace cloud account. It costs me about $3.50 a month to backup around $10GB of my most important files. They are fully encrypted and the backup is incremental. I looked at Moxy but liked this because of the pricing and the security of going with Rackspace vs an unknown. You can also back up to Amazon S3.
Disk Space Manager (when you run out of disk space and need to delete files)
Have you ever run out of space on your harddrive and wished there was a way to look into your harddrive, see what’s taking up all the space, and be able to easily delete what you don’t need? This is what you need and it’s free.
I get asked this question by CEO audiences a great deal. It seems that somehow many CEOs have been told that Twitter is big so they had better get on Twitter. In my informal survey of CEOs that I know, most cannot name one valuable benefit they have gained from being on Twitter other than being able to brag about their hipness to their YPO, TEC or PEO group.
So what advice do I give?
For CEO’s of large firms:
Most CEO’s of $100 million+ organizations do not need to get on Twitter themselves. Twitter represents a powerful new social phenomenon that is part of the whole user-generated content revolution (also called Web 2.0) but you can read about that here without wasting your time joining Twitter and then racking your brain every day for something to post that your General Counsel won’t freak out about.
You should be blogging before you get on Twitter, either to an internal audience to help with vision casting or to an external audience for thought-leadership. If you use Twitter as a way to share your blog posts externally then fine but do it in that order.
You should ask a marketing savvy thought-leader in your organization who is 1) under 35 and 2) already on Twitter to come back to you with a recommendation on how your organization could use Twitter to grow its business. There is probably a subject-matter expert or thought-leader within your organization who could command an audience on Twitter but in all but a few cases that’s probably not you, the CEO.
For CEO’s of small firms and sole proprietors:
Sure – get on Twitter – but don’t waste a lot of time on it. Twitter can be effectively used to grow your digital footprint. Make sure you fill out the short bio section CAREFULLY!! It’s what will show up in a google search. This is test for people who can’t articulate their value proposition in a succinct way.
Focus on getting yourself a large network of potential customers and influential referers on LinkedIn and Facebook first. Then figure out how to use the status updates on Linked In and Facebook to position yourself to your network the way you’d like to be seen, without annoying or alienating them. Then get yourself a blog and learn to use it. And then you can add Twitter to the mix as a way to repeat your status updates to another audience or to point to your blog posts. But do it in that order.
Make sure you figure out how to write posts and status updates that accomplish what you want them to. Try role playing being a person reading you on Twitter, or via your LinkedIn or Facebook status updates. What will the reader want to read? What will they find useful? What will cause them to think of you as the __________ person? You get to fill in that blank with what ever brand you hope to own. Take a look at this humorous list of the “12 most annoying types of Facebookers” before you start.
Use tools like ping.fm and friendfeed to automate your posting to multiple networks to save you time.
I am hoping to be one of the lucky ones to get a google Wave invitation in the next few days from a friend (one of the special 100,000.) From my experience with google so far I am eager to see what they have put together here. I am hopeful that it will be the game-changing collaboration application that some are speculating it will be.
If you are trying to figure out what it is then this video from MG Siegler at TechCrunch might help.
“You are going to take over the call centre and make it profitable” the CEO said. I had been the Director of Strategic Services for a $3 million direct marketing startup for only about three months when the CEO handed me the 24 person call centre and made me Director of Operations.
I had never run a call centre before but I had managed many teams. So I spent the first 3 months observing and started building my plan. The plan was going to mean of lot of change for those 24 people. I knew that I would need to fire at least 3 of the current managers. I know I would also be rearranging the work to better align it with the talents of remaining managers. I knew that change was stressful and that, if not managed well, could end up creating an environment of such low morale that we’d be worse off than before I took over. So I needed to help people deal with change.
I reached out to an HR consultant I knew and she recommended Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson. I bought a dozen copies of the audiobook version and gave them out to people in the call centre (including the ones I planned to let go).
What a great book! They use the timeless idea of a parable - a story filled with meaning – to teach. It’s under 1 hour on audiobook and you will probably find you have more than a few laughs.
A number of the staff came back to me later and said that the book had really helped them in both their work and personal lives and that they had taken it home for their significant others to listen to and passed it around to friends.
I highly recommend it for anyone about to go through a big change or anyone struggling with change in their lives.
If you get it please let me know what you thought of it.
I often get hired to lead a specific marketing initiative for a mid-size firm. After I have worked with a particular executive for several months and trust has been established they often ask me to candidly tell them what I think the biggest issues at their company are. I almost never tell them it’s their marketing, or their lack of good IT systems. The biggest issues at mid-size firms are always related to their people: generally they have the wrong people in some key positions, they have no processes that identify talent during the hiring process and they have poor processes for managing talent within their organization. As such they have many people working in areas which they lack the talent for. This leads to low employee engagement which leads to poor customer service, low customer loyalty and ultimately puts a huge damper on profitability year after year.
So even though my primary practice is in helping mid-size firms grow profit using internet marketing, I have developed a secondary practice in employee engagement and talent management. Why? Because in the long run it will have a greater impact on profitability than any marketing strategy will. Gallup calls it the Gallup Path and the graphic above shows you the powerful linkage between talent management and sustainable profitability.
If you are an executive and are interested in a roadmap to sustainable profitability through managing your talent then the seminal works on this topic are a series of books put out by the Gallup organization. They are international best sellers and I give these books to executives more than any other business book. It’s most helpful to read the books in order starting with First, Break all the Rules and then moving on in the order below. They come in both book and audiobook form.
I spent the last 2 days at SES Toronto 2009, a global conference on Search Engine Marketing. Aside from catching up with friends and old colleagues, I enjoyed meeting Emanuel Rosen, the author of The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited and his was by far the best session. I liked it so much I bought his book and I swore I would not buy any more books until I had read the 5 beside my bed. Sound bite: 73% of buzz (viral sharing about brands) is in person, 17% by phone and 10% online. The top category people talk about is …… Food! Three meals a day… I guess it makes sense.
Most of the booths (other than Microsoft, Google and Yahoo) were small tech startups providing incredibly niche services that most of my CEO clients would be hard pressed to understand. And there is so much hype in this space. If you are not careful you can start to feel like you are a total loser because you didn’t name your kids based on the available domain names and google keyword bid estimates. Everywhere you turn someone is taking a photo with their iPhone and posting to Twitpic and Facebook. I had to send someone into the bathroom ahead of me to make sure the coast was clear.
Microsoft has a nice big booth promoting their new search engine bing.ca. Bing looks interesting and I’ll give it a try. I like competition – it keeps everyone on their game.
I came away with several good ideas on how to develop more successful social media campaigns for CPG clients – which is one of the biggest challenges out there. Here are some other random things I learned:
My big learnings from the SES Toronto 2009 conference:
You must stimulate your happy customers to talk in order to overcome the 30% of brand buzz that is negative and comes from people who have never used your brand.
We imitate some people and we distance ourselves from others. Fairly key ☺
If you want buzz you must give people something to talk about. There must be a good story. Check out “Will it blend iPhone” on YouTube below this list or Tom’s Shoes.
Dispersion matters. People are clustered into social silos and you must get buzz from across a diverse group of people, including across different social clusters, to predict success.
You have to prepared to do 10 social media initiatives to get 2 winners. Paraphrased from Jim McDowell of BMW.
Mobclix is a great tool for iPhone app developers. Great stats on best apps by category.
I often see a new person on a marketing team get invited to a creative presentation from an agency that’s presenting work started before they joined the team. The most common thing on their mind as they walk in is, “how will I comment on this when the agency, or my boss, asks me what I think?” Generally they just respond with some comments about whether the ads look nice or not – which is really just a waste of air in most cases.
So what should they do? Well, the most important piece of feedback the client needs to give the agency is whether or not the creative is on strategy or not, followed by whether or not it is well executed (and therefore elicits the desired emotion and response from the viewer). In order to comment on the strategy, you need to have it written down somewhere. So the first thing you should ask if you are the new person who gets asked to sit in on the creative presentation is, “where is the creative brief?” You can only assess if the creative is on or off strategy if you have something to compare it to.
Here’s how to respond to a creative presentation:
If you have a strong gut reaction, give it, but perhaps not as your first comment.
Even if you have lots of negative comments, try to start with something positive. Creative people need encouragement.
MOST IMPORTANT – Compare what you see to the Creative Brief and especially to the Advertising Strategy (Benefit, Brand Character, Design Theme). You have to have an Advertising Strategy to do this and it should have been in the Creative Brief. Your most important assessment and feedback is: is this ON STRATEGY or OFF STRATEGY.
Either send a follow-up email after the meeting summarizing your comments and requested changes or ask the agency to send you a follow-up email containing that.
For more perspective on why to take the time to write a good creative brief, check out this post.
You can purchase a detailed Creative Brief template with notes and explanations by clicking here.
When you hire an agency to make a marketing piece for you, do you take the time upfront to write out a detailed Creative Brief? Most people don’t, but great marketers do. As an Assistant Brand Manager at Procter & Gamble my Brand Manager always insisted that I write one. I often resented the time it took, just like I resented much of the process P&G forced me to follow as a new hire there. I was a young punk right out of business school and I knew everything. I just wanted to call the agency and tell them over the phone that I needed a direct mail piece made. But then I eventually became a Brand Manager and I too insisted that my staff take the time to write a creative brief before every project that involved contracting an outside agency. So what happened to me?
Well other than becoming Proctorized, I became convinced that the upfront time invested in a Creative Brief pays out in spades versus the “just call the agency and then add new requests every few days for the next month” method.
The purpose of writing a creative brief is to clarify our thinking upfront and to force us to make decisions at the beginning of the project so that the agency can start working on it with a complete picture of what we want. This process allows the design and production process to happen efficiently and therefore less expensively. People who don’t take the time to write a creative brief frequently end up making many changes to the requirements of the project during the project and this causes rework and ultimately leads to missed deadlines, higher costs and frustrated designers and agencies. A good creative brief should be so complete that if we handed it over to the agency and disappeared for the duration of the project, the end result should be pretty close to what we wanted.
Objection: If I spell all this out then why I am I paying my agency so much? Isn’t this their job.
No it’s not. The client owns the “strategy” (the content of the Creative Brief) and the agency owns bringing that strategy to life creatively. They are very different skills. Strategy is primarily about research, numbers, analytics, decision making models, and ultimately making clear choices. (In a small organization it is often just knowledge we have about our organization and stakeholders that we can’t expect the agency to know combined with some careful thought around the options and a sense of where we want to go in the future.) The creative process is about taking dry, sterile words and miraculously turning them into ideas and eventually executions that resonate, and produce emotion and action from the target audience.
Good agencies need the information in a Creative Brief in order to produce creative material that is “on strategy” for your brand. If we don’t give them a Communication Strategy then we are expecting them to create one for us out of thin air and that’s not their job. Their job is to take our Communication Strategy and bring it to life creatively in the elements we have asked for.
When we see their creative concepts or executions we should compare them back to the Creative Brief and ask, does their creative version communicate the message we asked for, even if in different words? If yes, then their creative is said to be “on strategy”, which it needs to be. If no, then their creative is “off strategy” and needs to be revised.
You can purchase a detailed 20 page Creative Brief template with notes and explanations by clicking here.
Google SketchUp is a free 3D content creation tool that has been available since April 1996. It was originally developed by @ Last Software and released in August 2000. Google acquired @ Last Software in 2006.
Implications:
The Tool:
Google SketchUp has the potential to radically alter the design playing field. While there will be many people who just download and use the tool for fun, it puts commercial quality design tools in the hands of anyone with a computer and access to the web.
One of the major changes of the past 10 years is that smart people living in the developing world are able to buy a computer and get web access at a reasonable cost and with that start to compete with North American based workers in fields like software coding, web coding and graphic design. They earn substantially more than their peers even when they charge rates that represent massive cost savings for North American companies.
With Google SketchUp these changes are coming to the commercial design industry.
The Community:
Google is great at creating communities and there is already a community developing around SketchUp. That community will only grow and it provides companies that currently design in North America and Europe an opportunity to access design talent from anywhere in the world and substantially increase the rate of new product innovation while lowering their costs.
