Author: Mel Kirk
Posted on: 2nd Mar 2015
The key to staying on top of things in any business is organisation and productivity – be it with your day-to-day tasks or with larger projects, using the appropriate tools for the job is vital if you want to make the most of your time and be succesful in your professional life.
This is something Tribal Media‘s Mel Kirk faces on a daily basis as her business goes through rapid expansion, and being a self-confessed geek, Mel understands how technology can help people in any business, so we asked her to share some of her favourite digital tools that she uses on a daily basis to ensure she stays ahead of the game…
Google Drive
This allows me to collaborate on documents with my team, which is great as it’s updated in real-time and because it’s saved on the cloud can be accessed on any device in any location, which really speeds up the process when multiple people are working on one document.
Feedly
A great tool for consuming content from your favorite news sites and blogs, particularly with the recent death of Google Reader. With the ability to read articles offline, this is really handy for catching up on news during the morning commute.
Tweetdeck
Handy for managing multiple social media presences from one location, scheduling future updates, but also keeping on top of mentions of brands/organisations that you manage.
A beautifully designed bookmarking service that allows you to save articles offline to go back to read at a later date.
Salesforce
We use this to manage all of our contacts, as it can be accessed by any member of the team, is automatically updated and allows us to save every piece of correspondence that we have with our contacts. In turn this means that any one of the team can pick up a conversation with a contact should someone be out of the office sick, for example. What’s great is that it’s also stored in the cloud and therefore accessible from any location.
Storify
The best tool out there for collating tweets, blog posts, Instagram pictures, YouTube videos etc. into one simple story. We use this to showcase our work and the coverage that we’ve gained for our clients/campaigns all in one place, and then we can access and share it to anyone at any time.
We use this less conventionally than most. We use this as a way of visualising campaign ideas, especially creating mood boards for events. This makes it much easier for our clients to imagine what could be produced and takes less time and effort than a traditional mood board.
Evernote
This has a few uses – you can save articles or links for viewing on any device at any time a bit like Pocket, but it also lets you save notes, images, and almost anything else to different notebooks based on personal or business use, or for different projects or subject matter. I know the Confederation of Professional Golf team use this one a lot in their day-to-day work.
EasilyDo
Great little iPhone app for putting all of your “handy stuff” together. It will proactively check traffic before you drive somewhere, warn you of bad weather, organise contacts, merge duplicates, file receipts, remind you of conference calls with all of the details – It’s like my digital PA!
Author: Mel Kirk
Read more by Mel Kirk
Mel Kirk is the Founder and Managing Director of Tribal Media (TribalMedia.co.uk), an agency that helps brands engage with bloggers, and has worked with clients such as Kellogg’s, Microsoft, MTV, Samsung and Sky Sports. Having also been a video blogger for 7 years at Randommel.com, Mel understands the importance that bloggers can play for brands in a world that is ever reliant upon word of mouth recommendations.
Follow Mel on Twitter here: @Tribal_Media / @MelKirk
