Blog
Things on our radar
Simplicity in internal communication
Who says ’social technology’ is for brand building, marketing, sales and fun?
The rise in popularity of things like Twitter (ie – microblogging), RSS (think the news being brought to you) and dashboards (updates relevant to you) are changing the way businesses communicate.
There are three tools out there worth considering for any size organisation:
These are both very similar products. Yammer, I believe has been around a bit longer. Think Twitter with a bit more (like longer messages, file attachments and groups) for internal business use.
At Software Testing Club we’ve been using Yammer for several months now – we all work in different locations so face to face contact is virtually non-existent. The amount of emails flying around was very difficult to cope with. Now that we have Yammer, we have reduced our emails by around 99%.
This one isn’t out yet, but it looks very interesting and I really want to get my hands on trying it out. It seems to go a few steps further by integrating with popular Social Networking sites (I believe Facebook and Twitter) to help communicate with customers or potential customers.
Personally I would like to see SocialCast and Yammer follow the route of integrating with social networks or having the opportunity to create an internal social media dashboard. That would really scratch one of my big itches.
Like all tools, they are just tools. Often the biggest challenge is user adoption – it can be really hard to get people to use them consistently and effectively.
Share those books!
Seth Godins post on sharing his Linchpin and other books very much aligns with what we at Schux do.
We love books and find Amazon very (and dangerous for our bank account). I don’t know about you, but once I read a book I know that I will never read it again. Even if it is really good I find that there are just too many other books that are on my priority list.
So at Lewes Werks (a coworking space we work at) we put all these books that we have read so that anyone else within our community can borrow or share them. Books often never come back, but that’s ok. Sometimes new ones appear, but even if they don’t we feel that sharing is the right thing to do.
Useful online photo editing tools
Editing of images is essential to maintain any website or online presence. The standard image editing tools that come as standard with Macs or PCs simply don’t do the job well.
There are a couple of online tools that come with generous free access. There is the option to upgrade to premium/paid versions, but quite often the free versions are sufficient.
We’d recommend checking out Picnik and Photoshop.com.
If you’re looking for a downloadable and easy to use app for the Mac then Pixelmator is worth a look. (This is what I use on a daily basis).
Happy image editing!