sutton088

PickyDomains -   Risk free domain naming service Social media is all about connection and networking, but it's also distraction and procrastination in their finest, pixelated forms. Help your team use social media productively with these tips. Define the End Goals for Social Media Use Who's doing what, and why? Social media professionals know that without clear goals, social media use becomes a chaotic mess of button-clicking and key-tapping. You have to know what you're attempting in order to know if you're getting close. What are the end goals for social media in your business and for your team? Define these and you are giving your team members a way to quickly determine if their use of social media is helping to reach those goals. Discuss Limits for Social Media Use Defining goals and assigning roles will help your team members know how to use social media in a productive way... that is, in a way that is helping them to reach those goals. For some, social media use ...

PickyDomains - Risk free domain naming service Email has become one of the biggest detriments to productivity. Your team members are spending 28% of their workweek dealing with email : reading it, responding to it, processing it. In other words, an entire day of a five-day workweek is spent on email. Is email really that important? Of course, email provides convenience. We can communicate across the globe instantly. When email becomes an overload of unnecessary communication, however, the burden outweighs the benefit.     Check Yourself First Start by making sure you're part of the solution, not the problem. If you like to communicate by email about everything... If you like to use group emails to discuss projects, tasks, clients, and the company holiday party... If you keep multiple email threads going with multiple employees every day... If you expect immediate replies to your emails... ...then you might be part of the problem. If you have trained your employees that they m...

PickyDomains - Risk free domain naming service Tired of your calendar causing more confusion than clarity? Use these pro tips to handle your crowded calendar and get back in charge of your time. Build Trust with Your Calendar If you don't use your calendar well, and check it regularly, you can't trust it. And if you don't trust your calendar - and really, yourself to use it well - then you won't be helped by having a calendar. Mentally you won't be able to get the relief you should from dumping all time-bound information into your calendar. You will suspect your calendar, and depend on your brain to remember and remind you. The problem is that your brain isn't very reliable. A calendar, used well and regularly, is reliable. But you have to use it well in order to trust it, and you have to trust it in order to benefit from it. Check Your Calendar Often At a minimum, you should check your calendar every morning to see what's on the schedule for the day. What e...

PickyDomains - Risk free domain naming service Your team works well together, solves problems, and comes up with innovative, unique ideas. Except when they don't. If your team is in a creative slump, here are five ways you can end it. 1. Identify the Blocks Denial is your enemy. Awareness is your friend. If everybody is sitting around, pretending like everything is going just fine, you need to step in. Open the discussion so that they can be open about their difficulties. Ask questions and listen to their answers. Chances are, they already know a few issues - or, perhaps, many - that are causing blocks. Set up a team meeting and talk about what is blocking the normal creative flow you have come to expect from them. The goal of the meeting should not be to destroy all creative blocks, but to figure out what they are. Sometimes, talking through the issue will prove to the solution. If communication problems, personality conflicts, or internal stress is the source of reduced creativit...

Ideas are worthless unless implemented. To make the most of those creative brains on your small team, you can’t have a brainstorming session and leave it at that. You need to have a system in place to manage ideas fr om the initial burst of insight to complete execution.   The Three Stages of   Idea Management   There are three essential stages in idea management:   Stage 1: Capture/Input Stage 2: Feedback/Analysis Stage 3: Decision/Action   All three stages are necessary. With a smaller team, you can move more quickly fr om one to another, but you still need to work in the right order to manage ideas effectively.   Stage 1: Effective Collection   The best ideas are often the ones that sound a little crazy. Sadly, those are the ideas we are most likely to reject because they sound, well, a little crazy. It’s important to create a truly   open space where all of the ideas can come out and introduce themselves . Welcome all ideas equally in order to...

Note - this article has been originally written for   TheNextWeb .   PR is hard. And expensive. Most of the time, you get nothing out of it. And when your company finally is mentioned in an article, even in a big publication, the results can be disappointing. Like that time when we got a whooping 169 visitors after getting into ZDNet .   Over the past two years, I’ve made a lot of PR mistakes. I’ve also got Bitrix24 into Forbes, VentureBeat, ReadWrite, PCWorld, PCMag, TechRepublic, CIO, ITWorld and 200+ other tech publications. I’ve learned that what you do with the article AFTER it’s published is frequently a lot more important than what do you before. And I am happy to share my insights with you.   1.   Pay for LinkedIn Inmail.   LinkedIn Inmail is the cheapest and most effective way to pitch journalists. My account cost me $100 a month and at least 50% of all mentions of Bitrix24 in the press are results of LinkedIn pitches. The most amazing thing about ...

So you are planning to launch a company intranet or want to replace your fossilized SharePoint portal. There are more than 30 intranet vendors to choose fr om and you are lost. After all, intranets aren't cheap and you don't want to make a mistake. Don’t worry, this intranet evaluation checklist will help narrow down your intranet choices to only the best solutions:   1. Cloud AND self-hosted.   You ONLY want solution that gives you these two choices and most vendors do. Cloud-based intranet services are usually very inexpensive and require no involvement fr om intranet developers who charge a pretty penny. That’s a plus. However, cloud intranets have few customization options and some, like Yammer, are known to have   regular and prolonged outages . You want to have an option to migrate to cloud (if your intranet budget is slashed) or go from cloud to server (if you need customization or for compliance in your industry) any time you want to. Stay away from vendors wh ere...