Well, it’s that time. The work is piling up like the leaves outside. You know what I’m talking about.

So while I’m getting down to business, I wanted to share some of the tools we use to get things done at Matterhorn.  Hopefully, there’s something in here that’s new to you, or we’re using it in a way that you haven’t thought of.

For all of our projects, we use 37 Signals’ Basecamp project management system. I don’t think there’s a better way for us to keep tabs on anything and everything you’re doing. It’s easy to use and great for planning. I particularly like how information like events or files can be viewed indiviually by category or together as a timeline of progress.

For social media, there are tons of tools that we use to listen around the internet for conversations that our clients can participate in.  Once we identify them, ping.fm is one way to post in several spheres at once.  It’s easy to get in “broadcast mode” with a tool like that, which will hurt you when you’re using social media for business, so be careful.

When I write in a word processor, I pretty much have to use MS Word (cutting edge, I know).  It’s too bad everyone uses Word- I like Apple’s Pages much, much better.  Even though I can export Pages to Word, the stuff that pages excels at, namely the ease of formatting, doesn’t translate sometimes.  So rather that deal with the headache, I just use Word.  Damn you, Word!  Be smarter!

If I’m writing directly to a blog, I’m in WordPress.  On the tech side, WP is easy to attach to the sites we build, and has so many bells and whistles, it’s pretty obvious that it’s the one that’s most ready for heavy lifting.  On the interface side, I can (mostly) format my posts however I like, and the dials are easy to tweak.

For staying current, I use an RSS reader.  There are tons out there, but I use google’s.  It’s got just about everything I want, and nothing I don’t, so it suits me.  I messed around with using Alltop for a while, but I ended up just sticking with my original digs.  There’s talk that Twitter will replace RSS, but meanwhile, I’ll use a reader.

Finally, for instant messaging we use Adium.  It recognizes almost every different IM client, so you only have to use one application to talk to almost anyone.  Plus, the duck icon will flap his arms around when you have a message :-)

There are tons more (Pat’s icons for SEO tools alone cover the desktops on 3 of his 4 screens); these are the basics, meaning, these are pretty much what I use everyday for the content and client side of things.

Thoughts?

Tags: blogs, content, content marketing, getting started in social media, project management, rss feeds

This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 11:10 am and is filed under Digital Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.