There’s lots of talk about innovation, and digital and digital innovation and innovating digitally, but how much does it really achieve? Tweeters, Bloggers, Facebook junkies and technology advocates, the Web 3.0 harbingers, 2.0 monkeys and social media specialists… most of what I see makes life easier for people that have spent a lot of time complicating their digital engagements (myself included). How much use is a tool like Ping to someone who doesn’t even use one of the channels it aggregates? UnHub is awesome, but if it only links to one page, what USE is it?
The train of thought I’m on at the moment is all about applying this stuff to something other than marketing and keeping my browser tabs to a minimum. The power of the tools we boffins use every day is largely unrealised, and in order to take best advantage of it, we need to roll things back a bit and really look at the core functions these tools carry out.
What better way to introduce new users and audiences to a tool than by integrating it into their lives to solve a problem that they already actually have?
I am finding blogs to be the hub of this, and they are super-awesomely useful.
I run blogs as the central portal for projects, with key milestones and documents hosted there-on. Nice, hey? Means that the stakeholders and influencers can log on any time and check progress, even comment on it and feedback. And if they’re up for it, I can make users ‘admins’ so they can post and edit along with me.
From a blog you can run a plain old RSS feed and use it to update people wherever they like, ping, Facebook, twitter, the lot.
And running multiple projects can get complicated, so I feed the RSS from all these blogs into one blog (and my feedreader) and I generate a to do list. Well, I say I, but it’s really the internets doing it all for me.
There, I just circumvented email as the core contact channel and made a trackable, time based, version controlled project management sytem.
That’s enough for this afternoon, I have a lot of coffee to get through yet.
