Productivity

Four must-have digital tools for creative marketers

Byong Bark is Creative Director at social media marketing firm, Social Envi. He shares the four tools that he relies on every day to create successful social campaigns for clients including Belkin, eHarmony and hot sauce connoisseurs, Tapatío.

Byong Bark - Creative Director at Social EnviThere used to be a lot of yelling. Not so much because we were expressing our anger through volumes of passionate, poorly chosen, inappropriate words, but because it was easier to communicate that way when it was just a few of us sitting at one table. We would have our ears plugged with headphones to alleviate the cackle of clacking keyboards, so there used to be a lot of yelling. Now we have these tools.

Project management
When you have three people on a team, it’s often easier to simply ask them what they’re up to, where they’re at or what they’re available to do. When you have to wade through multiple projects with multiple people on different arms and legs of an octopus operation, it’s easier to see where they’re at when using a system to keep tabs on progress. Trello does that for us. It’s a digital scrum board, a lot prettier than sticky notes on a white board and a lot less annoying when that one task, that gets bounced from in-progress to finished and back to in-progress with extra sticky notes attached, now refuses to stick because the darn thing has lost all its stickiness. Burn your white board to the ground. Get Trello instead.

Trello sample screen

Collaboration
Revision hell is a terrible place to be. Multiple file versions, sent via multiple emails from multiple people with multiple opinions leads to multiple headaches. Hightail was something we didn’t know we needed, until we used it. A lot of visual content gets thrown around here at Social Envi and being able to leave notes on particular parts of an image as well as stacking different versions on top of each other for organization was a dream come true. It works well internally and client-facing as well. Being able to express your thoughts and ideas in the actual work itself, rather than having to pull notes from an email and cross reference it with the asset is so much better for collaborating.

Social Envi Space for Sharky's Woodfired Grill

Listening and engagement
Engaging with people through the brands they love is part of the ensemble of services we offer for our clients. Sprout Social is a personal favorite because of its ease of use, clean and simple interface and some pretty decent reporting. It may not be as robust as some of the other tools out there, but we run pretty lean here and Sprout helps to keep things that way. It also shows you the history of conversations you’ve had with people, which helps prevent awkward robotic responses when engaging the same person at different times.

sprout

Asset creation
Adobe Creative Cloud logoAt the heart and soul of what we do is create great content. Photography, video, design, UX, web and even sound production, we do with Adobe Creative Cloud. There are plenty of free, lite alternatives, even apps on mobile that can help achieve similar results, but you won’t get the polish, that extra sheen, the flexibility and power that Adobe offers. If I wore makeup, I’d wear Adobe Photoshop.

To find out more about Social Envi, visit www.socialenvi.com and follow them on Twitter and Instagram.

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