Your ability to communicate and keep your team working cohesively can be a mountain-scaling, yet necessary task for mastering entrepreneurship and selling online. The team that consistently serves, entertains and solves problems for customers and prospects in real-time will have an edge in the current and future landscape. The tides will always shift in their favor as it is proven that 70% of all buying decisions are based on how customers feel they’re being treated (per McKinsey). Social media is the perfect medium for treating clients well and your team needs to be working in unison to achieve this.
Regardless of the type of business you’re engaged in online, your trump card will, in many cases, be your team’s ability to respond to customers’ needs and communicate and give generously; none are tasks to be oversimplified, especially when serving a large client base or community. With access to a bountiful supply of new and tested collaboration tools and services, there certainly are no excuses for fouling up on managing your online marketing campaigns. These tools are the hallmark of the new industrial revolution that is currently taking place in social. They both amplify your organization’s work while allowing you to build a solid and closely-knit team and foundation.
Here are 7 powerful tools to get you on the right track and since 97% of businesses already using collaboration software have reported being able to service more clients efficiently, there’s no better time than now.
ClickMeeting
ClickMeeting is a glorious and feature-rich online collaboration tool used by giants like Sony and Siemens to help bring their internal teams together. The service provides a platform for users to share knowledge and resources and communicate who are separated over different geographical territories and departments. It’s a powerful app that creates bonds between decision makers, the everyday frontline worker and everyone in between by offering a nimble browser-based tool that works for all.
The service integrates major social network allowing seamless sharing and interactions with users online and a few other apps that compound its capabilities with file and desktop sharing, moderated chats, digital whiteboards, real-time translation, audio and video conferencing and polling and FAQ sessions and a ton of other features. ClickMeeting eliminates the need to conduct physical face to face group meetings allowing for more time to get things done.
Nimble
Nimble is a powerful service for merging not only your teams but also connecting all your points of contact with your marketing and communication world. It’s a client relationship management software as service that pulls contact information from both your social network accounts and email and merges email conversations and social signals into one place; enabling you to engage wherever and with whatever you’re working on. The service integrates with popular apps like Hootsuite, Google Apps for Business, browser extensions and has a mobile app.
The unique and most valuable experience nimble will deliver for you and your team is its ability to help you see your target market and clients’ social world as a unified connection making engaging, servicing and closing leads simpler.
Freedcamp
Freedcamp is a free and secure collaboration tool built for the startup team on a budget who needs get work done and at scale. Backed by an open source warranty, the web app simply enables you and your team to get things done with a focus on setting tasks, assigning responsible users, setting timelines and milestones, collecting and reviewing feedback and the ability to create multiple workspaces.
Its simplicity provides a somewhat distraction free experience that not only works for teams but even for the individual freelancer or entrepreneur with a need to keep work organized. A fine addition.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media engagement and team management solution that covers the gamut of personal and individual use such as keeping up with a small network of friends, family and associates to large scale enterprises that are overseeing campaigns that reach millions of people.
The Pro version of the service allows you to bring together your marketing team to actively engage with clients over a broad cross section of social media accounts. A setting typically found in large organization and media agencies. The app helps you to organize your company by team, department and region while delegating tasks and streamlining workflows geared towards leveraging social connections and marketing activities.
Coggle.it
Coogle.it is not your traditional social collaboration tool but boasts simplifying mind-mapping to help individuals and teams get things done cohesively through bringing together complex ideas and merging itineraries and scope. Coggle.it is doing mind-mapping right and perfects what other similar tools get wrong, which is usually making mind-mapping a mind-maddening and confusing task.
This free service is different and the creative team, who built it, dedicated their efforts to making the design and features as intuitive as possible; making planning, collaborating and recording thoughts as seamless as writing on a sheet of paper.
Salesforce Chatter
Chatter is an enterprise social network that allows users to synchronize and keep in touch without ever using email or the multitude of social networks crowding our daily lives. Built on the robust and highly customizable Salesforce1 platform, the service brings teams together by making business social. Teams are able to discuss ideas, share resources and experience in real-time to land sales opportunities, access project updates and other resources via the mobile app as well.
With the purchase of 1 CRM license, the app is free for up to 5,000 employees and even goes a step beyond the typical capabilities of collaboration tools to helping you create vibrant private communities to better connect with and serve customers. Chatter also helps eliminate the lag time typically experienced in companies where knowledge, guidance and resources need to be shared between various departments and employees in different time zones.
Podio
Podio is another collaboration app with a unique, robust and powerful set of tools designed to bring teams and departments together while customizing the experience. Podio’s customization features are only matched by Salesforce’s basic CRM product as it allows anyone with any point and click and business experience, to build custom, field driven mini-apps within the system to collect and analyze data. To further support Podio’s ecosystem and improve the service’s application to a wide variety of users, they’ve built a thriving marketplace that allows anyone with a custom app to share their versions and download others that may suit their needs.
It’s a service that can scale and morph into whatever you want it to be and is suitable for teams in growth mode who need the freedom to build their work tools as they grow.
Integrating collaboration tools to help bolster your team’s social media marketing activities and bring ideas and goals together is a sure win for any company, large or small. Industries all around are experiencing significant gains in efficiency, improved sales, better access to knowledge and more streamlined workflows (per Clinked). Introducing a collaboration tool into your business may be the kickstart your teams needs.
