I work as Account Director in video agency. I lead our sales team but I also have own clients which I lead from the agency’s side. This means I need to be updated and aware with deadlines, project management, resource allocation and so on. I work closely with our producers, their job is to take care of the practical things in different productions. I’m also in touch with our clients quite often. My main task is to understand our customers business and try to figure out how our solutions can add value to theirs.

In my work we use lots of different digital tools. Most of them are chosen by us, but some are provided to us by our customers. Some of our customers have a specific app or software and from their request we need to activate that specific system in our own use as well. That means we really need to be quite flexible with new digital tools.

Screencapture from Frame.io

For our sales and marketing team the most important tool is Hubspot. This is a CRM, marketing automation and sales management software that collects our customer info’s, sales activity’s and deals under the same register. I can estimate the future sales and see how specific salesperson or team is doing in general just with few clicks. We’ve used Hubspot for more than 5 years and it’s been a lifesaver in many ways.  

We do our internal communication mostly by using Slack, Outlook, Teams (video call) and phone calls. Some quick chats are made via Slack, but most of the one-to-one recaps I do either via phone call or Teams video call. To me it is these two are most efficient and effective way to communicate and have a discussions. The projects are mainly managed in OneNote and Google drive. We share documents and other important materials via these cloud services. For the video commenting and sharing we use specific frame.io-app. That app is made for smooth video sharing and easy commenting. Our customers are able to add comments to the video easily just by pausing the video and typing a comment to the comment box. This app has helped our work a lot.

With our customers we use mainly Outlook, phone calls and Teams / Hangouts for communicating. These are simple and quick apps to use. Luckily most of our customers are used to use these platforms and it makes our work and meeting request sending simple.

Social media

I already use quite many different digital tools in my work life but also in my free time. I’ve noticed that my daily screentime (with my phone) has decreased from 5 hours to 2,5-3 hours in past 6 months. To me the reason is simple: I’ve had a lot in my plate lately and I just haven’t got bored. I started to dig into this and noticed a research where people were asked their top uses of social media. Based on this study “filling spare time” was the second big reason why people use social media in general. The biggest reason and almost half of respondents to the survey said that “Staying in touch with friends and family” was the reason.

Top uses of social media

That’s where we come to the good things. Thanks to social media keeping in touch with our friends and family hasn’t never been easier and simpler. No matter where you are, you can easily open a chat conversation or a video call with our mates. Thanks to the comprehensive network and cheap mobile data prizes that is possible to everyone. Thanks to social media you can also see news that you couldn’t see or hear. You can educate our self or someone else just by joining the conversation. There is a saying that social media makes the world looks smaller.

Social media have two faces – it connects, educates and brings things closer to you. By doing that it also allows a new way to influence people. It opens doors to fake news and false claims that can be brought out the way that the reader thinks are real. The motives can be political, financial or just intentionally malicious. Multiple studies have found a strong link between heavy social media and an increased risk for depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm, and even suicidal thoughts. We can say that social media can be dangerous if not consumed in moderation.

New Social Media Apps for Me

Below you can find 5 new social media tools / apps I haven’t recognized before. It was pretty hard to find new tools but definitely worth of it!

BeReal – Social media app

BeReal is a photo-sharing app that allows its users post a photo per day to show their followers what they are doing in real-time. This app is a fresh change to the social medias polished and planned posts because the picture must be taken right away when BeReal sends you the photo request.

It’s hard to say what business benefits it could do for you but let’s say it would be a great tool for internal communication. It would affect positively to work spirit. Especially when working remote you could share a photo of the day by bring your colleagues to closer each other’s.

Monday.com

Monday is a project management platform – which has done a lot of marketing effort towards me. I think I’ve seen at least 15 Monday.com video ads in past 3 months. Eventough the ads are good and the app looks good I think we are not (yet) ready to use this app in my organization. The reason is simple, we already have some many apps that adding one more wouldn’t be the solutions it would make the problem even bigger.

All in all, Monday.com looks one of the most intuitive platforms I’ve seen in long. You can create different project management steps, projects and contact persons with just a click or two. this is something we should try with our project management in near future.

Salesforce

Salesforce provides customer relationship management software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development. I chose this tool to investigate because I’ve heard several talks about this platform lately. I watched few tutorials about it would look and what could be the benefits by using it. In summary it is pretty similar to Hubspot we are now using. By comparing these two services I think that Hubspot still takes to gold medal in this comparison. It seems that Salesforce might be better customization, analytics and advanced features. HubSpot trumps Salesforce when it comes to user-friendliness and low-cost plans. In our company we don’t have UI- or UX-designers, so by using all ready existing platforms we get the best out of it.

Discord

My journey stops next to Discord. I’m not sure if I’ve seen the app-logo before, but when searching new digital apps in year 2022 Discord is one of the most popular ones. So after watching few videos (again videos) I’m confident this is something I should definitely get to nknow much more. Discord is a free communications app that lets you share voice, video, and text chat with friends and other peers. It has hundreds of millions of users, so it is already a pretty big platform.

There are different “channels” (called servers) where you can chat about the servers topic with random people. By my founding’s the hype about this app is coming from younger generation. This is something that millennials or older are not using commonly so it makes it cooler for younger generation to use.

I tried to figure how would this app help us in our work. Like Jodel, this app would be great for field work while creating ideas for our customers whose target group is younger generations.

Miro

Miro is the online collaborative whiteboard platform that enables distributed teams to work effectively together and for example help people to do brainstorming in remote meetings. The use of this app has grown in the past three years when working from home has decreased a lot. This app looks simple and intuitive to use. You can see what other people are doing at the same time in the board and you can zoom in or out easily with your fingertips.

This app will be taken in use with my colleagues. By using this app it will be a lot easier to create new ideas and visually and effectively. This is something that will make your cooperation much smoother in our company.

SELFEVALUATION

This third theme was the most “hands on” theme for me. I really wanted to dig and find new social media tools, because I knew these is something I eventually must learn. This is a good example about how fast the digital transformation and development is. In my work I need to be on a pulse with trends and new digital tools. The information I get today might be updated in week or month.

E.g.TikTok was a channel for dance videos last year, now it’s a channel for every big brands for reaching their customers. It was interesting also to read other people blog posts about this specific topic. The posts where a cross section about the public conversation about social media. Some people are a bit scared how it changes the world and builds a gap between generations, and then some people see it more as a positive change and mandatory development.

I learned five new digital tools and this assignment also reminded that the right way to use social media is reasonable use only.

Reference:

Gaubys, J. (no date) Why do people use social media? [Jul 2022 update], Oberlo. Oberlo. Available at: https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/why-do-people-use-social-media (Accessed: October 12, 2022).

salesforce (2022) What is Salesforce? | Salesforce explained EP. 1, YouTube. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx2sK-QiBjw (Accessed: October 12, 2022).

Social Media and Mental Health (no date) HelpGuide.org. Available at: https://www.helpguide.org/articles/mental-health/social-media-and-mental-health.htm#:~:text=The%20negative%20aspects%20of%20social%20media&text=However%2C%20multiple%20studies%20have%20found,about%20your%20life%20or%20appearance (Accessed: October 12, 2022).

What is discord and how to use it? (2021) YouTube. Available at: https://youtu.be/3gr4h_4Nn8g (Accessed: October 12, 2022).

What is Miro? – miro support & help center (no date). Available at: https://help.miro.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017730533-What-Is-Miro- (Accessed: October 12, 2022).