 These are my top five tools for working off-site. Welcome to the We Are Slam show where we share marketing insights, best practices, and ideas to help your business grow. My name is Tyler Kelly. I'm the co-founder and chief strategist here at Slam Agency. We're a digital-first marketing agency with our own in-house creative. We're really fortunate to be able to all work in the same room together, the creatives, the strategists, the copywriters to kind of make magic happen. But what happens in a world where people don't go into the office, they're working from home, and they're trying to collaborate and do amazing things without ever being in the same room? So this is the question that many marketing directors are asking if they tell everyone that, you know, we're just going to work from home for a month. How are we going to get things done? Is it even possible to do your best work when you're not in the same building? I'm going to share with you the tools that we use to do our best work from anywhere in the world. Now, I know that there's a couple agencies nationally that they don't even have a physical location, that they just work with freelancers and they have team members all over the country, all over the world. And that's a really great model. It doesn't work for SLAM because, you know, we like to connect in person. We do our best work when we're together. But there are times when we're not able to always be together. So these are my top five tools for working offsite, working from home if you can't make it to the office. As a marketing director, these are the tools that you have to have in place to be able to do work online and in the cloud. First up is communication. Now of course we have email, but email can sometimes get bogged down. The way that I like to use email is as a tool to communicate with people outside the organization. If I'm communicating inside the organization, then the tool that I use and number five on my list is Slack. Slack is a chat tool that allows you to connect in ways that you would expect through chat. I like Slack because it's simple and in its simplicity and ease of use, there are advanced features that allow you to do some really cool things with hashtags and private channels and connecting with other Slack workspaces. This is what makes Slack amazing. It allows us to, number one, be connected on our phones and on our desktops. And it allows us to communicate, the way that I like to communicate with digital communication is if it's super important, pick up the phone and call me. If your number's in my phone, I'm going to answer. If it's slightly less important than a phone call would require, then send me a text. If it is something that you just need a response back within the hour or two, Slack me. And if it's something where you need a response back today, possibly tomorrow, depending on what time you send it, send me an email. This is that priority of communication. My team knows that regardless of where I am, if they need me, they can Slack me. Number four, project management. As a marketing director, you need project management in the cloud. You need to be able to go to the www.and access the projects that you're working on. You need to be able to communicate with your team. You need to be able to see deadlines and requirements and files and all this good stuff should all be within one system. The system that we like to use is Asana. It really is, I think, the best project management tool and here's an insider tip. We've been using the free version for over five years. There's so much that you can do with the free version of Asana that you don't even need to upgrade. We've been using it with, you know, 100 plus clients and it works. We love it. Asana, number four, project management. Number three, video communication. This is critical. Number one is a marketing director. You want to make sure that your people are engaged. Conference calls, you don't know what they're doing. I mean, they can be sitting there browsing Facebook or, you know, doing their nails or whatever the case may be. With a video communication, with a video call, you know, right off the bat, they're engaged in that they're paying attention. On the sales side, on the biz dev side, video communication is important because it allows you to build familiarity, likability. It allows you to make that personal connection. Very important things that video allows you to do that at just a regular conference call. Wouldn't. So what are my favorite apps for this? For most communications, Google Hangouts is my preferred choice. Number one, it provides a conference line and a video link that is right there in the Google Calendar. So I can just, I can just select to use Google Hangout. And then my person on that calendar invite, my inviteee will get a link to meet me in the Google Hangouts room. And in that room, I can present my screen. I can share my desktop and I can really, I can do what I need to do. I can see their face and we can communicate that way. If you're working with a larger group of people, then the hot app right now is Zoom Video Communications. With recent world news, Zoom, I believe has just like exploded, you know, in the stock market. They're doing amazing because they really do allow you to connect with large groups of people via video communication and it's stable. That's what makes it, that's what makes it great. But at number three, you need a video communications tool for most people. Google Hangouts will suffice and for everyone else, Zoom Video Communications. Before I go to number two, just a little side note. Something to think about is, you know, how are you going to connect with people on the phone when need be? A lot of people use VoIP. We use Grasshopper in many cases. I know there's several others that are out there. But think about that generally, though, all you need to do today is forward, if you're still using landlines, forward that landline to the person's cell phone and done, right? Easy peasy. The other thing to think about is time management. Now we don't currently use time management tools here at SLAM, but if we did, you know, we might look at something like a toggle or a rescue time just to keep track of what it is that we're doing. You know, one of my first jobs out of college, I developed websites, and this is pre-word press, websites for a home builder based in Eden, California. And what I found very quickly is after about a year of doing this was that I wasted a lot of time during the day, which just made me have to work longer at night. But ultimately, you know, this was not something that I necessarily enjoyed. Being home all day, waking up, rolling out of bed, jumping straight on the computer, like that human connection was missing. I mentioned video as a way to kind of make that personal connection. But the other way is to make sure that you're spending your time effectively. That way you can get out of the house, go on a walk, you can do things, break up your day, and you're not just on a computer for 14 or 15 hours a day, because it's that easy. Number two, I want you to think about jotting down notes, and there's a couple of different ways to do this. Number one is if you're proofing or if you're making corrections on any sort of image that appears on your screen, then you're going to need some sort of screen grabbing capability. A lot of times this is just baked right into Windows or iOS, but in those instances where you don't have that as part of your capability, then full page screen capture, which is an extension for Google Chrome, is probably one of my favorite screen grabbers. I love it because in a browser, unlike the snippet tool in Windows or something, unlike that where you can just kind of just get the screen, the full page screen capture will actually scroll down your website page and capture the entire page, which is important and you can take it into paint or into your graphics editor, mark it up and run with it. Typically if you're used to working with the team, you might just print that out, you might make some notes on it, but when you're not in the same place, that's not possible, so you need some sort of screen grab with the capability to jot down your notes. The other thing I really like for jotting down notes is Everlast Rocketbook. I've got one right here. Check this out. This is a Rocketbook and essentially what this is, is it's all these pages that aren't actually paper. I use an erasable pen. I'm able to jot down my notes, I'm able to shoot, you know, take a scan of this QR code and then I can direct where I want this page to go and it's going to do that based on the app. It's going to shoot it to wherever that final destination is, all based on this and then this is super sustainable and great for the environment because at that point I can erase this page with a little bit with a damp rag. I can erase this page and good as new, I can use it again. So one of my favorites, combine this with a Evernote and you've got yourself a great way to make notes and store notes online to communicate with your team that way. And my number one tool for working from home to be able to do the things that you do in-house when you're not able to be in-house. My number one tool would be a password manager. There's a lot of password managers out there, but essentially the idea is that it's super secure and that it allows you as an organization to put all of your passwords into the cloud in a way that each site has its own password that's you know, super encrypted and hard to hack and each person has their own password so they don't even see all the different passwords that are in your organization's folders, if you will, but what they can do is they can access them and they can go to each site, they can go to each login and they can do what they need to do wherever they are on a computer with a password tool. This is super important. If you're not using one now, you should be. The one that we like is Roboform everywhere. You know, we tested a lot of password manager tools and this one really was for us the best one. So we pay per user and we've been doing that for several years. It was one of the best decisions we made. At first it was a nightmare to kind of organize, you know, client passwords and internal passwords and all these different passwords. But once you get those organized, it's super secure and it allows your team to work from any computer anywhere in the world without jeopardizing security. OK, so if you've been watching the news and you're thinking that what am I going to have to do? Should the time come where it's like we have to go work from home for a while? If that's the case, this list of tools, jump on it right now. These are the tools that you need to get to the place where you're able to do that. Of course, I don't think it's going to get that bad, but in the event that you need to travel and you need to keep in touch with your team, you need to continue to do work. If this is the case, then these are the tools that can set you on the path to be able to work remote. If you've enjoyed this episode, do me a favor, subscribe, rate and review. And if you're watching on a network where you can leave a comment, do so. I read every comment that you leave and I look forward to engaging with you. Visit us at slamagency.com. I look forward to getting to know you. Thank you for tuning in. I will see you next week. Thanks for watching. If you like what you just watched, subscribe, then hit that bell. You'll be the first to be notified when new content goes live. After that, you can watch more videos from Slam Agency. We've picked something we think you'll love.