Thought I’d share my experiences of using online task management site, ‘Remember the Milk‘. It’s a fantastic free tool that allows you to setup to-do lists for ‘Personal, Work and Study’ tasks. Tasks can be added to lists, priorities can be set and details can be added such as deadline, related notes, links and much more. It’s like taking all those pieces of paper with ‘To-do’ written on them and putting them into a friendly, easy to use, web 2.0 format.

I’ve only been using the Personal and Work tasks as I’m not studying at the moment, but it’s already made a huge difference to how I work.

Using Remember the Milk at home

At home I am far more effective at getting things done, I’ll often say “I’ll do that later” and then forget about it - but now I can put it on my task list and set the deadline for it. I’m usually an organised person without Remember the Milk but adding it into the mix has made me super-organised.

Using Remember the Milk at work

At work is where Remember the Milk really comes into its own. In my role I get regular emails and phone calls, or words in the corridor, from colleagues asking for things to be done on the website etc. Remember the Milk allows me to jot all these tasks into one big list, prioritise them and add keywords. This means I can group tags together easily.

Setting the list of work for the day is much easier. The tasks due that day come up, ranked by priority and I get cracking. Rather than rooting through emails, bits of paper and relying on the old grey matter, I can waste no time and just get straight on with the task at hand.

The notes section has been extremely useful, allowing me to add those extra bits that people put into emails and attaching them to the task. This means I don’t have to go back through my inbox and find the relevant emails from colleagues.

I really like the tagging ability of Remember the Milk. You’re able to tag each task with relevant words, so far example a task called ‘add new environment templates to website’ might be tagged with ‘environment, templates, website’ - so if I am asked to focus on “that environment campaign we are running” I can quickly call up all the tasks relating to the environment and get on with them.

Things I’d like to see with Remember the Milk

There’s a few ways I would like to see Remember the Milk improved, some of them are for moe to explore more. I think the calender function should be easier to use. I’ve tried to use the iCalender function but it won’t work on my browser for some reason, so an easier to use calender would be fantastic to slot meetings in to.

I haven’t used the mobile phone function yet due to not having a mobile that’s powerful enough. I still have a Nokia 6630 brick - which does calls and texts which is all I need really! But I’d definitely try the integration with your mobile if you’ve got a phone with good internet browsing etc.

There’s huge potential with Remember the Milk for the sharing of tasks. I’m going to see our HR manager and show her the potential to allocate tasks, show what tasks have been achieved etc - it could make everyone more effecient and accountable. It would also help at the end of meetings where everyone says ‘Right, what’s going to happen now and who is doing what?’. The tasks could be allocated there and then into people’s workflows with deadlines set.

How have you been using it?

Are you using Remember the Milk? Are you using something else, another online task management tool? How have you been using it? Has it made you more effective and organised?

Image for this post used under creative commons from flickr user Auntie P

personal branding

This month’s topic over on Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists is an interesting one and one that I voted for in our very democratic way of deciding December’s topic. What have you done to build your brand online?

See where you are online

The first thing I did was go and see what is out there about me on the internet. A quick Google of my name ‘ed walker’ made me realise first of all: a) I have a really common name b) There’s a ‘Sir Edward Walker’ - not me. Having a common name is the first hurdle in building a brand online, because if you’re called Japhael Jiminez - chances are you’re pretty unique.

Start a blog

Starting a blog is a must. This should be the core of your brand online. This is where you live and breath online. If possible try and buy your own domain and a bit of hosting, as having your name as a yourname.com/.co.uk/.net will help massively when it comes to boosting yourself up those all important Google rankings. After starting your blog and making it look pretty, get posting. Post about stuff that matters to you, it’ll probably matter to other people. Your blog should be your living CV, blog about stuff you’re working on, your success’ and even some of your failures. Make sure you’ve got an ace ‘About’ page, so that if people want to know more about you they can find out.

Link to people

You’re not going to build this brand alone. When posting on your blog, link out and link far and wide. If you link to people, they will probably come and look at your blog and see who you are. They might even link back if they like your stuff!

Have a good presence on LinkedIn

Forget Facebook, Bebo, MySpace etc, LinkedIn is the professional networking site and it can be used by potential employers to find you and see who you are and what you do. Ensure your profile is fully filled out, keep it updated reguarly and you’ll be surprised how much traffic it can bring to your blog and also how highly LinkedIn profiles rank in Google and other search engines.

Claim your blog on Technorati

Technorati is the bloggers website. It’s important to claim your blog as this will tell you who is linking to you and give you an authority ranking. As more people link to you, your authority grows.

Listen to those who know

I suggest people like Chris Brogan and Adam Singer, who aren’t journalists, but have built up highly successful blogs and follows online. They have built a brand around themselves online, and as a result have benefitted financially but also in building up a big and useful network of contacts.

Network offline and transfer online

Face to face is still and always will be the most powerful communication tool in the world. Make use of it, at a networking event? At a party? Social media is reasonably in right now and while it may not be the best conversation starter it’s a great conversation finisher. Make sure you leave people you’ve been speaking to with your blog address, or if you’re a guest speaker make sure it’s on your slides.

Twitter and other social media

Make sure you’re using social media such as Twitter to join in the conversation, find and follow relevant people. Give people a reason to follow you by posting regularly and by posting interesting links to Twitter. Don’t tell us what you had for breakfast, that’s what Facebook status updates are for. Make sure all your social media presences link to your blog and that your blog links to all your social media presences. Think of your blog as the continent with lots of little islands around it.

Join relevant networks (like TNTJ!) and get networked

If there’s a network for your industry, join it and meet people. You’ll be surprised how interested they’ll be in what you do and what you may be blogging about.

Image in this post is used under creative commons from flickr user See-Ming Lee

Really liking the ‘Best of 2008′ that Last FM have just released. It feels like a magazine when you click onto it, apart from instead of someone, somewhere, deciding what is the best single of the year - it’s the listeners.

I like the layout. I like the idea. And it’s interesting that Last FM is creating editorial content through its users. There’s a biog for each act, almost verging on comment in places, and then there’s some multimedia content with videos of the acts. And to be able to listen to the ‘Best of 2008′ radio - excellent.

What could the third sector learn from this? Creating a presence for the ‘end of year’ is a desirable thing. List your achievements, show off what you’ve done and after all everyone loves an end of year list.

Gave a presentation to AMSU (Association of Managers in Students’ Union) North-West meeting this afternoon about what’s nearly been a year journey for our development of the web presences at UCLan Students’ Union.

It was a great chance to reflect on how far we’ve come, particularly in the last six months, and to take stock of some of the big changes that have happened as a result of our new website and approach to the web and social media.

The presentation was only a few slides long but there was plenty of discussion about how Union’s can use the web, and in particular how they can engage the membership through the web. Hence some discussions about online voting, the use of Ning as an issue based social network and the collection of members data to communicate messages properly.

It was useful to show what we’d been doing and hear that others wanted to follow suit, but needed to have a real think through what they wanted to do with their web presences. We also talked about what we’d got planned for the next six months and it looks promising.

I didn’t make it down South for the #nfptweetup but it seemed like it went really well. You could contribute a slide in advance for discussion by those at the event (apparently over 30 people showed up) about how twitter can be used, examples.

Mine was ‘What is twitter’ overkill and who in an organisation should be doing the tweeting. On the twitter overkill questioned it seemed that if you’re not interesting when you tweet then anything is overkill, but if you are interesting then tweet away to your heart’s content.

Below is the slideshow of crowdsourced slides for the event, experiences of using twitter, questions and examples:

Congratulations to Rachel Beer for organising the event, it was a cool experience to be ‘tweeting from the sidelines’ as the discussions unfolded.

There’s a couple of great posts from Chris Brogan about using twitter and where to start in the world of social media, with some useful tips for charities.

setting up a blog about wine for my dad

My Dad is 56. He works as a field marketing manager for a wine company and has done for about five/six years. He’s got a Mac, loves them. He’s got a great knowledge of wine and often does tastings. I accompanied him to one at Burton on Trent wine society last week and on the drive back to London we got talking about how he loved doing tastings, attending wine events etc but that he lacks a focal point to bring people back to. Sure, he has his business card with an email address and a phone number but nothing to document all the wine knowledge in his head, the tastings he’s done, the massive wine events attended and the trips abroad to see vineyards in action.

My social media brain was whirring and I thought this is a great opportunity. My dad has something interesting to say, a subject he’s passionate about and he does interesting things with that subject. I need to get my old man blogging.

We sat down on Sunday morning with a piece of A4 paper and we planned it. First of all I showed him some blogs and how they worked, he was impressed. Then I asked him a series of questions:

1. What do you want to call the blog?

2. What is it going to be about?

3. How often are you going to update it?

4. What sort of content will you be putting on?

After that we went back to the web and we looked at some other wine blogs to get a feel for what they were doing. Some were really impressive while others seemed very out of date.

Dad decided that he wouldn’t be able to update his blog that often, due to work commitments but that he would have some regular features. We chopped his content up around categories (reds, whites, roset, sparkling, wine of the month, tasting reports, insights) and he started to plan his content for the next month or so.

We got him a wordpress blog to start off with, didn’t buy a domain or hosting as he needs to get used to it all first. He put in his first post about his wine of the month, he cropped a picture and uploaded that. “This is pretty easy”, he said. After that he wrote up a tasting report from the Burton wine society tasting and he learned how to link directly to another website (in this case we were linking directly to Tesco, Laithwaites etc where you can buy the wines that he used for the tastings).

In the first 48 hours of operations the blog has had more than 50 views, Dad was astounded. Also if we put ‘walkers world of wine’ into Google it was in the number one spot. We also got Dad a twitter account and linked it up to his mobile, so now he can twitter about wine or twitter about wine events that he’s at (like all the big trade tastings). 

In the space of a weekend, my Dad now has his own website and can update it easily and regularly. Of course I’ve got a log-in as an admin in case he’s got any problems, but he should be fine. He can start creating content about a subject he loves and sharing it with the world. It made me wonder, how many other experts are there out there who aren’t sharing what they do?

View Walker’s World of Wine blog or follow my old man on twitter

I spent a few hours on Monday at an NUS Services Ltd event in Birmingham about local business income generation. Well, it was supposed to be about that but the general idea seemed to be whether NUSSL could move into the student media agency area which is dominated by the likes of BAM, OnCampus, Student Media Group etc.

The overwhelming mood in the room was ‘No, you missed the boat about 5 years ago’. But, there is a huge area where NUSSL could provide something very useful to Students’ Union’s. Business solutions and in particular web based ones.

If I was in NUSSL and looking for ways to diversify I’d be considering:

- Taking an open source CRM solution and modifying it for Students’ Union’s

- Providing membership solutions in terms of clubs and societies

- Working on data solutions for Union’s to offer loyalty products such as swipe cards etc

- Offering training to Union’s on how to use social media, web technologies and how to generate income from the web

- Working on ideas for how to generate new revenue streams from mature, international, part-time and postgraduate students, because the student movement is not getting any younger

Unfortunately the event didn’t allow for much exploration of these ideas because it was dominated by lots of ‘no, no, no’ rather than ‘what about, maybe, could we’. NUSSL needs a culture change and to figure out what Students’ Union’s need in the 21st century to connect with their memberships and remains as the gatekeepers of getting messages to the student body.

Some quality reading today:

• Why charities need to use social media

Good post about charities needing to embrace social media. There’s a lot bandied around about facebook this, twitter that, but it’s sometimes overwhelming. That’s why Rachel Beer’s guide is an excellent starting point.

• Will the web kill the high street?

It hasn’t happened. But the web does provide a way for specialist shops to take hold of a market and dominate it.

• Martyn Lewis campaigns for the nation’s young people

New online only charity that aims to get young people to reflect their views in the media. Seems like a good idea, but as young people are ‘turned off’ from traditional media brands who says they will come back to them to comment?

• 14 reasons to have a web guru on your team

Yeah! Great stuff. Any organisation that isn’t trying to understand, work with, get involved with the web and social media won’t win in the long run.

Seemed to be a trend over the last few days as some great posts popped up about what the US election and in particular the Obama campaign means for marketing professionals, charities and nonprofit organisations. Here’s the best:

Seth Godin kicks off with a great take on what the elections meant for marketing professionals. He definitely believes that online is the place to be for campaigning.

Kivi was quick off the mark with what nonprofit organisations can learn marketing wise from the election. She focuses on the ability of the Obama to fundraise from a whole spectrum of people, small amounts building to one huge total. She also links through to the Getting Attention blog which has a good piece about what the election taught us about email marketing.

The Charity Place has a piece about what nonprofits can learn from the Obama campaign, and it’s more of the same. Engagement, make friends first and then ask for money - not the other way round. I think that’s an important one, build a connection and then ask for the money.

The above was the question posed for the November debate on Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists and I gave my answer as ‘I’d invest it in people’.

The post is here, or you can read it below:

First off, I’d rather have a million pounds (British Sterling) than dollars to save journalism with. But exchange rates aside, let’s get down to business.

My strategy would be to invest in people. Invest in getting journalists to do that saving. You can’t do things alone, you need a good team with good people. I’d probably shed some dead wood from the news room, maybe coax a few people to leave early and get some fresh blood in.

I’d keep the subs, but expand their role to include a lot of backroom stuff - like picture uploading, digital media production, video editing. I’d keep the print edition but I’d make it follow online’s lead. Maybe just have one good strong print edition per day, and throw everything into online.

I’d develop strong supplements based around local issues, and not be afraid of trying something new. I’d link these supplements with mini-sites online built around that issue.

I’d invest in training for my staff, I’d employ the Google technique of 10% time for my reporters. i.e. 10% to go off and cover what YOU want and what YOU think needs covering.

I’d put a bit of money towards having trainees in. Not expecting them to pay for everything. There would be a pot of money so that kids can come in and get experience, learn about being a journalist, in a good environment, and not be skint afterwards. You never know, they might even bring a good story in with them - and that’s got to be worth the money.

I’d invest in a CRM (customer relationship management) system for my newspaper, logging user comments, offering them personalised news updates, and beginning to build an idea of who my readers really are. So I know that Joe Bloggs in the North of the city responds well to this type of news. Then I have something to sell, I’ve got proof of effectiveness, readership and grabbing people’s attention.

So to sum up, good journalists, probably better paid, more of them, getting some 10% time, with a good online setup.