The Marketer's Secret Weapon: How to Get Buy-In for Your New Idea (A DroneCo Comic)
The ability to garner support and guide both execs and your project team through change is a vital part of being a good leader and project manager — not to mention it’ll make your life easier when you’re no longer fighting flawed processes, tools, and mindsets to get things done. But it’s a tricky skill to master. How do you get the necessary people to agree to a new idea and commit in a way that will result in meaningful action? Click to Tweet: Share the fun! Click the strip to Tweet it. 5 Tips to Get Buy-In for Your Idea: 1. Paint the Big Picture Emphasize the immediacy of the problem you’re currently facing, explain exactly what it’s costing your organization, and outline the specific benefit of your proposed solution. Change requires work and resources, so give people a compelling reason to make the effort. 2. Make It Personal Is there a certain executive that you know is particularly concerned about saving money, or getting things done faster? Who's always using the latest gadget or app to improve their daily lives? If your solution or idea relates to one of these areas, take it to that person. Use those particular interests to capture their full attention and increase the likelihood they’ll not only support you, they'll be just as invested in your proposal as you are. 3. Use Emotions to Your Advantage... We may like to think we make business decisions based on solid reasoning and rational justification, but emotion plays a huge role in whether we embrace or resist a proposed change. So consider the emotional drivers you can use to bolster your proposal. What current frustrations can you emphasize? What anxieties can you soothe? 4. ...But Cite Hard Evidence and Data When You Can Point to recent successes your company has had in overcoming obstacles or adapting to change, and use them to both recall the positive feelings associated with that success and as evidence your organization can adapt successfully. Alternatively, you can find examples of companies or teams that made the same or a similar move with good results, and use their stories both as social proof and to provide a vision of where your company could be. 5. Follow up Once you've actually gotten approval for your idea, don't go radio silent on the topic. Maintain interest and support by checking in with executives and giving them updates on your progress, whether it’s reporting back on implementation options, adoption progress, or the positive results of your change. Plus, by showing how you’re actually delivering on your vision, you’re building trust with executives for the next time you need their support. Follow the DroneCo Comic for More Startup Shenanigans! Check out the comic archive, and then subscribe to the strip to keep up with every new episode. And don't forget to follow DroneCo on Twitter for a daily dose of fun! Share our webcomic on your own site using this embed code:
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How Wrike Helps Backcountry Connect People to Their Passions
We stepped outside with Ivan Ward, Producer & Media Manager, and Georgia Steenberge, Design Director, at Backcountry to see how they were able to overcome the obstacles and continue to connect people with their passions.
A Winning Video Marketing Strategy (A DroneCo Comic)
Welcome back to DroneCo, Wrike's weekly comic strip! We're following the madcap marketing department at a hot new drone delivery startup in Silicon Valley. Last week, Marketing Director Sujay awoke from his personal productivity paradise to discover an email catastrophe. In this week’s episode, the gang preps for an impromptu video shoot. But CEO Dot has other plans for their marketing strategy types.... Click to Tweet: Want to share the fun? Click the strip to Tweet it! Embed this webcomic on your own site using this embed code:
The Marketing Manager's Nightmare (A DroneCo Comic)
As the latest hot tech startup in the valley, things are always moving fast at DroneCo. Marketing Director Sujay and his team make a noble effort to keep up with their lovable-yet-eccentric CEO's zany ideas and half-baked instructions, but with all the late nights and hectic schedules, sometimes the inevitable happens... Click to Tweet: "The Marketing Manager's Nightmare — check out this funny comic from @Wrike!" Want to spread the fun with your friends on what does a marketing project manager do? Click the comic strip above to share it on Twitter! Don't Miss Out on Any of the Marketing Madness at DroneCo! Catch up on all the marketing department antics in the comic strip archive, or subscribe to the comic to catch every episode!
How to Use Flipboard to Stay on Top of Your Competition and Your Industry
Because we're all busy all the time, it almost becomes a chore to seek out news online. And yet it's vital that everyone — executives and managers most of all — stay on top of their industry's headlines in order to monitor the competition. Information is key. The problem is your Facebook feed is dominated by Buzzfeedy articles and clickbait. And assembling your RSS feeds in Feedly might seem like way too much of a time investment. How then does one collect relevant news and consume it in a pleasing UI? We have a suggestion: try Flipboard. What is Flipboard? Flipboard is a web-based content platform with well over 100 million users, and adding 250,000 additional readers every day. It gives users a sleek magazine interface to consume news articles in choice topic areas. Instead of venturing to individual websites and collecting RSS feeds into a feed reader such as Feedly, you can simply choose to follow generic topics such as "project management" or "marketing," specific people such as Madonna or Robert Scoble, or other user-created magazines such as Productivity Works! or Startup Spark Up. The entire user experience was designed for mobile first (they only just released the desktop/web version of Flipboard in February 2015), and is easily one of the most satisfying app experiences around. Articles are presented in a magazine-style layout, allowing you to swipe through pages. Flipboard allows you to become a magazine editor. You can "flip" content from across the web into your very own magazines by using the app, or a bookmarklet/browser extension on the web version. Your magazines can revolve around topics you enjoy, and there's no design work involved. The app automatically displays your curated content in a neat magazine layout. 5 Tips on Using Flipboard to Monitor Your Industry & Competition If you really want to make the most of Flipboard as a one-stop news reader, it is important to set it up properly. Here are five tips: 1. Follow topics, people, and magazines in your industry/niche Feel free to follow the topics/people/magazines you enjoy personally, but also find Flipboards that will inspire and inform your work. Follow your competitors. Follow your industry. The things you follow will determine what articles show up in your feed, so it's important to put thought into choosing what you follow. 2. Explore Flipboard's suggestions After Flipboard acquired Zite in 2014, it beefed up its recommendation algorithms so that people could more easily discover user-generated magazines. It now does a very good job of recommending magazines based on topics you follow, another reason why it's integral to follow stuff you actually want to read about. 3. Or... simply read the Daily Edition for Flipboard's curated news If all that still seems like way too much work, there is a final alternative: the Daily Edition, which is Flipboard's version of the daily print newspaper. A team of editors hand-picks articles for this section every morning, and just like a newspaper, there's a definite end. Unlike the regular feeds, there's no infinite scroll — there's a point where you can say "I've finished reading today's top news stories." 4. Connect a Read Later app You can't always read something as it appears on your feed. If you connect a read later app such as Instapaper, Pocket, or Readability, you can easily check out the post that caught your fancy at a more convenient time. 5. Connect your social media accounts Once you install Flipboard on your mobile device, connect your social media accounts so that you can flip anything from your social feeds straight into your magazines. Note: if you sign up for Flipboard on the desktop, you might miss out on this feature since it's only available on the mobile app. Start By Following These 4 Flipboard Magazines If you're looking for suggestions on magazines to follow, we put together four of our very own. Check them out: + Productivity Works! for tips on getting work done, to-do list strategies, productivity tech, and tips for becoming more efficient. + Social Project Management, for everything related to project management methodologies, project management tips, and articles that of interest to project managers. + Startup Spark Up for entrepreneurial advice, startup culture, growth hacking, and other emerging business articles. + Marketing Speak for content marketing, advertising, social media, and all things digital marketing. What Are Your Favorite Flipboard Magazines? There are probably thousands of magazines available on Flipboard. We'd love to hear your recommendations on what else to follow. Drop your links in our comments section!
Welcome to DroneCo — Wrike's New Weekly Comic
It’s like Big Brother but with a lot more SCRUM Welcome to DroneCo, the Valley’s latest startup darling. DroneCo is creating quite a buzz with intelligent remote delivery drones. “We make delivery drones,” says founder Miles “Dot” Commadore. “But that’s not all—we’re engaging the future with synergistic-social convergence or, as I like to call it, SynSocCon." Like any tech company experiencing massive growth against intense competition, DroneCo has more than its fair share of drama and dysfunction. Lucky for you, Dot has agreed to let us take a weekly peek behind the scenes. Starting with the Marketing department, we’ll bring you candid, uncensored moments from the conference rooms, cubicles, and brightly-colored, never-used “Creativity Pods.” Meet the Marketing Department Don't miss out on any DroneCo antics! There are several ways to stay up to date on DroneCo comics as they're released: Subscribe to the comic to catch every episode. And check back on Monday, April 6 to check out the first strip! Follow DroneCo on Twitter Follow our DroneCo Pinterest board We look forward to having you join us on this journey. Check in each week to see how DroneCo manages its way through the ups and downs of startup life!
How Automation Leads to Creative Confidence
Automation can alleviate your workload so you can focus more on creative aspects of your work. It eliminates mundane tasks while establishing structure and consistency in your processes. Let's take a look at how automation frees you up to focus more on the more impactful, fun stuff.
How to Market Your App Successfully (Work Management Roundup)
Welcome back to the weekly Work Management Roundup, where we grab the week's best articles concerning work, productivity, entrepreneurship, and startups and hopefully inspire you to work smarter and be more successful. This week, we take a special look at startups in general and app developers in particular, with three meaty articles on finding app success. Read on! Life and Death in the App Store (The Verge): An eye opening story about how an app startup has to struggle not just with plummeting app sales but with customer fatigue. The average person spends 80% of their time on mobile using only 3 apps. So successfully selling a new mobile app right now is like hitting the lottery. 10 Killer App Store Marketing Tips (Slideshare): Despite the 1.5 million apps currently available to consumers, there are ways to increase customers and drive down the cost of user acquisition. This deck by StoreMaven examines a year's worth of data from leading developers worldwide such as Kabam, Zynga & Google, for these 10 solid tips on app store marketing. Facebook viral marketing: When and why do apps “jump the shark?” (Andrew Chen): Growth hacker Andrew Chen shares a technical discussion on how your app can go from success to epic failure. It delves into user acquisition, "virality," network saturation, and user retention. And it's got a downloadable spreadsheet. Motivating Millennials Takes More than Flexible Work Policies (Harvard Business Review): While having flexible work schedules is critical to attracting millennials to your organization, you have to go further to keep them engaged. Here are 5 tips to engage more with this demographic. How to Win at Medium (Medium): If you're blogging on the Medium platform, bookmark this blog post now. It presents a complete series of tips and tricks for writing your posts and making them both more readable and more visually appealing. Want to show your remote colleagues some love? Find fun ways to liven up conference calls and get to know each other. Just because you’re not all in the same physical location, doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy team bonding activities. #Wrike See more tips for including your remote team in your activities in this blog post: -------->>>> http://bit.ly/RemoteTips A photo posted by Wrike (@wriketeam) on Mar 14, 2016 at 3:40pm PDT More Work Management Reads Think About This: Some of the Best Things Lazy People Do (Conversation Agent) BYOD continues to add challenges for IT leaders (Computerworld Hong Kong) The Tricky Business of Conversion Optimization (Huffpost Business) Go Try This: 5 Methods of Collecting Project Requirements (PM Tips) The 8 Slack Communities Every Marketer Must Join (Klear) Improve Your Critical Thinking With This Five-Step Process (Lifehacker) Browse Productivity Works on Flipboard If you use Flipboard on your laptop or mobile, then you'll enjoy our magazine on productivity tips. Check out Productivity Works or click on the widget below: View my Flipboard Magazine.
