Going Gonzo With Your Network, Part 2: Small Businesses
You have the germ of the idea for your small business endeavor, but of course there’s always a million directions it could go, depending on all sorts of external factors, influences or distractions. To help get a bead on them and reduce a bit of the chaos, you can load up your network with all sorts of items, research, references or other activities to help move the ball a little further down the field.
Application Examples
Here’s a few examples of how a small business can utilize some of the applications within an Odysen network:
- Actions: Add the hundreds of different tasks that need to be done, big and small, break out in sub-folders, see integrated views, sort and edit to re-prioritize as appropriate.
- Documents: Use to store PDFs, presentations, drafts or other more elaborate proposals of your idea. Add photos or other images if to better show your idea, going with a picture is worth a thousand words viewpoint.
- Events: To help get an additional external perspective, find all the events or meetups related to the idea, where you have a good chance of finding others that hopefully can appreciate, enhance and support your solution.
- Notes: Store spur of the moment ideas, create a list or other short-form summaries.
- Websites: Get a handle of the ecosystem around your idea, add all the websites you can find that you believe are relevant, helpful to reference back to later. Whether for potential customers, partners, suppliers or competitors. Create sub-folders to easily organize or see an integrated view in the respective parent folders.
- News: Besides keeping track of blogs, add a keyword news search for your specific niche, helping to stay informed of what others are doing in your area. Similar to websites, add as many news feeds as appropriate, for your general product or service ideas, industry blogs and other complimentary topics.
Application Examples by Role
As expected, some applications are used more than others for different types of roles. Of course, if in a small business or freelancing, these are just different hats being worn on the same head. Regardless, to give a general idea:
- Business Development: Use news and websites to organize external content, upcoming industry events, documents for uploading detailed product or marketing proposals, and actions for tracking key new product milestones.
- Development, R&D: Use notes keeping track of new ideas, websites to reference different types of research and actions to keep others informed of progress.
- Project Management: With actions, you have lots of options for organizing and sorting, set the priority, status, due date, owner, add comments or break out into various sub-folders for larger, more involved projects.
- Marketing: Use websites for quick access to the ones used most, such as for your blog or other marketing or promotion activities, events for new customer promotions and documents for storing/sharing collateral material such as product briefs, datasheets, presentations as well as audio and video files.
- Sales: Get new marketing collateral material in documents, use events for upcoming customer visits, actions to track milestones or tasks needed to get a win or close a sale, or notes for storing and sharing customer meeting notes with others.
- G&A, Finance: Store a range of websites for easy access, including for your various support services (billing, phone, website, others) or government regulations, use events and event alerts for various monthly, quarterly or annual activities needed, or documents for storing past files for later reference.
With the end result giving your small business a comprehensive Intranet solution for a range of your different hats and roles. Separate in different folders for easy organization, share with others as appropriate.
Getting Started
Start with the free Spark plan to get initially setup with a few other Basic users as needed. As you business activities grow, more people become involved, you can upgrade to other plans for additional Basic users, Advanced users, and storage options as needed for your network.
Matt | Posted on | January 10, 2012 | Comments Off
Tags: Business Development > Development > Finance > Marketing > Research > Sales > Small Business > Startups