My full-time corporate gig is as a community manager for an open-source developer community. The community mainly comprises no-nonsense, no-frills people who love some old school tools. The fancy graphical environments in the latest and greatest collaboration web apps just get in the way of power user developers who know every trick in the book to get the most out of tools like IRC and mailing lists. Keep in mind that open source communities tend to have people — from corporate developers to passionate enthusiasts — collaborating across the globe in every time zone to develop software that we use every day. They know a thing or two about collaboration, and they use the tools that work. I had stepped away from hardcore developer communities for a couple of years when I was consulting, and in coming back to these established tools, I’m rediscovering why they are so useful for collaboration.

IRC / Group Chat

The best thing about IRC or Group Chat is that you can set up a place for your team or your project where people can drop in and out to ask questions or just have conversations with other people working on similar projects. It’s kind of like the water cooler, if you want to get even more old school, where people gather to talk about both work and social topics. Because it’s real-time chat, you can get quick feedback even when you don’t know exactly who to talk to because you are reaching out to a group of people with similar interests or similar jobs.

Lately, we’ve also been holding quite a few scheduled meetings in IRC, and it is a great way to get a lot accomplished very quickly. By scheduling it, you make sure that you have the right people available and anyone can participate as long as they can get some type of internet connection. We also make the logs available, and we use MeetBot to capture minutes of the meeting. This allows people to miss the meeting, but still see a full, unfiltered record of the meeting in the logs along with a summary of the meeting from MeetBot if they just want the highlights.

Mailing Lists

By mailing lists I mean both traditional mailing lists, like LISTSERV, or more recent additions like Google Groups. The fact that I love mailing lists is a bit odd, since I hate email. Part of what I love about mailing lists is the control that you have over how you receive the information. Most lists allow you to get every email immediately, or in a daily digest depending on how you prefer to interact with the list, and many of them allow you to turn the email off entirely when you go out on vacation. That way, your email doesn’t pile up, but you can skim through the online archives when you get back to catch up on the big news. Regular email just doesn’t have that flexibility.

The reality is that everyone uses email, and mailing lists are a great way to collaborate with a group of people without accidentally leaving anyone out of the loop. It’s too easy to forget to copy every person on the team when communicating with a group of people. The online archives are also a great way for new members to learn about the project and get a sense for the history of the group, and it gives you a place where you can always look back at the conversations when you forget some important detail.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the new tools, too. I get a tremendous amount of value out of tools like Twitter and the newer collaboration suites that have social networking and plenty of bells and whistles built-in. However, sometimes you just need something quick and cheap that just works. Just because a technology is old doesn’t mean it can’t rock.

What are your favorite “old school” collaboration tools?

For one of my new projects, I had to sign up for GetResponse, an email marketing service. Since I had to get a subscription anyway, I wondered if there was a way I could use the app to improve my freelance practice. Email newsletters are often used for product promotion, so why not use it to  market my services?

While it might seem to be too late for me to hop on the email marketing bandwagon, I see very few options that offer the same effectiveness for reaching my customers, particularly with my client base. Many of my clients aren’t tech savvy, which means they don’t have social-networking accounts, so I can’t contact them using Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Also, I doubt that many of them return to my web site after we’ve started working together.

In order to maximize the effectiveness of my email marketing campaign, I had to plan what kind of messages I would send to my customers. Here’s what I came up with:

Provide general business information to clients. Educating our clients is always a good thing. It’s not enough to just give them our work output — I have to teach them how to use it well. But this often burdens me with hours of repetitive tech support. With the use of email marketing services, I can keep clients updated with the latest industry trends, as well as what they can do to adapt.

Promote new work. An email list can also be a good venue to tell others about the current work you’re doing. Did you just publish a new book? Are you launching another web app? It’s a good way to promote your new projects and show your clients how much you’re growing professionally. After all, the more skills you learn and the more experience you gain, the better you’ll be able to help their business.

Share feedback. If a client writes to you and tells you that your work increased their sales by 150 percent, wouldn’t you be proud of it? Just make sure that you have a client’s consent before featuring their comments on your newsletter.

You don’t have to share purely positive feedback, either. You can mention client complaints, but include the steps you took to fix the problem, and what your client had to say after. This brings some honesty into your testimonials, and should make them stand out from the usual testimonials that skeptical clients tend to gloss over.

Hand out exclusive offers. You can also use your mailing list to send out exclusive offers that will alert inactive clients to any new services or products you are offering. In my experience, it’s more effective to contact people who already know you and have worked with you before. They’ll always be more comfortable about rehiring you, compared with new prospects who have never heard of you.

During my first year as a freelancer, I ran into a “dry spell” for a couple of months. I had no new leads, and my current clients didn’t seem to need any work from me. While I didn’t subscribe to an email marketing service, I used my email contact list and sent out a message offering some of my services for a small discounted fee if they sent me successful referrals. I received several new, referred clients, and, thanks to the discount,  several existing clients were encouraged to rehire me for future projects.

Learn the interest level of your customers. While some of the tips above could be done just by sending emails with your regular email client, tracking your clients’ interest level is something you can only do with an email marketing service. You can check who opens your messages, clicks the links embedded in your emails (and which links they click on), or buys something through your site.

Like any other communication tool, mailing lists shouldn’t be abused or you risk losing your audience. As long as you’re providing value to your subscribers, your messages will always be welcome in their inboxes.

Do you use email newsletters or email marketing software to keep in touch with clients? If so, how has it affected your business?

Image by lusi from sxc.hu

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There’s one sure way to stay out of trouble, and that’s to wait to launch your web site until you actually have some content in a presentable form to show people. If, for whatever reason, you can’t wait that long (maybe your client wants to build the sort of anticipation normally reserved for companies like Capcom and Apple, for instance), then your placeholder should be functional rather than static. That’s where LaunchSplash comes in.

With this new web app, you can quickly and easily create a standby splash page to help visitors feel like they haven’t completely wasted their time by visiting your site, and help make sure they actually come back when you do have something to show off. It only took me two brief screens and all of about 30 seconds to create this, which is infinitely better than a static page with, say, an animated .gif of a hard hat and construction tape.

Built in to every LaunchSplash page is a mailing list that people can sign up for to receive updates about your web site. You can track sign-ups at the LaunchSplash site via your Page Editor. You can also tweak your template, colors, graphics, and even the CSS of your page to make it match your brand image. You can even use Google Analytics or any JavaScript traffic tracking snippet to check your site’s visitors, all from a visual dashboard — handy if you’re not HTML-savvy. If you already have your own domain, you can map it to LaunchSplash’s servers to display your preview page automatically.

With their basic free plan, you can create up to two Launch pages, and access all the free templates. Upgrading to one of their three paid plans ($5, $15 and $25 per month) will get you access to special “Premium” templates and the ability to create more simultaneous launch pages. I don’t see why you’d need more than one, unless you’re a lazy web designer who really likes to procrastinate, but maybe that’s their target market. Regardless, the free account is a great idea if you’re not able to set up your home on the web just yet, but want people to be able to go somewhere and see something on the web that refers to you or your brand.

What do you think of the LaunchSplash app?

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