Helping Businesses Communicate in a Virtual World
During these uncertain times, where social distancing is becoming the norm for the next short while, we at WSI Digital Marketing want to ensure our clients and valuable partners that we are here to help with all your digital business needs. For the health and well-being of our team, we are (mostly) working remotely, without interruption of service. We are not doing any face-to-face meetings for the near future and have been hosting virtual meetings instead.
As our governments are strongly recommending that we work at home if at all possible, we thought that we could share a few great tips and resources that will make it easier for you to be able to carry on business as best as possible and allow you to stay connected with your team and clients. We have used many of these trusted tools amongst team members and our partners for many years. Let’s get started.
Virtual Meetings
Zoom
This popular video conferencing tool allows businesses to conduct meetings or host webinars. There is a free version to get you started which allows you to host meetings with up to 100 participants. It is a great tool for virtual meetings with your prospects, clients and team members and even has a chat feature for quick messaging. You can work in the desktop format or download the zoom app for your tablet or smartphone.
This online meeting and web conferencing tool that enables businesses to collaborate with customers, clients or colleagues via the Internet in real-time.
Skype
We have been using Skype for many years, which is now owned by Microsoft. It combines instant messaging, video conferencing, voice calls, and document collaboration into a single, integrated app. This is also a free tool.
Google Hangouts
This free Google tool facilitates text and video messaging (or phone calls for that matter). It’s easy to fire up a session for a one-to-one chat, or conversation involving multiple parties. It’s also great for people who are working from home, as it’s simple to set up a meeting between colleagues no matter where you are in the world.
Team Collaboration
Slack
This is a free tool that allows us to communicate quick chat messages back and forth and allows us to share files quickly and display screenshots to demonstrate certain things visually.
Asana
A project management tool that is great for teams. The free version allows you to create tasks and view them as a list, a Kanban-style board, or a calendar. You can also designate assignees and add due dates, while collaborating with up to 15 team members.
File Sharing and Transfer
Google Docs & Sheets
Create Word and Excel type of documents easily. When employees work remotely, Google Docs lets you all work together on a single document at the same time. Feedback and changes are saved instantly. Google Docs and Sheets are free to use but plans are available if you need additional storage. We Transfer – Our team often has very large graphic files that we need to share with clients and partners and use WeTransfe to move these large files, as there are limitations sending large files via email. This tool is free to use for files that are less than 2GB.
DropBox
A cloud storage service, which means you can copy your files to the cloud and access them later, even if you’re using a different device. You can share these folders and documents with your team members or anyone else via email. It too is a great way to transfer large files.
This list of collaborative tools will help keep you productive and facilitate communications while you work remotely and allow you not only to keep in contact with your client base and provide your usual stellar services but also to continue to prospect in the future. There are many other online tools out there, which we can share at a future date.
If you require any assistance with these tools, we would be happy to help guide you through the process. Please send a request to our support team at support@wsisme.com