Technology – let’s face it, those of us in business love to hate technology on the one hand, but couldn’t live without it on the other. It’s one of those love/hate relationships we all have in our lives today, apparently of necessity. Douglas Adams said it best:
“Technology is a word that describes something that doesn’t work yet.”
When it works well, however, and does the job it was made to do we can’t imagine going back, but when it plays up it becomes so incredibly frustrating that it challenges the very boundaries of our healthy mental status. Indeed, we could use the term “techno rage” to describe the emotional experience we go through when it simply won’t work. We’ve all been there. (Personally, the password issue gave me a lot of angst until recently.)
But let’s say you have found an application that makes a huge difference to your business and one that has minimum technical issues for you to have to deal with as well. Bliss. It’s time to pay homage to the developers of such apps that make our lives so much easier.
And let’s spread the word about such applications, in case you are not yet using them.
I ran an informal survey of just a few local business owners to ask which technology applications would they rate as their top 3, regarding usefulness and ease of operation. I came up with the following: Xero for managing your accounts, Mailchimp for email management, and Facebook for marketing.
Xero won by a mile, when it comes to accounting, in front of other traditional applications that have dominated the marketplace for many decades now, simply because of its ease of use. People mentioned that it integrates with your banking, allows your accountant and bookkeeper to analyse and report the results with ease to you and can be the fluid conduit between your bookkeeper/accountant and the Australian Tax Office for you too. It’s removing many headaches for busy business owners.
Mailchimp seemed to be the popular choice for most, regarding communications with their subscribers. It’s an easy-to-use email management system, where you can create those regular broadcasts that engage your audiences and eventually, can lead to sales.
Facebook came out on top when it came to social media marketing. (No surprises here.) Those who use it through paid marketing campaigns love the analytics. They can measure and then tweak their ads to become more effective, as well as target their markets specifically. Others who use Facebook as a broadcast platform in a socially-engaging way found the engagement that they got raised their profile and contributed to good branding. It seems that there are many ways to use Facebook, depending on your goals.
Of course, people found that it was difficult for most to limit themselves to the top 3 because most of us use more than three. Many other applications were mentioned in passing, such as Infusionsoft, Slack, Trello, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, Evernote, Dropbox, Google Calendar & Apps.
Personally, I really like Paypal, aWeber, and Eventbrite (I run events) for business and Dropbox, Penzu and Grammarly for writing. What about you?
Can you share your top 3 applications with us?
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