- Monday.com is a collaboration and project management platform.
- Perfect for managing content creation and production.
- It will significantly increase your productivity.
- Easy to set up and use.
Content creation is at the heart of our inbound digital marketing strategies, and as brands and business we are all now creating more and more content both from our in-house teams and partner marketing agencies, this can represent an ever growing problem with our ability to efficiently manage the associated processes and communication overload.
For anyone responsible for managing the content planning, creation, and publishing of images, videos, articles, landing pages, ad versions, even traditional marketing assets, I am sure you will have experienced productivity issues as a result of working across multiple platforms, with internal and/or external teams, fragmented communication for version feedback and sign-off via email or multiple WhatsApp groups, time spent downloading files from Dropbox, or using YouTube or Facebook to preview video versions.
Not to mention the time spent/lost searching and sharing your archives for the files of past projects, or the additional time required to create presentations for management review meetings via PowerPoint or project management software.
If these issues ring any bells for you, I am sure Monday.com can more than halve the amount of time you invest in administrating your content production processes enabling you to focus on increasing the volume of content you are producing, without sacrificing quality.
This isn’t a full review of Monday.com as it is quite a powerful tool for your business in general and has a lot of features beyond the context of content production, I personally employ the platform when I am managing client projects such as digital campaigns, content projects, SEO action lists, website development, and our internal sales processes for Disruptable™ amongst other things.
It is however, five reasons why I think you should definitely consider investing in monday.com to improve your content creation productivity.
What is monday.com?
Monday.com is a user friendly, non-technical work operating system (Work OS) that enables organizations to build custom workflow apps in a code-free environment – to run projects, processes and everyday work (sounds a little complicated but it is not). As of 2020, the company serves 100,000 organizations from around 200 vertical markets, including many non-technical organizations.
Alternative collaboration platforms include Asana, Slack, and Trello.
So let’s get into why I think monday.com would be a positive addition to your content creation operation…
1. Easy to set up and use
As it is a cloud based system, you can access your projects via your browser or a very well developed and robust native app for Android and iPhone. You will quickly find it becomes the most used app on your phone, even more so than your favorite chat app or game! Well maybe not game…
Once you have activated your account, you can immediately begin create what are known as work boards for each type/category of project that you implement (videos, infographics, adverts, articles, new website pages etc.), followed by the defining the universal steps it takes to complete each project type.
For example, in the case of video production you would add chronological steps such as the storyboard, a creative plan, a script, design assets (animations, supers, graphs etc.), the location, which actors, production, post-production, cut 1, cut 2, cut 3 and so on. Each step will have a job status from “To Do” up to the point of being “Complete”, with the labels being fully customizable.
You can then add in new elements such as deadline dates and status bars to show the % of the job completed (amongst others), so that you/any user can easily view the status of multiple video projects together on one board.
The interface relies heavily on the use of color to categorize and differentiate task/project status, it is simple and it works very well in helping you prioritize tactically or strategically. If you are seeing too much red you know you are going to get overall slip, a lot of green and everything is dandy…
2. Unlimited access for external collaborators
The standard license offers five power users (you and your core team) adding cost as you scale for new users, however the truly indispensable feature is that you can invite an unlimited number of external collaborators (your agency representatives, a video producer, a developer, a writer, a designer, or perhaps even a colleague/boss who requires basic visibility of everything you are working on).
The power users have full access to the system and you determine what they can and cannot see or do, whereas invitees can access only work boards you create and make public, they can then add new projects on their boards or access the chat function, and this is where the real productivity boost occurs…
3. The productivity boost – communication
Every project, within every work board has its own dedicated chat function, isolated away from all other projects and associated communications you may have active. So immediately you are segmenting or isolating your communication to the specific project and task at hand.
No more WhatsApp groups, emails, and calls across multiple projects themes and it is all logged in each chat history for current and future reference.
4. The productivity boost – collaboration
But it gets better. Within the chat function you then have the functionality to upload, view and review with feedback; documents (word, pdf etc.), images, videos, audio, any media type, and then set custom task lists with check boxes for feedback to the creator.
The monday.com servers are more than capable of managing video therefore you no longer require third-party file storage platforms such as Dropbox (although you can connect these services), and it is faster for a creatives to upload video than if they were using YouTube or Facebook private access and sharing a link. You are then able to download final versions for publishing once the project is complete or simply store them as archives within monday.com.
You can configure your alerts for phones or email so you are notified instantaneously whenever there is an update, in fact everything changes in real-time and you can see those changes as they happen.
5. Management reporting and team meetings
Whether you are closing out the month, or undertaking your weekly update meetings, you can simply use the application to drive the agenda using the interface onscreen to present past work or plans for future projects with customized reporting dashboards.
Each individual in the meeting is able to employ their own action lists for onscreen review, and based on feedback update them there and then. This helps you make sure that they are not just writing points down in their notepads, only to never revisit them at a later point in time, you can see their notes!
Because of the well-presented interface, you can change the view magnification to quickly extract the salient points regarding productivity and progress, or when presenting to management or stakeholders you simply use Monday, no need for Ms PowerPoint, Project and your notepad.
Conclusion
There are various collaboration platforms out there now and you should be employing one of them, but for content creation, production, and publishing I think monday.com is probably one of the best, it will help you stay organized, reduce fragmented communication, and remove the need for multiple platforms when interacting on your projects. The fact that it is just so easy to use, makes the process of getting team members and external collaborators up and running a complete doddle.
By the way…
When I was managing the content production of more than 500 articles, videos, podcasts, and infographics per month for folkU, I was able to ban the use of email and chat apps, allowing me to keep those channels for broader business operations, and because we were able to upload, add, review and feedback individually in one place, per project, we avoided information overload and the potential for having to revisit missed points, there was no need to keep switching between applications, and I was able to provide clear direction to all team members (internal and external) on the go, wherever I was, or they were.
Disclaimer:
This article constitutes an independent product review; Disruptable™ have not received, and will not receive any form of financial remuneration for its publication.
