February Playlist – I’ve Got a Crush On You

Valentine’s Day is just a few days away, and love is in the air! While you might be making last-minute Edible Arrangements orders or prepping for a Galentine’s event, Don’t Panic Mgmt has been thinking about who we’re crushing on as a team.

Here’s a look at some of our favorite tools for 2016. These companies below make us feel like we’re passing out blow-pop valentines in the fourth grade all over again.

P.S. Stick around to the end for our valentine themed playlist, “I’ve Got a Crush.”

Samepage

Samepage is a collaboration tool. It’s useful for any company with a lot of moving pieces and parts, but it’s particularly helpful for virtual or distributed teams. Essentially it allows you to combine files, photos, cloud content, maps, videos and team conversation together on one screen. Don’t Panic has separate pages for every client, every contractor, and our important policies. In short, it rocks.

Feature we’re crushing on: Samepage is compatible with Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and more—so no matter where your team saves their files, you can easily get synced up and get everyone on the same page (ha ha).

Buffer

While you’ve probably heard of Buffer before, the Don’t Panic team can’t say enough great things about it! Their analytics are the bomb, and they have recently added new features that make their social media scheduling tool easier to use than ever, like the ability to auto-select images from your links to add to your Twitter posts.

Feature we’re crushing on: Buffer recently acquired Respondly, a social media customer service tool that will take your brand monitoring capabilities to a new level. Previously, this missing feature sent some of our clients to Sprout Social, but now, Buffer seriously has everything a social team could need.

Sococo

The Don’t Panic team has written at length about how awesome Sococo is before, so it’s possible that calling our relationship a crush isn’t doing it justice. Sococo is an online workplace for distributed teams (or as I like to call it: Sims! For work!). Team members have their own private work spaces and can pop into each other’s offices for a quick audio or video chat.

Here you can see Jaime and I having some serious QT in the DPM Ball Pit, while Jenn, Shannon, and Elise all get work done in their private offices.

Feature we’re crushing on: What aren’t we crushing on? The best part about Sococo is it significantly decreases the amount of internal email a distributed team requires and makes it possible for everyone to feel connected to each other, no matter where they are located.

Calendly

Calendly completely simplifies the needlessly complicated process of scheduling calendar appointments by eliminating the need for back and forth emails all together. Here’s how it works: set your preferences for availability in Calendly, share your personal link with your contacts, they select one of the available times, and the appointment is automatically added to your calendar. It’s that simple.

Feature we’re crushing on: Real-time calendar updates of availability. If you manage a particularly busy schedule, it’s not uncommon to accidentally double book someone. You give a person three optional time slots for an appointment, they don’t answer for three days (so naturally you offer the slots to someone else), and lo and behold, everybody wants the same date and time! In Calendly, once an appointment is booked, that time slot becomes unavailable for selection for everyone else, tackling the problem head-on.

Zencastr

Zencastr is the answer to your podcasting woes. Instead of using services designed for other purposes to record podcast episodes (looking at you, Google Hangouts and GoToWebinar), Zencastr is a web-based app (no installation required!) that syncs with your preferred VOIP provider and records your calls, while simultaneously streaming the high-quality file to your Dropbox account.

Feature we’re crushing on: The separate audio files, oh the separate audio files! Zencastr keeps everyone’s audio on its own file. In post-production, you can finally edit out the sound of that vacuum salesman ringing your doorbell without losing what your guest was saying at the same time.