So, as I mentioned in phases-iphone-ownership-beginning, after about my first hour or so playing with the iPhone, it came to me that this was a device that could help you get things done. No more going to the computer, turning on the computer, waiting for it to boot up, etc., just to check my email? A calendar that I always have in my pocket? These were revelations to my unorganized old-self. After the 2.0 update and the ability to add functionality to an already cool device was released, that’s when the real fun began. I was on the bus yesterday and Stacy was reading the NY Times across from me, and there was that ad that Apple is running aimed toward small business owners. One of the free apps that they displayed was called SimpleMindsXpress, so I checked it out. I cannot recommend an app more highly than this one. Let me elaborate…
As you darn well know if you read this blog, I’ve recently undertaken the self-assigned role of Web Czar of my band. Whilst pondering over all of the various aspects of what a band like mine needs to be on top of in terms of their web presence, I’ve often wished I were better about writing stuff down - organizational website overviews, flowcharts of how a shopping cart experience should be, etc. I’m just not a pencil and paper guy. Luckily, someone out there figured out a way to make it much more exciting to my brain! And it was free! So, here’s how I picture RRE’s overall web presence:
So, great! Now I can kind of get my head around it a little better. I’ve broken it into 2 main categories (for my purposes. Media/PR is going to be handled by the proper authorities), our official presence and the one that is probably going to be even more important overall, the Community. They both involve using the various social networks, and in the free version you can’t link a child category to 2 parent categories, so I just created Social Networks for both. Now, zooming in a little closer, you can start to organize which social networks on which you want to keep track of your presence:
and if you have a campaign specific to one of them, you can zoom in further. BTW, the auto-spell checker on the iPhone automatically changes Twitter to Twitted (decidedly inconvenient these days), and there appears to be a bug in this app that won’t let you dismiss the “correct” word. Annoying, but I guess nothing is perfect. Now I’m going to turn my attention to the forthcoming fan site, which we will park at Railroadearth.net when all is said and done:
And the next Railroadearth.com:
Or the RRE iPhone app:
Holy crap!!!
So, in closing, in two hours on the bus yesterday I was pretty much able to sketch out just about every component of our entire online infrastructure, which as much or as little abstraction as I needed. God bless America!
Edit: So last night’s deep thought was that I completely forgot to even mention how it works. They call these diagrams “Mind Maps”, and when you create a new one, you start off with that central blue bubble. If you want to add a category under that you just click the button. A different colored bubble shows up that you then name with the category. You can move them around and add new ones and cut old ones out. For instance, here’s the revised overall scheme, to which I added the iPhone app and just tightened everything up: