Whatever is the breed of your goods, or services, or your target regions, you, by default, need in your team content marketing managers, copywriters, communication managers, and other content creators. It is they who keep vigilance on the corporate blog, articles placement, and SMM to build the digital presence of your business.
With over 15 years of background in the promo team, I have witnessed the emergence of professional copywriting toolkit. Today, the market is flooded with solutions for creating and managing content with regard to the business and domain specifics. Nonetheless, our marketing team has experienced the lack of professional tools for a long time.
We happen to have in our midst copywriters, proofreaders, the chief editor, marketing manager, SMM manager, and SEO engineer – a large team capable of completing different tasks. But our prime goal is content creation.
At the dawn of our teamwork, it was the dark time of chaos and numerous technical issues. We started with using Word + Version control system (Microsoft Volume Snapshot Service, and later SVN). After that, we passed on to Jira and even tried to adjust to our needs the solutions based on mind maps, i.e., Mindjet.
But then one day, we discovered MS OneNote – a mind-blowing tool. It was the year 2007, and One Note was already available in the MS Office 2003 package. From there on, our business activities have undergone dramatic modifications.
How we work
- Planning, tasking, controlling and monitoring, calculating KPI
We should admit that before OneNote came into our life, we had been successfully tackling challenges. But we had to use Word and Excel files – a “necessary evil” – that we e-mailed and stored in shared folders.
How we do it today.
We still keep track of progress in free form, compiling the tables where we tag stages, current processes, and those in charge of tasks. It is not as convenient as we’d like it to be. However, we don’t need to email files or care about file versions any longer. Each team member with the access rights can track his or her tasks, change status, etc. The killer feature is options that allow integrating single files, injecting Excel tables, and creating reports in the editorial area on OneNote pages. Any shortcomings of this solution are offset by its flexibility.
- Copywriting, proofreading, supervising
OneNote is tailored for these all. It is an ideal tool for collaboration over copywriting tasks. You get content-sharing, change-tracking, and reviewing tools rolled into one. Your copywriters, whatever the number, can work on one single document. They can exchange links via corporate e-mail server or create tasks in Jira, and they can also place comments in the editorial area. Creating content in One Note is as easy as breathing.
- Websites reviewing
Our team actively participates in the QA for custom web applications. Frankly, our managers require all bugs fixed in Jira or a bug tracking system. But you never know the number of needed UI changes and HTML coding errors waiting around the corner. OneNote allows developers to deal with bugs by describing each one in the right section. In particular, OneNote lets pasting screenshots in one click and offers tools for reviewing pages.
- Databases of articles
OneNote is a multi-dimensional database, which in itself is a handy feature. It allows users to create custom databases of articles, fragment them into sections, store articles within each section, and systematize pages by making up to 3 subpages.
- Global search
We have long valued the convenient search system that allows retrieving information from the following repositories:
- All Notebooks
- Current Notebook
- Current Section
- Current Page
Further, the search system lets users look for information nodes by such attributes as:
- Tag Type
- Author
- Reviewing Events
- Document Management system
We have realized the significant potential of employing OneNote as a document management solution. We finally eliminated the use of single files. This universal tool lets us store corporate business knowledge, project data, such as emails, content, reports, and graphics.
- Personal Knowledge Management system
The internal OneNote organization perfectly correlates with the concept of knowledge bases. The growth of professional experience makes us steadily gather, process, and accurately store customer feedback, new information about cutting-edge trends and innovative methods. We can search and retrieve required knowledge quickly and effectively. Our copywriters are used to employ OneNote not only for professional reasons but also for day-to-day tasks.
Arguments for and against
OneNote provides the following perks:
- It doesn’t require advanced technical skills to create and maintain the OneNote infrastructure. For local use, it is enough to place databases in the network shared folder. You need to set the copywriting team access rights – and that’s it.
- OneNote is compatible with different platforms. It is available on PC, Mac, Android, iOS, and as a cloud application.
- The embedded OCR enables text search in images and allows completing OCR on the fly.
- “Napkin math” is easy-to-do straight on OneNote pages.
There are some pitfalls to be aware of:
- The lack of task-tracking tools. Actually, OneNote has no “Tasks” entity. You can create it and track changes, which, however, requires a lot of manual work. As a result, the effectiveness of this activity will depend on the diligence of those responsible for tracking tasks.
- Error syncing cloud storage data. We have time and again experienced problems syncing via the cloud server, OneDrive. However, there are no such issues with working in the local application.
- No sync with a messaging system. We have to use third-party systems for corporate communication, such as Outlook or Skype. Sadly, there is no automatic information transfer option from the messaging systems into OneNote.
