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Yesterday afternoon, Steve Jobs gave the keynote at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference. Many cool and exciting new developments were announced, but one that stood out was iCloud, which simply put, allows you to share your music, photos, email, calendar events, contacts across your computers, iPads, iPhones and iPods.
Apple has created a number of new applications to make sharing your documents, photos and music easier. They are also opening up iCloud to external developers, so new apps created by third parties will also have the ability to store information in iCloud.
Jobs said in his presentation that, “Some people think the cloud is just a hard disk in the sky, we think it’s way more than that. And we call it iCloud.” Which brings up the question,
What is the Cloud?
Wikipedia defines cloud computing as “the on-demand provision of computational resources (data, software) via a computer network, rather than from a local computer.” To put it a little more simply, the cloud is a new way to store information that has come about since the Internet changed the way we use computers.
In the 80’s and 90’s we stored our computer files on floppy disks. We then gradually moved to CDs and zip drives, before memory sticks and external hard drives took over in the last decade. As storage has become cheaper and our Internet connections have become faster, it’s become possible for us to store our files remotely, or “in the cloud.”
Storing our files so that they can be accessed over the Internet, allows for a more flexibility, which we are only beginning to explore. If your Word documents and Power Point presentations are stored in the cloud, you can access them from any computer. If your music is stored in the cloud, you can easily share is between your iPhone, iPod and computer. Photos can be streamed to your television to play in a slideshow and important documents can easily be backed up.
Apple hopes that they can make using the cloud easier for normal humans, as for the last couple of years it’s only been available to technocrats. But as marketers we also need to consider,
How Does the Cloud Affect Marketing?
The explosion of things moving to the cloud isn’t something that should be scary, in fact it will make our lives as marketers easier. There are a couple of ways you as a marketer can start taking advantage of the cloud today, and you might even be doing some of these already with out realizing it.
1. Sharing Schedules - The cloud makes sharing calendars and schedules super easy. At HubSpot we use Google Calendar to keep track of everything including blogging calendars, webinars and our vacation schedule.
While we all enjoy having our calendars accessible on our work and home computers as well as on our iPhones, having our events stored in the cloud also allows us to create calendars that everyone on the marketing team can see.
This means no more mass invitations to events you only need to be aware of and more knowledge distributed throughout the team. Everyone on our marketing team knows when someone is out of the office through our vacation calendar, and our sales team can keep updated about the webinar schedule via the webinar calendar.
2. Sharing Documents – We use a combination of Google Docs and Dropbox to share documents across the team. This keeps us from having to email presentations around as we collaborate on creating them and to share photos and branding collateral.
With Google Docs we can collaborate on a document, working on it at the same time, and seeing the changes the other person is making. We also have the ability to set the permissions so everyone at HubSpot can see it, or so that only specific people can.
Dropbox allows you to share entire folders of information. If you have monthly reports that the team collaborates on, you can share a Dropbox folder that will appear on the desktop of everyone you share it with. They can then access the files within, make updates and when they save those updates they will automatically be reflected in the version on your computer.
3. Backing Up – The cloud makes backing up your work so much easier. Have you ever had a teammate who lost their computer on the subway? Or who fried the hard drive with an improperly placed glass of water? For many of us this has meant lost work and frustration. With tools like iCloud and Dropbox your work will be automatically backed up so that once you have a new computer, you just need to get access to the files.
These tools also mean that documents on your work computer can be easily accessible on your home computer. So while this means your files are backed up safe and sound, it also means you can stop lugging your computer to and from work!
The cloud has opened a whole new world of collaboration, sharing and safety. If you aren’t already using some (or all) of these methods to making your life easier, it's time to get started!
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