That nasty bug on a new integration project refused to be found and we were fried at the end of the day. We felt lost and defeated. Leaving the office seemed hard to do but coming back the next day with a fresh perspective was equally important. I think I was in my own world that night. I sent a text message to our team: “I believe nothing is impossible. I hope you think the same”.

We assembled early on Tuesday morning. I think we spent the night thinking about what could have gone wrong. Starting fresh we decided to take a step back and work the basics. This would help us incrementally build our confidence again and find the error(s).

Step 1 - Downloaded new code libraries from the vendor site and went through the tutorials and how-tos. Were we missing something?

Step 2 -  Made sure our server had the correct requirements. It was important to double-check just in-case there was an incompatibility.

Step 3 - Kept the terminal window open and used the ‘tail -f’ command on the error log file. This would help us squash bugs incrementally as we progressed.

Step 4 - Setup the code and made sure that the most basic example ran. It gave us a few fatal errors that we couldn’t make sense of. After searching the vendor’s site, there were others who had the same problem. We applied these patches. At last, the basic example ran properly.

Step 5 - This gave us confidence to add our code and made sure it ran too. After some minor modifications, this ran too and we were well on our way to complete the integration.

Looking back, we figured it was some old libraries and something buggy in our code that returned empty session values and broke the processing. We could have probably commented our code in the first place, but we opted to start from scratch.

This process is something that all developers go through. Though, what we learnt was very powerful and will stay with us for a long time:

a. Take up a challenge positively cause it ain’t going away. If you are going to face it, you might as well give your best.
b. Going back to the basics helps. Building on stuff that works always helps.
c. Control your mind when faced with a challenge. It will wander and get excited. Calm down.
d. Keeping everyone motivated and encouraged as you will be working with people with different stress levels.

That same morning, I came across a quote from one my twitter followers:

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.”–Robert Louis Stevenson

Deep inside, I knew it would be our day.

After asking around for social media stories we got an interesting case study from Mayank Dhingra who is looking after the social media marketing for five short films by director Onir. Mayank and his team have used social platforms like facebook, twitter & blogging within their outreach strategy. This is what Mayank has to say about how they went about using the new media and what their experience and insight has been.

This is a unique project because of its

1. Idea/Concept: The idea is to make five short films on socially relevant topics, release them for screenings/festivals independently and later make them into a regular feature film.

2. Financing: Anticlock films is putting 50% of the total cost involved and remaining 50% is being raised from the audience.

3. Audience Involvement: We are actively involving people who care about these causes to help us in spreading the word and contributing in whichever way they can.

On using Social Media…

Keeping in mind that we were marketing independent short films based on different issues, we decided to have a few independent (film specific) web properties like blogs, facebook pages which can be used to connect with people who believe in the same cause. Here we would also share developments about the short films. We are in the process of building a website for the feature film which will also serve as the primary web property.

We also have an account on Twitter which we use to share updates about all short films and a YouTube account for sharing videos.

We spend a lot of time and effort on promoting our blogs and facebook pages. A few things that work for us are:

* Cross linking and cross promoting a films blog, facebook page on our other blogs, pages.
* Giving out links of blogs during interviews with mainstream media like newspapers.
* Encouraging people to embed Abhimanyu (one of the five films) badge and/or Abhimanyu appeal video on their blogs/sites.

Facebook pages seem to work better for us as compared to Facebook Groups. We find that people love to know the tiny details and daily updates about the films. It’s very important to involve the cast/crew members into your social media efforts as people love to interact with them and it brings a lot of momentum to the campaign. Sharing updates regularly helps in sustaining audience interest. We also invite our contributors and volunteers to write testimonials on how they got to know about us and what made them contribute or volunteer. These testimonials are regularly published on our blogs.

It’s amazing how the online word of mouth travels! We’ve got contributors from more than 17 cities from across the world. This wouldn’t have been possible without social media. To measure the online reach, we created a new email id to contact us about donations, volunteering etc. and put it up across all our web properties. To our surprise, we started getting mails about contributions, interviews from people who none of us knew directly.

To make the process of contributing easy, we have set up widgets on our blogs which people can use to contribute. We’ve so far raised more than $1000 from it. Our online activities have got us mentions in all major newspapers like HT, DNA and more. We have a section on our blog and facebook page to share media/press mentions.

On running contests…

We ran a ‘name the film’ contest on facebook and got a pretty good response. We have planned a few more contests/campaigns which we will be announcing soon.

On some stats…

Abhimanyu’s facebook page has about active 1000 fans and Omar’s page (Omar is another one of the five films) has about active 1100 fans. We get hundreds of interactions in the form of ‘comments’ and ‘likes’ per week.

Abhimanyu Blog is updated almost daily (81 posts so far), it has received about 4500 hits and is increasingly getting more comments. It also has link backs from many popular sites/blogs.

Our Twitter account is also regularly updated (about 1000 updates) and we’ve got about 200 odd friends there. Our tweets get replied to and re-tweeted regularly.”

As we can see social media efforts have been fairly successful in marketing films with a social cause. It has also led to fund raising. So take a look at your social media outreach. Does this case study give you new insights? Do you have any thoughts that you want to share?

Let us know (support AT deskaway DOT com) how you are promoting your business with social media. We will have it profiled here!

We at DeskAway are active on many social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. We believe it truly provides value to our business and to our customers. It helps us build a better relationship with our customers.  It would be great to see what other businesses are doing in their social media sphere and what works for them.

So tell us your innovative and funky  social media story. We will feature the creative ones on our blog and push it through our monthly newsletter that goes out to thousand’s of business owners!

You can send your story to support AT deskaway.com or tweet us on twitter.com/deskaway

Spread the word!

1. Themes are open for all accounts!

Today, we opened up DeskAway Themes for all accounts, including Free. Go ahead, and personalize your DeskAway account today!

2. Showing full name of people in comments notifications for tasks & messages

3. Contact permission revamp

From now onwards, regular and limited users will not be able to see any other newly added users on their Dashboards. This is to prevent people from outside your company (lets say 2 competiting clients) to see who else is being added to the DeskAway account.

Similarly, the Contact tab will also not be available to people outside your company. Only Super & Regular users from your company will be able to see the contacts tab. To change someone’s company name, edit the user from the Team section.

4. Hide completed tasks to remove some clutter on the Task List page

5. Display project name within the calendar for due tasks



6. Show Export/ Backup size so you are aware as to how much you need to download

Hope you like these new enhancements! Thank you all for your feedback.