Danger In Numbers
We seem to have gotten used to a distributed way of business - where marketing, especially social media marketing doesn't happen in one place. In our cloud based world, Anne could be in New York, Andy in Lubbock, Texas, and Alison in Croatia, all working together to accomplish a mutual marketing goal. We feel confident because we know that Google will empower our collaboration as we co-write using Google Docs and save and share our files on Google Drive. Maybe even use the same Google+ account to spin our social web.
As wonderful as collaborating in this manner is, many of us haven't paid attention to the risky behaviors that could cause hiccups in our process. I've heard of several occasions where a team has worked diligently on a shared document which is almost complete - and suffers a major setback when one of the collaborators inadvertently deletes the shared document.
Less common are issues related to Google going down - which could mean not getting access to your shared documents, contacts or important email, or in the worst case could mean total loss of one of these important items.
The Tools Are There To Avoid the Danger
It's not difficult to remove the risk. All it takes is proper backup habits - but most of us have lousy backup habits, with procrastination being the big problem. Google even gives us tools to back up to our own computers; but they're a bit of a hassle. So we ignore those too.
Automating the Risk Out of Collaborating
I was pleased, recently, to stumble upon Spinbackup. It's a neat, inexpensive service that backs up your Google account, from shared documents through contacts and even Google+ photos. For a buck per person per month, you can back up a Google account, give all the collaborators access to the backup, and not have to worry again about whether somebody will torpedo your project by deleting a shared file. There's also a one-person Spinbackup account that you can get for free.
Amazingly Easy
The nicest thing about Spinbackup (besides the easy price) is that it's amazingly easy. You don't even need to create a password. Just create your Spinbackup account while you're logged into your Google account. It will show you a dialog box with all the ways it can use your data; then, after you okay that sharing, it automatically logs into your Google account and analyzes it. It only took seconds to do mine - but mine is not that large.
Less Than a Buck - Like an iPhone App
The least expensive shared account is 99 cents monthly for the first user and 80 cents for each user who can share. That will back up a Google account up to 2 GB, plenty for most people. If your Google account is fat with data, you can backup 100GB for $9.99 a month, and that includes 4 users.
Full-Time Access
It just seems like the natural progression in cloud computing. Our data gets backed up automatically so we don't fall prey to our own bad habits. The data sits on a secure (Amazon) server on the cloud, so everybody in our collaboration group gets access if needed. And it's so drop dead simple that we don't even have to train anybody to use it.
(Collaborative marketing / shutterstock)