Your scenario:
You're an advisor or team leader for remote yet globally located teams. You go into the office on a Monday. You call your remote clients. No answer. You email. Some answer and some do not. The emails you get back are all Out of Office replies stating people are on holiday. There will be no business as usual today.
The problem:
You didn't know about the holiday or you forgot about the holiday both on the preceeding Friday and the Monday morning prior to starting your day.
Solution:
You need some simple answers. Might I suggest a superb calendar app upon your smarty-pants phone all hanging out in the cloud 24/7 and linked-in to the best and brightest folks whom you do business with.
Me-Too's:
The calendar would
Value Hook:
But here is the bazoom, open and closed hashtag'n to and from your calendar to/from others thru Social channels that activates an automated yet humanized interchange spreading love (and notice of your doing's) to all those who need to know. The app would be called O.O.O. pronounced, "ooooooooo" or "ooooooh" and simply stands for out of office. "Oooooh!" Got it? Superb.
Examples of O.O.O. (ahhhh):
Here's how it would work. Friday afternoon you are packing up for a week long holiday. You hashtag #O.O.O to Twitter, Yammer or Linkedin stating you will be out on holiday the following few days. O.O.O. sends your message to all teams and individuals (public or private by your permission) via social channels and email. It tells others what they didn't know they needed to know. Even better it loads your message to their own O.O.O. calendar. Your notice becomes the very first item or notification to pop up the very next business day (or non-business day). They get the power of knowing and you get the power of knowing they know via "I read this" confirmation tracking.
If that isn't enough to pop your cherry O.O.O. will use the full powers of delight to turn your out-of-office and in-the-office life into a mega fun experience. Notify team mates you are gone by simply pushing your calendar to theirs and tagging their calendar view with the best pic of your smiling face ever shot. Sort your teams/clients daily items in one view or individually. Push messages to calendar appointment alarms. You know someone is in a meeting til 11am so you push a notification "alarm" to their O.O.O. calendar. At noon their meeting ends and the first notification they get is a timely message from you. Are you waking up early and need to make sure your team will make the 5am flight to ORD? Set your team alarm (ringing on team mates phones) to sound like your favorite hotel wake up call! Then push those as a meeting entry to your team and at 3am on the dot, "Ring, ring. Ring, ring. This is your Hilton Perks wake up call, your boss wants to make sure you packed clean underwear for the flight. Please wake up and pack underwear." Insert Hilton female robo-call wake-up voice.
The ultimate goal of the O.O.O. App is simply to help others know where you are and when you are available. It mixes Business with Social and integrates a human touch into a marketplace with a robotic outlook. The premise would be full transparency of calendar items, user customizable dashboards of delight and some helpful, mind-reading features designed to assure that distant clients, friends and family members will be in-the-know. Obviously the app could manifest in the mobile landscape and be created as a widget add-in to existing social sites or blogs.
Push>Pull±Push<Pull
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