Calendar Options for Promotion Schedules

[Ryuzaki]

For my case study site, I'm 99% done and ready to "launch." By this I mean I'm ready to get out there and attract traffic, links, and social signals.

One thing I've never used in my life is a calendar. They've always seemed inflexible when I need flexibility, and their pre-defined little boxes or # of rows to write on always annoyed me.

Are there any solid calendar apps that are flexible enough to include lots of data, add new rows/columns, and it grows as you add more info?

What I'm going to be doing is setting up a production / promotion schedule for each post as it gets published. It'll have things like:

Day 1:
Tweet - Brand Account
Reddit - Username Account
Post on this Niche Forum
10 sets of outreach

Day 2:
Day 3:

And on and on. But it won't say Day 1 or 2, it'd be the actual date. The situation will become that posts will begin overlapping each other along with site-wide promotion like blog comments, etc. This could get pretty hairy pretty quickly.

Excel could handle the task but I'm about sick of doing everything in Excel. It becomes unorganized quickly.

Any tips on the process, apps I should try, etc?

 

[c4yrslf12]

Is it all off of one event, ie publish post?

If this is the case, you could have a string of IFTTT handlers using the RSS function to post to Todoist or something. Just throwing out ideas, only because I don't know of one off hand.

 

[Alex VanDavid]

Trello might be cool for this. You can duplicate cards as need be. You can also enable "calendar power-up" events to see a month all in one view. There are a shitload of cool extensions that could help here too. Trello is amazingly flexible. Like anything developing a system that is easy to stick to helps a lot

I have done this in a database too with the best results. The ability to script in a trigger to the proper app or url to initiate the action can be done easily. Similar to the functions in Excel but a more attractive interface.

I like Trello lately because it has such a great mobile app dev and available on any machine anywhere.

Oh, and it shares and collaborates very well.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Thanks for the replies.

I use Trello now and love it. I just didn't think it would suit this task. I could just set up a card per day and add things in with a checklist, and when the day passes, archive it... It's not quite a calendar view but I don't necessarily have to have that either.... Hrmmm.

Any other suggestions are more than welcomed. I want to entertain a lot of systems before I settle on one. Trello + Excel for account info's could be a good one.

I did see some killer OSX calendar apps, but the actual calendar workflow just doesn't' work for me.

 

[Alex VanDavid]

You could either archive it or rename/date it. The "calendar power-up" option within any card on the board would allow you to see it in calendar view (everything dated on the board). Trello is decent because you can move a whole day of activities in one whack.

I use it for scheduling similar activities with a 43 Folders type format (GTD) in an Organization specific to these tasks.

Other options that are cool are Curio (if OSX) which is a killer IU (with a learning curve). But you build your days in blocks (tables) and include pertinent data. Just keep building or chaining blocks from yesterday to next week/month however you choose. Depending if you need a log, if so, then just dupe.

Also on OSX is a crazy ass app called Tinderbox (Eastgate Systems). This is for freaks who love granular data tweaks and scripting too. Lot's of fun, tough to get it going, but powerful as hell.

These may not be calendars natively, but hey we can all count 7 days, 52 weeks, and design accordingly.

Love Excel but hate the sluggish inter-cellular movements when retrieving data...