Words: Dan Sawney / Image: Ben Nankivell

What better way to kickstart Futurising then with a talk on making the most of the web? Sinead MacManus, from social enterprise organisation 8Fold, took us on a whistle-stop tour through the plethora of possibilities available to creative graduates looking to maximise their online presence for productivity and self-promotion.

She started by showing us how to build our web presence using three sites: Flavors.me, Posterous and WordPress. Flavors.me lets you aggregate your Twitter, blog and Flickr pages in one handy list. Posterous is a microblogging site that’s great for visual work. The most sophisticated tool on offer here is WordPress.org. Though it requires you to pay for hosting (using a site such as Bluehost), it’s a powerful tool that lets you insert all manner of widgets, plug-ins and media to get your website off the ground.

Sinead’s tip for documents was to use Dropbox. It does what it says on the tin, allowing you to easily drop your documents into it and also allows full collaboration.

Gmail is still the smartest and most powerful client out there and is unrivalled when it comes to labelling, filtering and searching your mail. Google also offers the best browser out there with Chrome. It’s simple and speedy and lets you have a huge amount of tabs open at one time.

Information capture application Evernote is one for the real info geeks out there. It lets you clip articles and websites to your heart’s content, and even has a text recognition function that lets you take a picture of a business card, poster (or wine label!) with your phone and then search for it using the text in the picture.

All these applications are great as long as you know how to manage your time effectively. For this, Sinead recommended Remember the Milk, which beyond making sure you don’t forget your daily calcium hit is great for organising your daily tasks. You can even set it up to ping reminders into your email inbox.

Finally to the elephant in the room – social media. If you tweet then there’s nothing out there that beats TweetDeck. You can organise your account into various columns that let you see your friends’ tweets, direct messages and mentions of you, along with any groups that you want to follow. You can also set it up to ping your tweets directly to your Facebook or LinkedIn account.

Functionality and integration were the keywords here, and all of these tools have them in abundance. Get to grips with them and you’ll soon be harnessing the full power of the web to get your creative career off the ground.