On the wonderful Audiobooks at Sea cruise yesterday, narrator Jess Moran gave a detailed and inspiring presentation demonstrating how she intentionally and thoughtfully develops things to share on social media without making life’s work out of each post.

Someone asked how to store and catalog all the assets that you create. Our fabulous host Joel Froomkin suggested that Evernote would be a good tool for this purpose.

He’s right!

As I’ve previously written, I love Evernote because it synchs across my devices and is always accessible to me. It offers tremendous flexibility in how you store info and search for it. You can use tags, the title, key words, and dates in your search.

You can add videos, photos, and audio to a note. Evernote also will transcribe your media, including your handwriting!

A Google search revealed plenty of apps for the specific purpose of holding your social media components. Airtable would also work well for this task, but I don’t know whether or how well you can use your phone with it for uploads.

I didn’t want to buy another app or test Airtable. I use Evernote for everything and wanted to try it for this purpose.

As an experiment today, I used my iPhone to:

• capture some images and videos during my day in Grand Cayman
• create a folder in Evernote named Social Media Assets
• add a single note in the folder for each picture or video. You could add multiple media to a single note, but I want each thing to be a separate unit for searchability.
• edit some video clips together in iOS iMovie

The ship’s Wi-Fi is horrendously slow. I also found that it often timed out or logged me out on my phone, especially when I was uploading the videos. I had much steadier reception using my laptop.

Since it was so problematic, I uploaded the images from my phone to an iCloud folder. I then signed onto the Wi-Fi with my laptop and imported the media into my Evernote notes.

I wouldn’t have any issues in uploading videos and pictures straight from my phone into Evernote using regular cellular service or land-based Wi-Fi.

Here’s the 2:26 explainer video I made in iMovie. It doesn’t highlight screen taps as I normally would show in a video I produced at home. However, I think you can get the gist and see how quick and easy it is to use Evernote to catalog your clips and photos.

When you’d want to use the asset you’ve stored in Evernote, you could Open it and Share it to another app, or download it. I’d rather Open and Share it from within Evernote so I don’t have multiple copies of the thing.

A better option might be to store the resource you’ve made somewhere in the cloud like Google Drive and add its Share link to Evernote in addition to or instead of the asset. You then could use Evernote for inventory and search and always have a link to the component.

This Evernote note has the intro clip that we filmed after breakfast that I used in the video demo. I corrected the date and transcribed the video. The video doesn’t load for me on ship, but it should be available and will probably download if you’re on land.

I recorded this tip for cruisers:

If you want to see the notebook containing all the clips I created today, please send me an email. Note that I will process the requests after I get home.

Want to learn more about Evernote? I created a 10-module video course for members of NarratorsRoadmap.com. I show Evernote’s basic features and how I use it for my Customer Relationship Management (CRM) records.

I also want to mention that when I write anything substantive on a social media platform — whether my own post or comments on someone else’s — I copy it from the platform into Evernote so I might repurpose it later. My words belong to ME!

I found in today’s experiment that I took far more pictures and videos than I usually would in a month! Plus, I learned how to do some things; for instance, I’d never used iMovie on my phone. I also learned the importance of uploading videos to YouTube rather than my WordPress site!

The biggest benefit to the experiment was that I felt more creative throughout the day as I was specifically looking for interesting things that I might want to include in my private journals, articles, and social media posts.

Thanks so much to Jess Moran for explaining your system and giving me a new approach to documenting my life!

PS. We had a great time shopping in Grand Cayman! I saw this sign as we walked around and couldn’t resist sharing it here!