Showing posts with label tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tools. Show all posts

Monday, August 11, 2008

del.icio.us tags: tools

Grou.ps allows users to create online "social groups," adding the features that best meet your community's needs.

Share photos, videos and bookmarks; create a group calendar; collaborate via a wiki; aggregate content via a group blog; communicate by posting to the community forum.

Despite being free, there's no branding and no ads. And there are more than 20 templates to choose from, all modifiable — only integrate the features your group needs.

Check it out and let me know if it works well for you.

Friday, July 11, 2008

del.icio.us tags: tools

The Awesome Highlighter enables you to highlight text on a web page and create a unique URL of the marked up page. A good tool for sharing content or creating citation links for reports, papers, etc.

Down for Everyone or Just Me allows you to check to see if that site you're trying to access has crashed or if it's just all one big plot against you and you're ability to get sh*t done.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

del.icio.us tags: twitter


Still collecting content on Twitter to get ready for my upcoming training. Luckily, there's lots o' sh*t out there, probably written by Twitter junkies during the many occasions when the site is down.

Todd Mintz posted 101 Everyday Uses for Twitter on InsideCRM this past week. 101 sounds like a hell of a lot, but Mintz's point is that Twitter has "more possible uses than a Swiss Army knife." Not a great deal of analysis, but a good read nevertheless because he lets the Tweets speak for themselves, contributing an excellent structure to the content.

Lee Odden at Online Marketing Blog polled the blog's readers to gain some insight as to how THEY are using Twitter, with the majority of responses falling into the broad categories of sharing (and promoting) sh*t and schmoozing.

Jennifer Woodward Maderazo at PBS' MediaShift has her own take on the value of Twitter. She's a fan, with the site going "above and beyond (her) original expectations in terms of usefulness." She finds it to be particularly useful for her reporting. "If you put out a question to 800 people, someone's bound to have an answer."

Matt Dickman at Techno//Marketer believes Twitter is "the ultimate customer service tool." Joshua March doesn't agree. I fall somewhere in the middle. I think companies should have a presence on Twitter if their customers tend to be early adopters who are inclined to talk about customer service and have some reach or influence. I don't think Twitter should become a core part of your customer service strategy if they are not. Like March says, trying to teach the majority of your customers how to use it is not going to make it something that's well-received. Despite the fact that I agree with March, I wish he used the term "social media" and not "social marketing" to describe his site. (Oh well.)

Seattle is my second home these days, so I shared this post with my peeps in Seattle who I count among my "followers." It's the Most Famous Twitterpreneurs of Seattle, the kings of the 2.0 geeks in the land of the Space Needle. At least one of the comments on the post picked up on what I noticed: "What, no women entrepreneur-twitterers?"

According to Compete, traffic on Twitter doubled between February and April, when approximately 1.2 million people were using the site and the percentage of time spent on Twitter, relative to the overall time spent online, has quadruped in the past six months. Nearly a quarter of the users are "heavy users," which, I am embarrassed to say, means 6+ tweets per month (I average that per day, folks) and overall, users skew young (18-24) and male. (But the experience you have on the site is dependent on who you're following, so, if you're worried about spending too much time with little boys, don't fret.)

I posted about Noah Brier's brandtags, so I hope you've checked it out by now. Here's how folks are tagging the Twitter brand: annoying, pointless, stupid and useless? Who are these people? ;)

For you design lovers, Wallpaper Magazine is on Twitter now . . .

Finally, Palin Ningthoujam at Mashable posted 140+ More Tools to the Twitter Toolbox they created last September. I am officially completely overwhelmed.

Friday, May 23, 2008

del.icio.us tags: tools

Kurt at Random Knowledge has pulled together an amazing list of sites to check out when you're hunting down images (like when you're trying to make a Power Point less lame). I head to Flickr myself, so I'm grateful to have more options.

Cause Caller helps to organize callers to petition policy makers or others. However, I'm not sure what they do with the phone numbers you give them. There's nothing in the FAQ to answer that question.