You’re Just a Tool, Social Media

Twitter may be Gini Dietrich’s favorite social media tool, but she’s also seeing the power of video and YouTube. Unless you’ve been in hiding, chances are familiar with these Big Dogs including Facebook and LinkedIn.

What else is out there? A lot.

Tweet Better. Show someone the standard web interface, they don’t get Twitter. That’s why you need a client.

[stextbox id=”alert” float=”true” align=”right” bcolor=”000000″ bgcolor=”c4bac9″]Tip for power tweeters.

If you manage multiple Twitter accounts, and want to make sure to not accidentally tweet from the wrong account, use different Twitter clients. I use Seesmic and Twhirl for other accounts, makes it much easier.[/stextbox]

After trying Twhirl, Seesmic and Echofon for Firefox, TweetDeck is probably still my favorite Twitter client. All of them work okay; I just like the organization and integration of TweetDeck.

Other Twitter gems:

Google Knows. Sure Google is set to go self-aware, annihilate us all in a few years, but until then it offers great tools. Did I mention they were FREE?

  • Google Profile. Vanity searching aside, the minute you set it up your profile is out there.  Plus you can add links to your blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Nice SEO.
  • Google Alerts. Smart people like Gini and Sarah Evans have blogged about using alerts for monitoring, with good reason: quick, easy and free way to monitor the web.
  • Google Docs. In case you hadn’t heard, there’s this Cloud thingy and you don’t even have to email files back and forth. Genius.
  • Google Translate. Get a comment on a YouTube video in a different language, need a quick translation will traveling, this works. There’s also a website tool.

Blog Posting Power Ups: It’s Good to Share.

  • Add to Any, Share This, TweetMeme are great services to let people forward your wonderful musings to their networks.
  • Issuu. Time picked it as one of the best websites last year. It’s an easy way of sharing and publishing graphic, stylized documents like newsletters. Lots of potential a la SlideShare.
  • Disqus. Even if you don’t use it to manage comments on your own blog, it’s worth registering and creating a Disqus profile since it will make it easier to share your two pennies.
  • LinkedIn Applications. You take the time to blog or develop presentations; these apps can add your WordPress or Typepad blog automatically, make it easier to enhance your profile.

Former favorite. Somebody please save this!

BackType is a social media analytics firm, that helps track the conversation in real time and they used to offer one of my favorite social media tools, a blog commenter profile.

  • It collected almost all of my comments on other blogs. Fab. Now my Disqus profile has saved those, but I don’t always use that tool to comment.
  • Via WordPress plugins BackType Connect and My Comments Elsewhere, I could show my blog comments in a great sidebar widget. Better than a blogroll.

In April they retired collecting user comments on other blogs, which I really miss.

Overload Much. Too much of a good thing.

  • FriendFeed. It’s linked to most folks Twitter feeds, so it’s redundant.  Unless Twitter is down, of course.
  • Plaxo. An electronic address book. I use LinkedIn more.
  • Technorati. Could never join, technical issues. Fail.
  • Yet to try:  HootSuite, Digg, Delicious or StumbleUpon though I see them used quite a bit.

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There are plenty of lists like this one from Jay Baer. Anything great I must to check out, if I had to add just one to the arsenal, what would you pick? Share your tips here.

Atlanta Public Relations, Marketing and Social Media

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2 thoughts on “You’re Just a Tool, Social Media

    1. Thanks Gini. Obviously there are tons of tools and apps available to clients and small businesses, this is just the tip of the iceberg. I am always psyched to find new things, thought I’d share.

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