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Social Media Informer: Best Digest of Social Media for Business

By on August 26, 2010 in Cool Tools, Social Media with 0 Comments

Anything that can make it easier for me to find a signal is a tool worth looking at.

Social Media Informer (SMI), a new hub and aggregator for social media content makes it easier to cut through the noise and find a signal. You can use the site as a daily digest, or search articles based on topics or dates.

In Tom Pick’s review of the site on Webbiquity, he shares:

“SMI was developed by some of the same people as the popular B2B Marketing Zone b2b marketing portal. It also uses the same underlying Browse My Stuff technology,
which enables publishers, PR agencies, corporations and other
enterprises to efficiently SEO-friendly build branded content
aggregation hubs.”

You’ll find archived content from plenty of the industry leaders, some you’re sure to be familiar with, and some maybe you haven’t discovered yet.  With Social Media Informer – you’ll be able to quick-and-easy now.

I’ve found myself searching by topic hubs (a great way to find outbound links if you’re using Blog Posting Mantra #4), and occasionally using the date-based “change edition” at the top (this could come in useful for our Social Media History category)

I’m proud to be among those featured, and thankful to be among their readers.  You should be too.

Social_media_informerHere are some of the other Featured sites (I’m either subscribed or following each of these folks):

If you want to learn more about how you can engage or involved, here’s more on how to Participate with Social Media Informer

 

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Using Google Voice Mail for Blog Posts

By on August 24, 2010 in Blog Coach, Cool Tools with 1 Comment

I've written and talked often about my dislike for ghostwriting blog posts.

GoogleVoice Occasionally I would find it necessary, but the process still carried the uncomfortable feeling of breaking integrity (for the blog author as well as myself).

To maintain voice and tone of the author, I've begun using Google Voice Mail more often as a "Blog Post Drop" for clients. And it's working great!

Some clients use this in the morning when they first get to work, some on the way home in reflection of their day. Just a little coaching on what to say (it's not a 30-second radio ad, it's a conversation with their customer) and we're on our way.

Google Voice Mail allows and transcribes three minutes of conversation. Even with lots of "uhm" and "soo" we can usually get 300-400 words in a full three minutes. I get an email with the transcription (not anything close to a Dragon-type of transcribe, but it's good enough) and the sound file. In 10 minutes or so, we have the transcribed version, find a relevant outbound link, insert an image, and presto – a blog post voiced

I'm going to put Google Voice to another use later this week.

You can even embed the recording into a post.  Here's a voice mail I left recently:

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Reworking Tumblr with Scaffold Theme

By on July 10, 2010 in Blog Coach, Conversations, Cool Tools with 0 Comments

I've been toying a bit with Tumblr since I saw MGSiegler's ParisLemon site using the Scaffold theme recently.

Having sought ways to say, share, and store content that is not really ConverStations "stuff," and to be able to do so easily (I can text or email posts into my Tumblr site — and Posterous too), I'm going to use Tumblr for stuff that's too big for my Twitter stream, and maybe just a bit off the radar for ConverStations' stream.

Tumblr 

I've activated a FeedBurner feed and will be making a few modifications this week.  Will it stick?  I dunno, let's find out.

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Cool Tool: Video Loop with Endless You Tube

By on July 6, 2010 in Blog Coach, Cool Tools, Video with 0 Comments

There has been occasions I wanted to loop a YouTube video, whether it's my own at a presentation or event, or a music or movie video I could loop while writing.

Via MakeUseOf.com, I've found EndlessYouTube a great tool for doing just that — and more.

This weekend, I did a lot of writing and found a "best clips" of The Magnificent Seven (a fave of mine). Had some of the great quotes AND the soundtrack. So I looped it using EndlessYouTube

Eyt

 Simply grab the ID number from the YouTube video you want to loop, place it in the "loop" form field. You can also crop to have just a portion of the video loop.

A quick and easy way to use this tool is to simply add "endless" to the URL, right in front of "youtube.com" – so http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsA0eL3xp0w becomes http://www.endlessyoutube.com/watch?v=AsA0eL3xp0w – dig?

You can use this at tradeshows or just before a presentation to loop a video of yours or one of inspiration to set up your show.  

Cool Tool: Track Tweets with The Archivist

By on June 29, 2010 in Blog Coach, Conversations, Cool Tools, Social Media with 0 Comments

Stumbled upon a pretty cool tool this morning, The Archivist, a tool to use in researching and archiving keywords, hashtags, and even user streams.

With less than a month to go before the Ragbrai event, I can grab (and subscribe) to a stream of data and tweets for Ragbrai (click on image to see “live” archive):

Google Chrome
 

You can save the tweet data as public or private. Below the pie charts and data candy, we find a stream of tweets. I don’t see an RSS feed option though (Search Once and Subscribe?)

Use BackTweets for Tracking Your Content on Twitter

By on June 9, 2010 in Cool Tools with 0 Comments

While It's pretty intuitive to track how your content gets shared on Twitter, especially when your Twitter name is mentioned in the tweet. This kind of RT of your site content looks like this:

RTwithAT
Thanks to Ryan Malone for extending our conversation outward to his tweeps.

But what about those that link to your content without mention of your name? Like this one:

RTwithoutAT

Thanks also to Kathy Drewien for extending our conversation outward to her folks.

Most folks track the former, but miss out on the latter. If you're one of those on the "missing" side of the ledger, BackTweets has the answer for you.

Simply input the URL you desire to track, and regardless of URL truncator, BackTweets will provide you the results. 

BackTweets

From the results page, you subscribe to the RSS feed (remember, Search Once and Subscribe). Easy-Peasy!

Results

Of course, you can do this for any site, including clients or competitors. They also have a BackTweets Pro for even more metrics and tracking goodies.  Give it a shot.

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Create Your Own Self-Portal Site – with Flavors.Me

By on June 8, 2010 in Cool Tools with 0 Comments

I put together a self-portal site this morning in about 15 minutes with flavors.me and some domain “masking” that was super easy to set-up.

MIke Sansone portal

I don’t have the upgraded version of flavors.me, though that gives more options including stat tracking, but I was able to put both blogs and a handful of my social networking pages. Just a portal to my other stuff.  I think sites like these are going to be more popular with time.

Others:

Rob Jensen’s Mind Map Portal

Kelly Nelsen’s Portal Page

Social Media Self-Assessment with Grader and HubSpot

By on January 21, 2010 in Blog Coach, Cool Tools, Social Media with 0 Comments

We keep score. In our bank accounts. On the golf course.  And we should keep score in our social media efforts.

2204506755_e9d327e99a Even though many aspects of social media efforts — maybe the most important ones — are not tangible, a scoring system like those offered on Grader.com are good to use on occasion to see how you might improve your playing field.

From the folks at HubSpot Marketing, the Grader tools can help you find areas of improvement and tech tweaks you can make to your site(s):

  • Website Grader: Works for both blogs or (cob)web sites. Shows areas of improvement for meta data such as keywords, domain information, inbound links, and Google-ish stuff.
  • Twitter Grader: Shows your conversational impact, measuring the follow/following ratio, number of retweets, and consistency of updates. If I could modify one measurement, I'd figure a way to analyze how many replies to or retweet of others to show engagement impact.
  • Also available: Facebook Grader, Press Release Grader, and a Blog Grader

The HubSpot team also has a great Inbound Marketing blog, a weekly video show (Friday afternoons) and a fun YouTube channel to which you should subscribe.

I already can hear some of the arguments like, "I don't keep score."  Un-huh.  How's your bowling game?

Photo on Flickr by tray

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Don’t Get Caught Watching the Paint Dry, Folks

By on December 5, 2009 in Blog Coach, Cool Tools with 0 Comments

I often use the Ziglar story about getting cooked in the squat (bisquits on the rise) to motivate an action, and this scene from the movie Hoosiers is along the same lines.

If you're just getting started in the conversphere or about to launch a new idea on us, just do it! Remember, Practice makes Perfect.

I got the clip from Movieclips.com – and yes, I am addicted.(H/T Lifehacker)

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Dang Technology! I Prefer Face-to-Face

By on July 28, 2009 in Blog Coach, Cool Tools, Social Media with 0 Comments

That’s what they said. About the telephone.

“Why would you want to talk on some contraption when you can go down the road a wee bit and visit? You won’t find a phone in my home. I prefer face-to-face.”

Well, the phone didn’t take away face-to-face back then, in fact — some folks would say the tool enhanced the talk.

Really, really?  So can Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and…

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