Tools of Choice

Social Media Tools

Twitter Search
There are some fantastic advanced search commands you can use with Twitter's search engine. From simple brand related searches to local phrases, Twitter Search can do it all.
IceRocket
Good blog search engine.
Technorati
Another good blog search engine.
Blogpulse
Blog search from Nielsen.
Google News
Track news stories and more.
BoardTracker
Forum search engine, useful for tracking forum conversations.
Facebook Lexicon
See how often people are mentioning you or your brand.
Google Analytics
You may not think of Google Analytics when you think of social media, but you should be. With Google Analytics, you can track referrals to your website from the social media platforms you're using.
Google Trends
See what's trending on the web.
Delicious Search
See how many times pages from your site have been bookmarked by others.
Digg Search
Much like Delicious, you can see how many times pages have been Dugg by others.
Google Blog Search
Blog search engine from Google. (none of the blog search engines are perfect, so it's a good idea to get a mix of data and parse it yourself)
TwitterCounter
Get a rough idea of your Twitter reach.
User Name Check
See if your brand's username has been taken on major and minor social media networks.
BackType
Monitor blog comments.
Social Mention
Decent search aggregation for various sources, from blogs to social sites.
Google Alerts
Set up alerts for keyword or brand name mentions across the web.

Collection Points

Google Reader
What's great about the tools mentioned above is that almost all of them offer RSS feeds for your searches. If you're an agency, or just represent multiple clients, it's real easy to aggregate a bunch of searches for one client into unique folders.
Netvibes
Netvibes actually allows you to set up a pretty nifty dashboard using a combination of RSS feeds and widgets. There's a great tutorial on how to do it

iPhone Blogging Apps

For the iPhone owners themselves; WordPress users should check out the official WordPress iPhone App.

At the minute it only covers writing and editing posts, but given that it was only announced yesterday, it has plenty of time to grow! I have my fingers crossed for comment moderation to be the next feature on the list.

The app will be released for free, for both wordpress.com and wordpress.org users, via the app store when it's ready.

And for Typepad users (if you don't already know!), Six Apart have a great free blogging app already available in the app store.

Preparing your blog for the iPhone is easy. Sadly, deciding whether or not to buy one isn't. I can't make up my mind! What do you think of it?

Create a Web-Clip Icon

Web-clips allow iPhone users to create a link to your web page on their dashboard.

To create a custom web clip icon for your blog, create an image that follows these rules:

• Square image. The iPhone adds the rounded corners itself, and adds a drop shadow effect.

• Has dimensions 57x57 pixels.

• Has no gloss effects. Again, the iPhone adds those itself.

Then simply upload it to the root folder of your site, with the name apple-touch-icon.png

The icon will then be used for every page on your site. If you want to have a different icon for a specific page in your site, you can do so by adding the following code to the page's <head> section:

FOR JOOMLA 1.5 or greater users:

Theres a number of Components, modules, extensions or plugins you can use to switch your Joomla based website to IPHONE and mobile phone ready web content. Cool!

The one thing about the social media community, it always changes! Joomla! is Ken Freeman's tool of choice because it makes it easy to add Articles, content, images, videos, and more. Site administrators can edit and manage content 'in-context' by clicking the 'Edit' link. Webmasters can also edit content through a graphical Control Panel that gives you complete control over your site.

I personally recommend the following tools for your toolbox:

Mac users:

MARSEDIT - a handy tool for managing submissions to an unlimited list of blogs.

Tubemogul- a great online tool for promulgation of your video webcast to multiple social media targets.

Woopra - a realtime analytic tool you install on your computer

What is your tool of choice for managing the fast changing world of social media? Post your ideas to our blog .

TubeMogul

As the world of marketing turns to social media rather than conventional, traditional advertising, advertisers are demanding to know what is really happening with your videos. If you want to attract advertising dollars, you must first produce the metrics of the results your videos are producing. The tool of choice for many in social media marketing is TubeMogul.

TubeMogul was the first online video analytics and distribution company serving publishers large and small who need independent information about video performance on the Internet and automated upload to the Web‚'s top video sharing sites.

TubeMogul was started in 2007 and today offers a robust solution for distributing your videos.

TubeMogul's analytic technology aggregates video-viewing data from multiple sources to give publishers improved understanding of when, where and how often videos are watched, track and compare what‚Äôs hot and what‚Äôs not, measure the impact of marketing campaigns, gather competitive intelligence, and share the data with colleagues or friends.

TubeMogul is a free tracking service that allows you to follow the trend of your online videos. The cross-network tracking tools means that you can accumulate data from various sources for comparative purposes.

You can track individual videos or video publishers as well as other metrics like comments, average rating, and a list of top videos. You can create entire groups of content to track, and this works for both videos and publishers as well.

This data is presented to you in charts that track online performance over time, and provides aggregated analytics for your research purposes.

There is also the option of emailing your data or exporting it to Excel. If you need additional stats on various metrics, such as demographics,

TubeMogul can provide this in a customized reports tool for you as well. This service will work for both publishers content and advertising campaigns, so regardless of the type of video content you are pushing online, from indie film creators to vBlog marketers, TubeMogul can provide a level of analytics for you.

Other Blog Tools

• Pingoat – pinging service
• Pingomatic – another pinging service
• AudioBlogger – audio post to your blog via phone
• BlogRolling – a service to manage your blog roll
• Creative Commons – copyright protections service
• Feedburner – RSS tool that adds a variety of features to your blog’s RSS feed
• Picasa – find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC
• Flickr – Store and share your images - good way of hosting images if you don’t have a stand alone blog on your own domain.
• Flock – A browser that enables sharing and blogging from within it
• Copyscape – allows you to track down other sites that are stealing your content
• TalkDigger – ‘find, follow and join conversations evolving on the Internet.’
• Blog Flux – Stats, Pinging and Directory

• Backpack It – A place to organise your to do lists, notes, files, reminders and more - all online
• Basecamp – Like Backpack it (same people behind it) but great for collaboration on projects.
• Ice Rocket – Blog Search
• coComment – Keep track of the comments you leave on different blogs in a central place
• co.mments – Similar name to coComment but not to be confused with it - a way of bookmarking and following comment threads via RSS
• Gabbly – Add live chat to our blog posts (like real time comments combined with IRC)
• Del.icio.us – Social Bookmarking site - good for sourcing stories but also great if you get linked to on it to get traffic
• Digg – Another major Social Bookmarking site
• Only Wire – a bookmarklet that submits posts to multiple social bookmarking sites at once
• Odeo – a tool for recording and sharing audio/podcasting
• TagCloud – produces Tag Clouds for your blog from RSS feeds
• Indie Karma – a micropayment system for bloggers
• Tiny URL – Turns long URLs into tiny manageable ones
• Swicki – a new type of search engine that harnesses the power of a web community - sort of like a search engine and wiki combined
Filmloop – photo sharing
• Stock.xchng – Free Stock Photos
• Favicon Maker – allows you to make a favicon from a photo
• YouTube – a tool for putting video on your blog
• blip.tv – another video uploading tool

IF you know of other tools, report them to us to be sure they get posted here.

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