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Social Media Workshop Links

Carol — Mon, 30 May 2011 22:28:53 +0000

As this post becomes public, I’m running an Introduction to Social Media workshop for the Warringah Chamber of Commerce & Industries. Below are the links I’ve mentioned in the workshop – click through to your heart’s content! If you’d like to do the workshop online you can have access for 30 days for $30 – that’s a dollar a day. Register now for 24/7 access until 30 June.

Below is the video I played.

Below are links to the various tools we discussed – these are just a few of the many hundreds available.

You can download the Sensis Social Media Report.

Blogs

WordPress and Blogger

Tips for blogging here.

Microblogging

Twitter, Plurk, Yammer (Enterprise microblogging)

Tips for using Twitter here.

Wikis

PBWiki, Wikispaces, Wetpaint

Social Networking

Public sites: MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, LinkedIn

Closed/private networks: Ning, Big Tent, Wall.fm, Oxwall (open source)

Social Sharing

Delicious, Diigo, Scribd, Flickr, Slideshare, YouTube, Quora

Online Survey

Survey Monkey

Manage

Manage your social media accounts at Hootsuite.

I wrote a post about tracking your social media mentions with links to the tools.

Campaigns

We looked at the Old Spice video, Twitter and Facebook and the Attune Facebook and Twitter.

Collect resources online with LiveBinders

Carol — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 21:21:38 +0000

LiveBinders is like a 3-ring binder for the Web. It’s an online space where you can:

Collect your resources
Organise them neatly and easily
Share them with others

The video below gives an overview of LiveBinders. You can see some examples and start your own binder here.

Collaboration site: Stixy

Carol — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 21:25:56 +0000

Stixy is a shareable Web-based bulletin board where you can collaborate with colleagues. It’s a bit like a wiki – only more visual. It’s easy to drag n’ drop tasks, appointments, files, photos, notes and bookmarks on your Stixyboard – organised in whatever way makes sense to you. They say:

Stixy was created to serve people who need to organize their lives – that is, virtually everyone – but who don’t have the time or inclination to adapt their habits to a piece of software. Stixyboards are designed to be instantly familiar to anyone who’s used a regular bulletin board.

You can save your Stixyboard and invite others to collaborate. You can view a Stixyboard here or make your own here.

Below is a sample Stixyboard thanks to iconolith on flickr.

Cool search engine: Spezify

Carol — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 03:59:27 +0000

Spezify is a cool search engine that displays your results in a visual way. Just look at their home page & you’ll see a creative array of information that others have written about Spezify.

I ran a search on Web 2.0 and below is how Spezify displayed the results. If you like your results to look good, then try Spezify for yourself.

Coded Messages (QR codes)

Carol — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 01:02:27 +0000

You’ve probably seen those funny little square bar codes popping up in magazine ads, posters, online and even on business cards. They’re called QR codes and they look like this:

They’re pretty cool and can contain a whole stack of information.

QR stands for “quick response” and they were created in 1994 by a subsidiary of Toyota in Japan as a tracking system for vehicle parts in manufacturing. They’ve become popular recently and many commercial applications are appearing for QR codes.

QR codes can store a lot of data. Things like:

Text
Phone numbers
Contact details
SMS
URL

All you need is an app on your smartphone to be able to read these. (I use i-nigma on my iPhone)

Your phone scans the code, decodes it, then displays the information. Here’s a video explanation.

Some examples

Here are some examples you can try – just open your QR code app & point your phone at the screen. This one will take you to a URL:

This one is a phone number. It won’t call straight through – you get the option to dial or save to contacts. (The number is not a real phone number.)

This will generate an SMS. You can add more to the message before it’s sent. (Again the number is not real.)

How to generate the code
Following are websites where you can generate your own code for free:

Or.. go to http://goo.gl/ and type in your URL. Copy and paste the shortened URL into a new window and add .qr to the end of it. This will generate a QR code for that website. (If that doesn’t make sense – watch the video above.)

What to do with the code?
This is the great question…..

Maybe you run a marketing campaign that uses a QR code to make an offer?

Maybe you add a code with your website to your business cards and/or website?

Maybe you think QR codes have no use whatsoever!

If you have any bright ideas for QR codes I’d love to hear them in the comments section.

Make your own Christmas video

Carol — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 23:30:41 +0000

It’s that time of the year when those of us in this part of the world are heading to the beach for a break. I’ll be back at my desk 4 January.

As well as wishing you a great festive season, I’d like to introduce you to a great little video making tool called Animoto.

All you do is load some photos and/or add some text, choose your music from their list & click the button. The smart people (or machines) at Animoto will mix your video in a couple of minutes. You can make unlimited 30 second videos for free or you can pay an annual fee of $30US for unlimited longer videos.

Here’s mine below – exported to YouTube. Click here view the original at Animoto – better quality.

Make your own at Animoto. (For the record I used the Pop-up Pandemonium theme.)

schoolr – great little search tools site

Carol — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 21:59:41 +0000

schoolr is a neat little site that allows you to search any term on the following sites with the click of a button:

Google
Wikipedia
Dictionary
Thesaurus
Acronym
Wolfram

And it also has a citation tool, unit converter and translator (under ‘other stuff’). They add extra features from time to time.

I had mixed results:

The acronym search yielded some interesting results. I had no idea that USSR meant all of the following:

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading, Underground Security Systems Research, Universal Solid State Relay, United Soldiers of Soldat Realistic and Unstimulated Salivary Secretion Rate.

The dictionary & thesaurus worked well. The unit converter has everything from acceleration to volume flow – so I figure that’s pretty handy.

Perhaps best of all is the image search – although it’s no better than other image searches you can use.

You don’t need to be a student to make use of this site – it’s handy to have a variety of tools in one spot.

Caption your own images

Carol — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 05:43:56 +0000

Helemeel.com provides dynamic images that you can add captions to and customise. It’s as easy as typing some text and the site then puts this onto the image you have chosen.

Rather than tell you in words – here are two I made in a matter of moments. (Click here to make your own.)

Track your social media mentions

Carol — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 04:05:27 +0000

After my presentation at the ICSP conference on last week, someone shared a tool for tracking mentions of your brand/name on social media – but couldn’t remember the exact name. I’ve tracked it down and it’s Social Mention. It’s a real-time social media search and analysis tool – free to use of course. You can go to the website and run a search on any term – or set up an alert (similar to Google alerts).

Social Mention allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

A search will give you all of the mentions of your brand over any period of time you want to specify as well as a series of measures such as strength, sentiment, passion and reach – as below:

Here are a few more tools that will monitor keywords/brands for you.

Samepoint is a conversation search engine that lets you see what people are talking about. Type in your brand and you get the following data. (I searched on the word Qantas.)

You can refine the search to certain applications by clicking on the links in the ‘Social Mentions’ tab ie Real-Time, Discussion Points, Bookmarks etc.

A few others you might like to look at are Spy, IceRocket, BackType.

There are also some good Twitter analysis tools:

Twitter Search will allow you to run a simple word search or you can use ‘Advanced Search‘ to define certain criteria eg words, people, places, dates etc. You can also analyse sentiment in a simple way by checking for the smiley or frowny emoticons.

Twitter Sentiment is a graduate school project from Stanford University which allows you to research the sentiment for a brand, product or topic. Type in your band name and it will bring you the following data:

1. A simple pie chart of mentions – positive and negative a bar chart showing numbers.

2. A graph of mentions over any period you want to define:

3. The actual tweets over any period of time you want to specify.

Twitrratr searches for negative and positive tweets surrounding a brand, product, person or topic. It gives you the following data – with every tweet listed under the respective column. (I ran this search on Qantas.)

Twendz highlights conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in. As the conversation changes, so does the twendz application by evaluating up to 70 tweets at a time. When new tweets are posted, they are dynamically updated, minute by minute. The following is how it looks. (Again – searched on Qantas.)

And by the time I’ve finished writing this there are probably more tools! Please share your favourites in the comments section.

Royalty Free Photos

Carol — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 08:28:45 +0000

There are many places that you can find royalty free photos. I’ve listed some below – please use the comment section to share any you know.

There are many available under creative commons licence on flickr. A tool I find useful to search flickr is flickrcc. It’s a simple online tool that will search for creative commons flickr photos. You can read more about it in a blog post I wrote. A couple of other useful flickr search tools are Compfight and Search flickr by colour.

Or simply go to flickr and use the search box. Be sure you check the copyright conditions – see the right hand column of the page. Many are available under creative commons but you must include the link and/or attribution. If they have an “All Rights Reserved” copyright you may not use them. Below is an example of a flickr photo used in one of my presentations – with the link back to the photo at the bottom of the slide (click on the photo for a larger version):

Wikimedia Commons is a database of 7,035,164 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.

Commercial sites

iStockphoto – you can buy photos for $1 but every week they have a free photo – just sign up (it’s free) & collect the free photos. You can see some of the images in a slideshow I put together:

Other commercial sites are:

Enjoy…..