My top five social media tools

Posted Saturday, July 15, 2006 at 8:58pm in Blogging, Technology  | 

Stuart’s tagged me with the latest meme, ‘your top five media tools’, so I’m game. Although, I must admit, I don’t think the majority of tools I use help me a great deal with regard to PR. I do, however, think they help me become a better blogger and user of the Internet.

1. WordPress. Goes without saying but WordPress is a state of the art semantic personal publishing platform. It has too much functionality, too many plugins and, being open source, there’s too many developers and designers cranking out useful addons and beautiful designs to make any competitor come close. You know the Apple cult? Think of WordPress as the blog platform equivalent. Oh, did I mention it’s free?

2. Bloglines. I’ve been using Bloglines for around eight months and I believe there’s no better RSS reader out there. And I’ve used a lot, including Newsgator and FeedDemon. Why is it so good? Well, it’s not a desktop reader (which puzzles me why anyone would want to use a desktop reader anyway), which means I can read my feeds from any computer with an Internet connection. But that’s not all, thanks to Bloglines Mobile I can read also read my feeds anywhere I have a phone signal. There’s a whole load of other great things about Bloglines too like the Hotkeys function and how it allows for Flash based content such as YouTube videos (see my Flickr pic). Did I mention it’s free?

3. Firefox. Read this post I made in February to see exactly why I love (yes love) Firefox. Yep, free.

4. Google Analytics and FeedBurner. I know that’s two but both help you to achieve one goal: A better understanding of stats … and I might have mentioned in the past I like stats. Google Analytics tells me just about everything I need to know: which corporations have been visiting (you know who you are), how long they’ve visited, which pages they browsed, etc etc. It also tells me the geographic location of visitors too including regions and cities and even tells me their Internet speed, operating system and browser. I particularly like the keyword option which tells you the keywords people have used in a search engine when they stumbled on your blog. There’s loads of other stats but I haven’t figured them all out yet. I use FeedBurner to see how many people are subscribed and what RSS reader they’re using. Both free.

5. BrandPulse. A tool for conversation mining and discovering discussion trends. BrandPulse is the daddy of all online monitoring tools. Not free.

Close but no cigar: del.icio.us (see my QuickLinks), WetPaint wiki (PR Blogger version coming soon … perhaps) and Skype (now with cheap text messaging).

Five bloggers I’m tagging:

My mate from down under, Paull. (Read his latest post - funny!)

My new colleague, Erin.

My other new colleague, Bjoern.

My fellow graduate, Alex. (By the way I’m getting lots of referrals from Alex’s blog lately!)

The one and only, Mr Mayfield.

Bonus tag: PR Monkey.

Side note:

Things will be quiet again. I’m off on holiday and once I’ve returned I’ll be making my move to London. Still looking for a place to live so if anyone can recommend anywhere be sure to let me know.

Side note deux:

Congrats to PR graduate and soon to be Chime employee, Ros, who has just found she got a 1st class honours degree from Cardiff uni. She’s not a blogger but has contributed her thoughts to this blog from time to time. Well done Ros!

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