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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12 Comments
Drew B's take on tech PR
Saturday, July 15, 2006 at 10:10pm
Beer for bloggers down under… love it! Billy no mates!
Alex Pullin
Monday, July 17, 2006 at 12:14am
Good to see appreciation of the free stuff!
reine Formsache » My top five social media tools
Monday, July 17, 2006 at 5:54am
[...] Kaum begrüßt man den neuen Kollegen, schon bekommt man das Stöckchen zugeworfen. Nicht schlecht, was gerade durch die Blogosphäre trudelt: “My top five social media tools”. [...]
Erin Caldwell
Tuesday, July 18, 2006 at 3:24am
Thanks for the tag, Stephen. I think.
I’ll get around to posting my list at my own blog … er … soon.
Richard Millington
Tuesday, July 18, 2006 at 6:59am
Google Analytics is in very high demand at the moment, i’ve been placed on a waiting list for an account.
Robin
Wednesday, July 19, 2006 at 10:21am
Ah wir haben ein bloke das Deutsch spricht…
Love the blog. I’d add http://www.urltrends.com to my list of favourites, but then I wouldn’t want to share it with anyone. Also, according to Alexa I own several porn sites - so they get a thumbs up too!
Alex Pullin
Friday, July 21, 2006 at 3:40pm
All done! It was a lot harder than I thought it would be.
sebastians · my favorite social media tours, eh tools or - you mean the world to me
Wednesday, July 26, 2006 at 6:52am
[...] google earth is, related to the relay, of which my coworker bjoern gave the baton to me, one of my favorite net tools. [...]
Ros Dewey
Saturday, July 29, 2006 at 9:04am
Thanks for the congrats Stephen! I’ve secured my flat in London already… catch up!
Stephen
Saturday, July 29, 2006 at 12:19pm
Ros, I’m trying!
I’m driving down on Tuesday and should hopefully have a place sorted by the end of the week (fingers crossed).
PRBLOGGER.COM - A PR blog » This and that
Tuesday, April 22, 2008 at 7:18pm
[...] My personal fave is Bloglines. Love it. Been using it for ages and I think I may have mentioned it once or twice before. Doesn’t cut it in when you’re doing some serious monitoring I’m [...]
Two (and a bit) years on… | PRBLOGGER.COM - PR blog
Monday, May 26, 2008 at 10:37am
[...] My top five social media tools. Ooh, I have many more in the toolbox now! [...]