Looking for a more powerful way to share presentations online? Consolidate your online profiles and social networking presence? Create a cool Twiiter background even if you’re not the artistic type? Generate word-of-word referrals? Use social media more effectively for research?
You’ll find tools for all of those tasks and others in this collection of more of the best cool online tools.
SlideSix is a multimedia presentation sharing site, designed to be SlideShare on steroids. You can upload presentations, record audio narration, and attach videos, all on the site. SlideSix lets you upload PowerPoint, PDF or OpenOffice presentations, mix in videos from YouTube or Vimeo, and share your presentations with groups.
PeoplePond is a secure social profile site that can be connected to your Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts. It’s an important place to have a profile listed for anyone concerned with online reputation management. The creators of PeoplePond more recently also launched CompanyPond, a company profile site that improves online visibility and SEO for corporate sites.
Another service that allows individuals to collect all of their social media profiles in one place, verify their identity, and track activity on those profiles. And, tired of filling out the same information over and over for each new social networking or profile site? DandyID “provides you with a globally recognizable profile that you only need to fill out once. The profile then follows you around the web and automatically appears on DandyID-enabled sites.”
For anyone who wants a cool, custom Twitter background but is design-challenged, My Tweet Space provides a wide selection of free and low-cost professionally designed backgrounds to enhance one’s Twitter presence.
TAF offers free and fee-based tools to help companies capitalize on word-of-mouth (or word-of-web) marketing. Their suite of apps ranges from simple branded buttons to social commerce tools, advertising and social rewards programs.
This is a cool alternative search engine that lets you search Google, Yahoo, Bing and Twitter simultaneously. Great for viewing the differences between “traditional” and real-time search results.
Bing Tips & Tricks by Digitial Inspiration
There have lots of posts written about Google search tricks, but in this piece, Amit Agarwal shows how to perform tasks like tracking companies, finding MP3 files and even setting up an RSS feed of search results (something that can’t be done with Google or Yahoo!) with Bing.
100 Tips and Tools to Research the Social Web by Select Courses
An outstanding list of tips and tools for using social media to conduct both primary and secondary research, monitor trends, create alerts, analyze information and organize your data.
In their own words, Sprout Builder is “a visual authoring studio that allows creative professionals to quickly and easily create branded, rich-media content and widgets.” It enables designers build anything from simple Flash banners to a sophisticated widgets with multiple media types, feeds and sharing options by dragging different media types onto a canvas and controlling effects. Pricing ranges widely from $19 per month for the individual option to $299 per month for the professional version, but there’s a 30-day trial for the curious to try this out.
Flock is a “social web browser” that integrates email, photos, video and social media sites into a single interface, while simplifying sharing and publishing. It runs on Windows, Mac or Linux and supports multiple webmail types (Gmail, AOL, Yahoo! Mail), social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace), blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogger, TypePad), media sites (Flickr, YouTube) and more. It includes features like a People Sidebar for staying in touch with your social connections, an integrated RSS feed reader, blog editor and web clipboard. And it’s free.
Huddle is an online project management, collaboration and file sharing tool along the lines of Basecamp, DeskAway and Projjex. It supports unlimited users, online chat, project alerts, a whiteboard feature, document management (approvals, workflow, audit trails), and collaborative document editing. Pricing ranges from a free, ad-supported version to $200/month for the enterprise package, with the most popular service level at $38 per month.
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems have become ubiquitous, yet many—perhaps even most—implementations fail to take full advantage of the software’s capabilities in one or more areas. Most companies could be getting more benefit from their existing systems, but identifying the problem areas, and what needs to be done to improve use of the software, can involve a long and expensive consulting engagement. This free analysis tool from on-demand CRM consulting firm Demand Chain Systems short-circuits that process, helping to identify the most promising areas for improvement in just 40 minutes.
Jing lets you capture on-screen action or animate still images, add narration, and upload the final video or YouTube or other video-sharing sites or share by email. Available for Windows and Mac, Jing lets you add call-outs to screen captures or images, share your video or output it for further editing in other tools. There’s a free version for casual home users, or a Pro version that adds features like additional output options and webcam capture (Mac OS X Leopard only) available for just $14.95 per year.
Skimmer is a free Adobe AIR desktop application designed to organize your social media activities and make interaction easier by aggregating your friends’ feeds from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and Blogger on one screen. It provides instant access to any video linked in a feed post, a slideshow view for Flickr photos or YouTube videos, and the ability to customize your profile and the appearance of your content.
TubeMogul is a free online video tracking and analytics service that provides a single point for uploading to the top video sharing sites, and powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed. TubeMogul tracks viewing statistics far beyond “views,” including per-second audience dropoff, audience geography and more. According to their site, “TubeMogul’s analytic technology aggregates video-viewing data from multiple sources to give publishers an improved understanding of when, where and how often their videos are watched, track and compare what’s hot and what’s not, measure the impact of marketing campaigns, gather competitive intelligence, and share the data with colleagues or friends.” There are also fee-based versions that provide more advanced analytics and video promotion features.
Check whether the Twitter conversations about you are positive or negative with twendz by Advocable
Palin Ningthoujam reviews twendz, a free social media tracking and sentiment measurement tool that shows you who is talking about your product or brand (or any other topic) on social media sites, what’s being said, a keyword cloud of the terms most commonly used in the conversations, and the overall tone (negative, positive or neutral) of the conversations. While not as sophisticated as professional monitoring tools, twendz does provide a quick, easy and free snapshot of the content and sentiment around any topic of social media discussion.
