If you want to keep up with a specific brand, for whatever reason (they’re a competitor in your space, your job is related to their activity, or you just really like what that company’s doing), to date there’s been no easy way to keep track of all of the sources that might mention it online. Even services like Alltop, which helps to monitor sites for particular topics and pare down the background noise to a dull roar, leave a lot to be desired.
BzzScapes is a new venture from marketing company BzzAgent that groups user-submitted content according to brand, so that you can stay up to date on the company or product of your choice via a variety of different types of web sites and media, with each brand having its own BzzScape. Compared to Alltop, there are two main differences. First, anyone can add any content they want (which means it may or may not actually relate to the brand in question), and second, anyone can vote and comment on things added, which should, in theory, mean that the best sources rise to the top organically. Read the rest of this entry »
Though I couldn’t attend OMMA Social San Francisco (I’m so far away, and my travel budget is currently non-existent), I did enjoy this article from MediaPost summarizing five key takeaways from the social media conference. The article’s author, Catherine P. Taylor, makes a number of good points, but what interests me most is the impression she got that social media, while still white hot with professionals working in the space, has yet to catch fire with clients.
The problem is a familiar one. Those of us who champion the use of social media tend to be fairly zealous about its use, but trying to transmit that passion to others, especially to key decision makers, can be a trying affair. For instance, I’ve had recent experience with a Managing Director who actually didn’t use a computer, so you can just imagine how easy it was to convince him of the value of having a corporate Twitter account.
Of course, it’s to be expected that senior executives exhibit a degree of technological inertia. Luckily, they all still speak the same basic languages: Return on Investment (ROI), Brand Recognition and Corporate Image. Even if they don’t speak all three (take a small consulting firm, for example, which depends on word of mouth rather than aggressive branding), they will understand one of the above: ROI, which is what I’ll be covering in this post. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s impossible to narrow the wide category of “web work” to just one or two particular work streams or career types. Naturally then, when I’m looking for tools to share here at WebWorkerDaily, I try to find ones that will have a functional appeal across job descriptions. This list is an example of how web tools can be useful across a number of different professions.
MeGlobe: Communication Multiplied
MeGlobe is an online multiclient messenger service that allows you to talk to contacts all over the world, regardless of language barriers. It translates your IM and sends it along to the recipient in near real-time, but don’t expect this service to be as good as the Babelfish from Hitchiker’s Guide. The client is still in “beta,” and features a reporting tool so you can point out errors in the translation engine, which then leads to improvements in said engine.
This is a great service if you have to work directly with technical staff in a geographically remote location and don’t want to have to go through a translator for every little communication. While the translations may not be perfect, they should give you enough context to get the job done.
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I may be a little late to the Skitch party, but I just had to try it out after coming across it last month. For anyone not yet in the know, Skitch is a Mac OS X-only image sharing application that does require that you download an application. Once you get it, Skitch makes the fact that you had to download yet another thing to your computer totally worthwhile. And I’m saying this after using the application for less than ten minutes. I’m already hooked and sold. (Skitch is free, by the way).
Skitch – and it’s Web-based, cross-platform counterpart Skitch.com – is positioned as a “fast and fun image sharing” tool. With its compact Mac app, Skitch makes it easy to take a snapshot of a Web page and share it with others in all the ways you might share an image.
What hit me the moment I watched the short video demo of the application was how incredibly useful Skitch.com could be for the Web development process.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
