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. I find it useful because part of my job involves making sure I keep abreast of what’s going on with Apple at all times. Staying current is easy enough, but knowing the slightly more obscure news and whisperings is what gets you ahead in my field, and that’s where BzzScapes steps in. Books, blogs, images, stories, video and more are being added all the time to the Apple BzzScape, which I can navigate either in grid, list or landscape view.

Aside from contributing to BzzScapes for companies that probably don’t really need the press anyway, you can also create your own BzzScape, which is another reason web workers should take note. Creating your own BzzScape for your own personal business or that of a client is another way to monitor and improve your presence online and in social media. Even if at first, you and coworkers are the only ones stocking it with content, the hope is that with time and exposure, others will begin to join in as well, and eventually you’ll have a nice supplement to your existing accounts on Facebook and Twitter with a little more to offer interested visitors.

One caveat before you sign up, should you choose to. The registration process itself is incredibly tedious. That’s because you’re actually registering for BzzAgent, which is a marketing research web site that wants to mine members for customer data in exchange for giveaways and promotions. So they ask a lot of questions. Including, oddly, whether or not I smoked, which appeared on its own page after three pages of other, much more standard questions.

If you can tough out the sign-up process, I think you’ll find that BzzScapes is worth it. It provides an interesting way to find new content that you might otherwise not have come across, and it could potentially become a valuable marketing tool for your own work.  Registration is also free, so it won’t cost you anything to try it out.

What tools do you use for tracking brands online?

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. Social media is a hard area in which to gather solid ROI figures, but it’s not impossible. Plus, it can be very easy to sell on the expenditure side, since most of the time the only cost involved is the labor of the resource tasked with setting up and maintaining your social network accounts. That alone is a convincing argument in a business climate which is shy with its advertising dollars but eager to maintain a public presence.

You can show ROI by gathering info on click-throughs from links posted via Twitter, or on Facebook, on profiles, groups, and pages. I find Twitter especially useful for attracting clicks, since your tagline, not the URL itself, is the seller, thanks to URL truncation. If you can write clever copy, users will click, and they won’t necessarily feel as “marketed” to if they don’t see your corporate address in the URL.

Providing the decision-maker with comparable examples of successful social media program implementations in your space is probably the best, and easiest, way to show verifiable ROI. If you can’t find any examples in your specific field, collect near misses and play up the fact that you’ll be a pioneer in your area. Mashable has a great article on establishing ROI for social media that talks about setting a success metric, and benchmarking competitors will help you do that.

If they’re not sold on the fact that online presence makes good money sense, you might want to sell them on the business card metaphor, which goes as follows: You would never leave a business meeting, lunch, coffee, etc. without exchanging business cards with the other party, would you? Even if it’s a sales call that wasn’t particularly promising, you leave the card, and hope your name comes to mind when they need something down the road.

Imagine the cumulative time your company spends doing work online as a business meeting, and then imagine that, to date, despite all that time spent with prospective clients, you’ve been leaving them with nothing but a hastily scrawled phone number on a bar napkin (your email signature, for the purposes of the metaphor). That wouldn’t fly in the real world, and it shouldn’t be allowed to suffice on the Web, either.

Of course, your boss or client could counter with the fact that you have a web site. Explain that just having a web site is like leaving a business card tacked to a public bulletin board and hoping people will take interest. Social media is the handshake, the lunch meeting, the phone call during which you ask about the family. In other words, social media brings that priceless “people” factor online.

It may seem silly at this point to still have to sell clients on the value of social media, but it only seems that way because we live inside that world every day. Impossible as it may be to believe, there are still some, like that Managing Director I mentioned before, who dictate their emails to their assistants. Talk about someone who needs the perspective of a helpful evangelist!

What strategies do you use for convincing clients of the value of social media?

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.

TinEye: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

This is one of those services which seems to have come in answer to one of my many “I wish there was thing that…” thoughts. TinEye is a reverse image search, meaning that it can use any picture you might have lying around to find out more about said picture, including its original source, whether any larger resolutions exist, and where it has been used, modified, etc.

I find the higher resolution finder to be most useful, but if you’re a photographer or graphic designer, you may be interested more in seeing how your work is being used. Illuminating, to say the least.

snitch.name: Find Everyone, Everywhere

If you do a Google search for someone, what usually won’t appear are their social network profiles and pages. Hence the need for snitch.name, a search engine specifically designed to comb social networks for your target. Just type in someone’s name, hit enter, and see their Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. profiles pop up, so long as they’re available and publicly viewable.

This is a great app to use if you want to find your friends on other networks you belong to, or if you’re looking to try to make a new contact for networking purposes. Note that even though it might be able to find someone, it’s still up to you to convince them that you’re a worthwhile contact for them to make.

Are My Sites Up?: Remain Vigilant Without Refresh

If you have a number of domains under your watchful eye, like myself, then you’re probably at least somewhat paranoid about those sites going down. Especially if you use them to do business. This web tool allows you to register your sites so that you receive email alerts when they go down, for whatever reason.

Won’t necessarily help the site come back online quicker, but it will let you open up that issue ticket/fire off that angry email to tech support in a more timely manner than you might otherwise be able to.

That’s four very different, but very useful web apps that could benefit many different kinds of web workers in many different ways. Two essential truths that bind these tools, and web workers together: We all need the web, and we all need other people.

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.

Right away I can see how handy having Skitch at-the-ready for aspects of my Web work that heretofore required wrangling with PhotoShop (I’m not really a graphics person) to manipulate screenshots. Skitch could help me take, modify and send or post screenshots for:

• making recommendations to new clients about their sites and modifications I’d recommend making;
• pointing out elements of good Web design on other sites to my clients;
• making comments about specific site design and development elements so my requests to my designers are unquestionably clear;
• before and after images of client sites after my team conducts a redesign.

The Skitch app does more than take a screenshot. It also provides editing and markup tools to draw and type “on” the image without actually modifying or ruining the image itself.

The first snapshot I took was of the upcoming redesign for my personal Web site. I wanted to show my designer what text I needed to change. All I had to do was take the snapshot, select the text tool and type my message on top of the image and then use the box tool to draw a box around the text I was referencing.

When I made a mistake drawing the box around the text, I clicked on the eraser tool and was able to remove the box without affecting the snapshot in any way.

The next images I took were of the original home page and redesigned home page of one of my past clients. On the before shot, I added some text about a few of the key goals I had set forth for the project. The after shot showed the end result of the work from the team I put together along with my comments. These shots could work well on my new site redesign as an example of what I do, and they took less than five minutes to create.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

To get these images into this blog post, I used a built in share function on Skitch – the “Webpost” button. With this feature, I was able to grab the code quickly and easily to embed images here. And I had the option to share a link to my personal page on Skitch.com or provide a direct URL for a smaller or full sized image.

I can also choose to make my Skitch page Public, Secret – for only people who know the URL, or Private and password protected.

Every image I took while testing out the app was automatically saved into my Skitch account which is a great feature for someone like me who is so forgetful about everything including saving files. I could save a screenshot without sharing it but also choose to modify, share or delete any image later since they were all archived in my account. This feature will automatically give me a nice archive of screenshots as I take and send them to clients, colleagues or vendors so I’ll be able to track down any shot in the future.

While I see the immediate value of Skitch for my Web work, I can’t ignore the fact that it is really, really fun to use. Skitch is one of those apps that will seamlessly cross over from my life to my work and back again.

P.S. – I was able to get ahold of Cris Pearson, co-founder and CEO of plasq, creators of Skitch, and while he didn’t reveal anything earth-shattering, here’s what he had to say.

WWD: Why is the site still in Beta? Isn’t a year a really long time for beta testing? Pearson: It is a long time. We have not been sure what route to take business model wise. There are many options. Paid VS free, Freemium (a free and a pro version) & subscriptions models are some of the ones we have been pondering. Down side is some customers don’t like to wait to find out pricing etc. Up side is you can experiment more and gather data while you decide.

WWD: When is the Windows version of Skitch going to be avail or is it even in the works? Last I saw it mentioned was March.

Pearson: A windows version is in the works, yes. I’ll stick to the ’soon’ time frame :) WWD: Anything else on the horizon for Skitch that would make it fresher and newsier? Pearson: We plan to beef up the skitch.com features over the next few months. A new dashboard like home screen is one feature we are working on. We also are looking to add upload support for some other services.