[Web Informant] 24 March 2009: Five useful social networking tools

[David Strom]

Web Informant 24 March 2009: Five useful social networking tools

In preparation for a keynote speech that I am giving next month, I
took some time to look at a variety of social media consolidation and
notification services. You might find one or more of them useful for
your purposes, even for those of you that still don't poke, tweet, or
know what RSS really stands for.

First is Ping.fm that can post to multiple social networks at once.
You sign up, give them your login credentials at Facebook, Plaxo,
LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, Wordpress and many others. When you want to
update your social networking universe, you send one message to your
Ping.fm account via an email, a text message, or a Web form, and it
goes out to everyone.  This can be a big time-saver if you post across
different networks and don't mind sending the same information to all
these places. I haven't used it as much because I tend to post
different things to LinkedIn vs. Facebook, as an example.

Friendfeed.com works in reverse. It consolidates your entire social
network "feeds" together in one place, so that your network can follow
your posts across your blogs, your social networks, and other sites.
You set everything up using the various RSS feeds that these services
create, which is pretty clever when you think about it. The downside
to Friendfeed is that your adoring public has to sign up separately
for this service, which means Yet Another Social Network Request to
fulfill. Still, I have been surprised at how many people are following
me in this fashion, and how many of them are the A-list blogger types
that you want to engage and be at top of mind in any event. Clearly,
this is one service to pay attention to if you are trying to get the
word out about your products and services.

Twitter is certainly all the rage these days, and a number of services
have taken some of the best notification-style pieces out of it in
interesting ways. If you like the way Twitter works but don't want to
share your updates with the public, such as just with your work
colleagues or a special task force, then take a look at
Presentlyapp.com. You can use the free Web service or pay to install
it behind your own firewall for the ultimate private group. They even
make use of the same kind of scrolling interface that Twitter has made
popular.

Another take on private discussion forums is from Yammer.com. They
cost $1 a person a month. Think of this as one of those old-school
BBS's that has been updated for the Gen-T and Web 2.0. I think if you
want something quick and dirty and need to have a group discussion to
knit your project team together, this is worth a closer look.

Buzzable.com can be used to create groups of Twitter users if you want
to send out notifications to all of your partners or customers at
once. LinkedIn is finally implementing this feature on their groups,
but that is probably too much work to get the initial group assembled,
given their still draconian triple opt-in rules.

So these are just five services that I have found that have something
going for them. Whether any of these companies will be around next
year is hard to tell. And I can guarantee that none of them have
received any TARP funds from the US Government. If you have other
suggestions, email them or post a comment on my strominator.com blog.

Self-promotions dep't

Since I mentioned my speech, I might as well give you the URL where
you can see what I am going to be talking about here:
http://www.ahma.org/HTF/keynote.shtm

I write about a half dozen articles a year for the New York Times, and
last week you can read one that I did about various services that help
automate meetings and scheduling tasks here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/business/smallbusiness/17meet.html

Also, last week I began a series of columns for PC World that will
appear every Wednesday under the title of NetWork, geared towards
practical solutions for small businesses that don't have a lot of IT
depth. They are collected here:
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/blogs/network.html

Finally, today I gave a Webinar on ten things that you can do on the
cheap to improve your security posture for TechTarget. You can reply
the seminar here:
http://searchmidmarketsecurity.com/2009priorities