You can think of social media as a set of tools that organizations can use for a variety of purposes – customer service, branding, promotion, relationship-management, etc. Just as with any toolkit, you’re not going to use every tool every time.
Sometimes the hammer fits, but if you’re trying to measure something the hammer is pretty much useless. Similarly, sometimes a blog will fit perfectly, while other times YouTube might be a more suitable tool. Sometimes (say it ain’t so!) social media outreach won’t fit at all.
If social media represents a set of tools – what’s in your toolkit?
Over the last two years my online toolkit has shifted back and forth as tools have come and gone. Recently, however, I’ve noticed a bit more stability in the services I use. Is this a reflection of a slightly maturing marketplace? Or just of a tough economy?
Here’s my current toolkit. I use these tools pretty much every day:
- Google Reader – to aggregate and archive news and other RSS feeds from blogs and tools
- Twitter – for real-time communication, connection, monitoring and learning via TweetDeck and search.twitter.com
- Delicious – for sharing and saving useful sites and articles
- Radian6 – for more complex monitoring solutions
- Facebook – for connecting with people and brands
- LinkedIn – for network building with people I know professionally
- Plaxo – for syncing between tools
- WordPress – for sparking conversations and learning from you here
- MicroPlaza – (new) for mining the links my key contacts post
- Present.ly – for communication within our company, alongside IM, email and the good ‘ole phone
- Bit-part players: StumbleUpon, Digg, Slideshare, Viddler, Flickr
What’s in your toolkit? What’s changed from a year ago?
Nice list Dave. A couple of new ones I hadn’t heard of before. We use Yammer internally vs. Present.ly though I’m intrigued to understand Present.ly’s Twitter API capability and what that really means.
And thanks for the Radian6 shout out too.
Cheers. David
I personally think its less about tools and more about approach, strategy and results. In fact I might suggest your toolkit’s overloaded.
Really nice idea to call it the social media toolkit. Definitely given me some ideas for packaging this stuff in a nice, accessible way to people.
I’m also surprised to see how closely your toolkit matches mine! I haven’t used Radian6 yet but I was given a demo only a couple of days ago and was very impressed – I’m looking forward to playing with the trial version over the next week.
Plaxo looms large on my ‘To Do’ list. I’ve heard really great reports of it, particularly with regards to integration, and it’s probably the next toy I’ll play with.
The only thing I’d add to your toolkit would be bit.ly. It’s a URL cruncher that also enables you to track who clicked the link, and where they’re from. It’s experienced some flakiness recently – probably because it’s heavily used on Twitter and is experiencing some of Twitter’s growing pains by proxy – but, as a dashboard tool for identifying interest in links, it’s a great idea.
Oh, and Feedburner for RSS, right? Despite Google’s best attempts to ruin it, it’s the only game in town.
Good list. I would also suggest that Tweetdeck is the Twitter tool of choice as it makes managing everything so much easier,especially now that there is Tweetdeck facebook integration.
I can’t believe you didn’t use the oft-repeated social media toolkit blogpost phrase, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
@clarkey Damn, another opportunity for cheese bites the dust. Don’t worry, I won’t drop the ball again
Great list here! Why is Mixx and Reddit not on here? I love these sites!
Interesting list, some new ones to try out here radian6 and plaxo seem worth a look. What about yahoo pipes for slicing and dicing feeds?
Definitely tweetdeck. Also have begun to use ping.fm quite a bit.