I owe a lot of blog posts. I owe them to myself. I keep telling myself I am going to blog about this..or that.. or whatchamacallit ( i did like that candy bar). I’ll sit down and my desk to start typing and think “What was that great idea I had for a blog?” It is gone like that. Yep, in one ear and out the other…, this comes as no shock to my wife.She can remember the color of a tie I wore to a wedding over 10 years ago. The name of some random street we drove by one time, in some city we have never been back to since. It is amazing.
As many of you know, I just got my first IPhone. This handy device is amazing. It is one of the simple applications on it that has inspired this post. ( Though my experience with the IPhone is for another blog post, yes I wrote that idea down.)
The Voice Memos. I can not live without it now. The ability to record little messages to myself about things, has changed my work flow. I find myself recording everything so I don’t forget ideas. Things like:
-Blog about this
- Pick up That
-Call Mrs.Whatsherface
I have become Mr. Organized now, thanks to it.
So this got me thinking.. what are some of the everyday “Social Media Tools” do I use that may be worth sharing? I am not going to go into great detail about each tool, as that could be a blog post by itself. I think I will share it with you in list form. As people like lists.
-Google Reader: The hands down best blog reader out there. Simply put blog reader brings the blog articles to you. Instead of checking websites all the time for updated content you just subscribe to a RSS feed and it will update the blog reader. For more on this you can read this earlier blog post I did on Google Reader.
-Twitter: By now you know all about it. If you don’t, you can read about it here. The key as a social media tool is not only the networking but the content you wade through. The comments you can see, the interactions. The best tools for that I think is Twitter Search and TweetDeck
-Xmarks: Now you need to use FireFox to run this addon. Everybody uses Firefox right? Right? This is a bookmark aka favorities addon. It lets me access my bookmarks from any computer. Brilliant!
-Stumbleupon: I think I may be alone on this one. Maybe just in the minority. I find stumbleupon to be really successful in driving traffic to my blog vs Digg. The idea behind stumbleupon is that simply put, is that people will look for random links on a subject. It makes recommendations based on the information you give it. Think of it as a changing channels on a radio till you find a song you like.
-Ping.Fm: I cant live without it. Lets me post to several social networking sites at one time. So yes, you will see the same post/status on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and even Plurk.
-GoogleDocs: Who needs Microsoft Office? I can access my documents from any computer and even my phone. You can have several people edit a document at the same time, make notes, whatever. Heck, my wife now does grocery lists for me on it now and makes changes while I am in the store. This is my favorite of all of items on this list, okay maybe not more then Twitter.
Noteworthy sites in no particular order:
-Linkedin: The Q & A section is very powerful
-Facebook: Ready for this. Every morning I wish people a Happy Birthday on Facebook. Yep, its social networking at its basic. It starts great conversations with people and lets me check in. Werid? Yes. Does it help me network? Yes.
-Meetups AkA Tweetups Nope, its not an application. Not a widget. Its real life. Nothing beats face time. I put together meetups and just network. Its the most powerful tool of them all…. and may even get you local coverage
