This week I had the pleasure of ”meeting up” with and presenting to the Iowa Entrepreneurs Coalition Meetup group again! Check out the group, they would love to have you join.
The presentation was: Increase Your Business & Influence with Cool Social Media Tools (click to see details of who attended and the comments about the presentation).
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I promised the group that I would post the web site links and a summary of each tool we covered — plus a few bonus extras! My first presentation, of what I hope to make a series of presentations, on “cool social media tools” focused on the platforms and tools that also have buttons (called bookmarklets) that can easily be “dragged” and dropped onto your browser bar (see example of my tool bar below with bookmarklets):
When bookmarklets are added to your browser bar they make finding, collecting, organizing, saving and sharing articles and content you find on the Web to your social networks and blogs much easier! When you create an account on any of these following platforms, look for the accompanying bookmarklets under the about, extras, resources or tools sections on the platform websites. But many sites will also prompt you to add the bookmarklet to your browser at the time you set up the account.
Visibli : Custom Engagement Bar and Analytics with Each Shared Link.
When you share articles on Twitter and Facebook using Visibli, anyone who clicks on the article link will see your personal brand profile picture and your social media links personalized above the article with a comment “shared by.” Visibli will help you attract more viewers to your website and social pages. The Engagement Bar also increases your reader retention by 12%.
Visibli.com
Scoop.it! : Share ideas that matter. Easily curate engaging magazines. Effectively feed your web presence.
Scoop.it identifies and collects great content that matches your audiences interests based on a profile of topics you create. The tool also allows to “connect with a community of curators with similar interests” and allows you to be discovered and followed as a content curator as well. Articles collected can be easily edited and published to catch your followers attention. Scoop.it can become, as they say, the “hub that feeds your social media.” 
Storify: Find the best of social media…
“Storify lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative. We are building the story layer above social networks, to amplify the voices that matter and create a new media format that is interactive, dynamic and social.”
In addition to finding the best “stories” on the web collected from multiple sources, you can create your own story which makes Storify a great postmortem for your event. Collect the tweets, comments, pictures, blog posts and more in one place that tells the story of your event. Your final curated story can then be embedded anywhere, such as on a website or blog and the whole story can be shared to go viral on the Web.
Pinterest : Pinterest is an online pinboard. Organize and share things you love.
A content sharing service that allows members to “pin” images, videos and other objects to their pinboard.
Pinterest also includes standard social networking features – so technically it is considered a social network itself- actually now the third most popular network after Facebook and Twitter.
Pinterest does include a bookmarklet called “Pin It” which can be added to the browser bar to make “pinning” easy from any website. 
Pinwords : Instantly add beautiful text to your images.
A tool to use in conjunction with Pinterest is Pinwords which allows you to add text your photos or create graphic elements out of text so that you can pin “words” (such as your favorite expressions or quotes) onto your Pinterest Boards. 
Springpad : Smart notebooks that help you share & discover with the people you trust.
Springpad explains further that you can “Organize and save the things that matter to you and access them from anywhere.” I am a huge fan of the project management software called Basecamp. But I am currently collecting content and organizing materials that I am going to share for a class, “Optimizing Social Media for Business,” all on Springpad. I will have to report back about how it worked for this project.
Springpad is similar to Pinterest in that you create “notebooks” that are similar to the boards you create on Pinterest. But instead of just pinning photos and videos with comments and links, Springpad notebooks are much more robust. When you add a “spring” to a notebook, it can be a recipe, a to-do list, a book or more. There is a drop-down list of pre-set categories for “springs” that are pre-formatted — such as a list. 
While Springpad lets you make notebooks and you can include a list in a notebook, Listly is all about lists. We did not get around to demonstrating this tool, but it is worth checking out in more detail. If you love to make lists, then you might just love Listly. The advantage in the end is that it allows you to create an embed code so you can embed your list on a blog or share your list link easily.
Listly : Lists made easy + social + fun!
Listly invites you to get your social curation mojo on! Boasting that 1000+ blogs have embedded Listly lists on their website, Listly says it you can “curate the Web’s best lists on Listly or right on your own site.”
In my Business Communication course, for oral presentations, I always tell my students that “lists” get people’s attention. Think about David Letterman’s Top Ten List. Our brains love organized content and we perk up when we see or hear something about lists.
According to Listly, here is what Lists do for your business: “Lists = Ranking. List Posts = Traffic. We help bloggers & brands curate, crowdsource, and engage readers via live embedded list content inside blog posts.” 
Quora : Quora connects you to everything you want to know about. Quora aims to be the easiest place to write new content and share content from the web.
The main appeal with Quora is getting great answers to your questions. The answers come from the Quora community many of which have been identified as providing expert answers in their fields. Their contributions are even ranked over time based on their popularity and the answers the have provided on different subjects.
In terms of content creation, Quora is an excellent source for writing blog posts based on “crowdsourced” answers. Here is an example of a “crowdsourced” article via Business2Community.com: The Future of Social Media: 50+ Experts Share Their 2013 Predictions . Quora would be an excellent source for collecting predictions from thought-leaders in the area of social media and marketing.
“Often the things you wonder about can be asked as a question. On Quora, questions are the primary way we elicit new information from people’s minds onto the web. Each question page aims to become the best resource for anyone with that same question. In many cases, your question will already have been asked and answered by people with first-hand experience.” (Quora) 
Hootsuite: Social Media Management Dashboard.
Hootsuite allows you to publish, monitor and measure across multiple social media networks, securely. You can also have multiple managers for group management and manage multiple profiles on one dashboard.
Twitter, in particular, makes a lot more sense and can be more powerful for business when using a dashboard such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck.com. While often you will work directly from the Hootsuite dashboard, it does have a browser bookmarklet available as well.
WordPress : Web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.
My blogs (short for web log) including this one are created using WordPress. WordPress has added a bookmarklet tool “Press This” that allows me to share content directly from the Web to my blog on WordPress by adding the title of the article and a link as a post and then at the same time allowing me to write an introduction or comment on the article I am sharing on the blog.
Many of the tools I use and covered in my presentation, PLUS many more, are listed and described here by You Brand Inc: THE ULTIMATE LIST OF CONTENT CURATION TOOLS AND PLATFORMS
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