Posts Tagged ‘youtube’

Cool Apps: Get A Handle On The Soc-Med Game with Postling

By John Thompson | May 21st, 2010 0 Comments

There are lots of opinions on Social Media and how it can be employed to promote business and engage with our customers. One thing upon which we can all agree, however, is that it can be enormously time-consuming. A time-suck, if you will.

Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. Yelp. FourSquare. YouTube. Tumblr. Flickr. How are we supposed to stay on top of it all and still, you know, do our jobs?

Postling is here to help.

Postling saves you time and frustration. Period. Postling endeavors to help you make social media engagement more efficient. It monitors your presence, and provides you one hub through which you can update your WordPress blog, Facebook fan (or profile) pages, Twitter…you name it. No longer do you need to log into different social media sites every day. Postling does all the work for you. In two simple steps, publish your blog post to your blog(s), then update your Twitter and Facebook status with a link and custom message.

Postling offers unrivaled information curation.

Now partnered with Collecta, Postling will give small businesses a way to track search terms and see its mentions on blogs, in mainstream media, and on social media sites. In addition, they’ve created a custom RSS feed reader, so that you can monitor competitors or blogs that are of interest to you and your business. From Postling, you’ll be able to tweet, comment or post to your blog.

And all of this will happen in real time. Pretty cool, right?

Some of the best features of Postling are the ability to monitor as many different accounts as you like, as well as a great community support feature, to which you can turn for advice when you really need it.

You want to know what people are saying about your business. You want to know what they’re saying right away. Postling will help you listen.

Postling is the tool for small businesses to get a handle on their social media usage. It’s not built for the big boys, it’s built for you and me. Check it out today!

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Cool Apps: Put On Your Blogging Jammies … It’s Embed Time

By John Thompson | May 7th, 2010 0 Comments

If you’ve ever written a blog post (and c’mon … if you’re reading this, chances are that you have), you know how beneficial it can be to include photos, videos, and yes, the occasional tweet, to help reinforce your overall point.

For the first two examples, videos and photos, embedding in blog posts has always been relatively easy. But with tweets? The process is clunky, at best. Up ’til now, bloggers either had to copy and paste them or, if they wanted even more of a hassle, take screen captures of them (this method preserves the integrity of the quote/tweet perfectly), then post them as images.

As of today, those hassles are things of the past, because Twitter has introduced embeddable Tweets (and there was much rejoicing).

Including tweets, if you’ve never done it, is a great way to quote people and in a way that’s much easier to read and follow than with traditional quoting. With an “old school” quote, the writer would include, usually, a snippet of a quote, which might or might not capture the original context.

With embedding, the inclusion of tweets is neater. It’s cleaner.

From now on, including a tweet will be as easy as including a YouTube video. According to Twitter’s blog there will be, “just a snippet of code you’ll be able to use to generate simple, selectable flat-HTML tweets.” The screen capture below (irony duly noted) shows how an embedded tweet will look:

Embeddable tweets. Not tons of bells and whistles, but darned useful. Your blog posts will be better for them.

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Cool Apps: Get Mobile, Get QIK!

By John Thompson | April 2nd, 2010 0 Comments

When you stop to think about it, mobile technology is pretty amazing. The things that we can do with our phones these days are truly mind-boggling.

Communication is faster and more efficient. Mobile applications allow us to run our businesses from the palms of our hands. We have access to pretty much anything at anytime. Like I said, amazing.

So, aside from the obvious things like email, access to social media outlets, and other glaringly-business-oriented applications, how can these little powerhouses best be used to benefit our businesses?

One of the most interesting uses I’ve seen is with QIK, a mobile video and live streaming application that can be used on more than 140 different phones. QIK allows you to record video on the fly. It lets you do it wirelessly. It lets you stream events with people as they’re happening.

“That’s cool and all, but how could I use that for my business?” you might ask.

Here’s one way: have you ever had clients whom you were helping to relocate? They arrange trips to see homes, you schedule as many showings into one weekend as is humanly possible, and they feel pressured to buy something, even though they might not have found *the* house, simply because they’re there. With QIK, if there’s a home that they’d like to see, you can arrange a showing…and live stream it to them, no matter where they are.

QIK could be used to do virtual tours for homes. It could be used in the great wide world of hyperlocal marketing, allowing you to capture video of interesting happenings in your market area. You could even use QIK to record VLOGs, which can be automatically uploaded to YouTube, Facebook, or your blogs hosted on WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and many others.

With a little creativity, a simple little tool like QIK could really be a game-changer for your business. How do you think you might use it?

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