Posted by: Laurie Head
Love new tools that will help grow your business and make it more efficient? There is a plethora out there and it’s tough to stay on top of what’s new.
I love tools that create a culture of sharing on a frictionless basis – tools like Microsoft SharePoint 2010, which we host. When paired with a Web 2.0 application such as NewsGator Social Sites, which effectively makes your office “even more social,” SharePoint 2010 can become an incredibly powerful collaboration platform – leading to greater efficiencies in all aspects of the workplace. What communications professional wouldn’t appreciate that?
But, to do my job, I also rely heavily on a number of Web-based tools that lead to even higher marketing/ communications efficiency. For example, I use Google Insights, Google Analytics and Google Trends on a regular basis to measure all aspects of our online presence. If you aren’t using these at your company, you should. Also, they’re free.
While attending the international conference for the Public Relations Society of America this week with 3,000 other communications professionals, I learned about dozens more useful tools – most of which are free or available for a small fee. Here are half a dozen that strike me as worth checking out in the coming days:
www.compete.com: Use it for free competitive intelligence that will help you with your online marketing strategy. Compare your Web site’s traffic and engagement metrics with that of another site – a competitor, perhaps.
www.kadoo.com: Simply upload your files once to their cloud and use them on Kadoo.com and/or anywhere else — from mobile and Web applications to Web sites and services. You can do it without sacrificing your right to privacy or file ownership.
www.hootsuite.com and www.postling.com: Need a digital dashboard to monitor social media mentions about your company and spread messages by updating multiple social networks in one step? These sites may be for you.
www.submityourarticle.com: Consider yourself an expert with something to say? Have you considered article marketing? Write an article about almost anything and, for a small fee, get this site to distribute it across the Web to sites that crave content. It’s a 100% automated article distribution service.
www.tweetcloud.com: What’s being said about your company? Use this site for a glimpse across the Twittersphere through an intuitive interface (a cloud).
By the way, if you are tweeting, then please follow us @ AIS_Network.
Tags: collaboration platform, communications, marketing tools, PRSA International Conference, public relations, SharePoint 2010, social media
