Author: Blancer

For long businesses have ignored the real concerns and feedback from ordinary consumers. They did things their own way without much of a risk of negative publicity. With the advent of social media, the cozy cocoon they had built has been taken down. Today, social authority is much more widely spread.

Twitter and Facebook gives every average Joe a unique voice and global reach. Brands can be built or brought down in 140 characters or less. Responsible businesses take social media seriously and after the break you will find a list of apps to monitor and measure the social pulse.

This roundup is a supplement to our earlier one, “10 Apps for Monitoring Social Media” and you can find a lot of popular apps mentioned there.

Echofon

Echofon

Echofon is not a full blown app per se. It’s a plugin that runs on Firefox, but is jam packed with a whole lot of features. Echofon for Firefox appears conveniently within your browser window. This is especially handy if you click a lot of links in tweets or post a lot of links as you browse. It notifies you when friends post tweets and has a text entry field for posting your own tweets. Echofon syncs unread tweets with your iPhone when you use Echofon for iPhone.

Support for Multiple Social Networks : No
Access to Multiple Accounts : No
Paid Upgrades : No
Graphs & Analytics : No

Klout

Klout

The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score. Eventhough it sounds a bit complicated, in practice it really isn’t. Check out our in depth review of the web app here and learn how to make the most out of it.

Support for Multiple Social Networks : Yes
Access to Multiple Accounts : Yes
Paid Upgrades : No
Graphs & Analytics : Yes

tap11

tap11

tap 11 helps you measure the results of each campaign with per-tweet analytics (tweet impact, reach, clicks, retweets, replies) and overall engagement with a comprehensive analytics dashboard. You can also manage how multiple team members tweet across multiple accounts.

Support for Multiple Social Networks : Yes
Access to Multiple Accounts : Yes
Paid Upgrades : Yes
Graphs & Analytics : Yes

SocialFlow

SocialFlow

SocialFlow claims that it is the only platform that dynamically publishes your content when it will resonate most with your customers and audiences on Twitter. The app helps you take the guesswork out of social messaging and start acquiring more engaged fans and followers that click, retweet and mention you more.

Support for Multiple Social Networks : Yes
Access to Multiple Accounts : Yes
Paid Upgrades : Currently in Beta
Graphs & Analytics : Yes

PeerIndex

PeerIndex

PeerIndex helps you understand and benefit from your social and reputation capital (Boy! They do come up with snazzy terms don’t they!) online. Install the Firefox and Chrome plugins to see PeerIndex of people within the tweet stream and around the web. I particularly liked their interpretation of the Topic fingerprint. The topic fingerprint shows a person’s resonance within each of eight benchmark topics and you can immediately find the domain of the tweets without actually having to go through a bunch of them.

Support for Multiple Social Networks : Yes
Access to Multiple Accounts : Yes
Paid Upgrades : Currently in Beta
Graphs & Analytics : Yes

TwitterCounter

TwitterCounter

The name itself is self explanatory. TwitterCounter is a web app that provides statistics of Twitter usage and tracks over 14 million users and counting. Twitter Counter also offers a variety of widgets and buttons that people can add to their blogs, websites or social network profiles to show recent Twitter visitors and number of followers.

Support for Multiple Social Networks : Yes
Access to Multiple Accounts : Yes
Paid Upgrades : Yes
Graphs & Analytics : Yes

BackType

BackType

BackType helps you make sense of social media so you can make better marketing decisions. You can search by a name of the person, topic of interest or a URL to get a good understanding about their social influence.

Support for Multiple Social Networks : Yes
Access to Multiple Accounts : Yes
Paid Upgrades : No
Graphs & Analytics : Yes

Topsy

Topsy

Topsy is a realtime search engine powered by the Social Web. Unlike traditional web search engines, Topsy indexes and ranks search results based upon the most influential conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain queried.

Topsy’s algorithms dynamically identify influencers within the Social Web for any searchable criteria, using these influence calculations to rank results. This means realtime search results are highly relevant & devoid of noisy stream of conscious content.

Support for Multiple Social Networks : Yes
Access to Multiple Accounts : Yes
Paid Upgrades : No
Graphs & Analytics : Yes

Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster

With Crowdbooster, you get to analyze the performance of your individual tweets with an interactive graph and table to quickly understand what worked and what didn’t. Customize the date range to better understand the impact of your campaign. Drill down to see replies, retweets, clickthroughs, and reach across your different tweets and campaigns.

Find out exactly how many impressions each of your followers has generated for your brand through retweets. Use this information to target special deals, rewards and promotions to the people who are impacting your brand the most.

Support for Multiple Social Networks : Yes
Access to Multiple Accounts : Yes
Paid Upgrades : Currently in Beta
Graphs & Analytics : Yes

Sysomos

Sysomos

Sysomos is redefining social media analytics with a powerful product suite that provides customers with the tools to measure, monitor, understand and engage with the social media landscape. Apps from Sysomos provide instant access to all social media conversations from blogs, social networks and micro-blogging services to forums, video sites and media sources.

Support for Multiple Social Networks : Yes
Access to Multiple Accounts : Yes
Paid Upgrades : Yes
Graphs & Analytics : Yes

Share Your Thoughts!

How easy it is to tackle a social media campaign? Which one si your favorite app to monitor and track social interactions?

Like most companies, Google regularly communicates with their business customers via email newsletters, updates on their official blogs, and printed materials. For a change, they’ve decided to publish a short book about data, called Think Quarterly, to a small number of their UK partners and advertisers.

To learn more about the latest experiment by Google and how it can be of use to us – the consumers – do read on.

Availability

Think Quarterly is available to read online at the official website, thinkquarterly.co.uk (also available at m.thinkquarterly.co.uk, if you’re on the move). As the links point out, Google’s UK division is in charge of the publication. EPUB and PDF versions of the book are available for download as well. All editions of the book are free.

Google’s Take

In their words, here is how Google sees their experimentation:

“At Google, we often think that speed is the forgotten ‘killer application’ – the ingredient that can differentiate winners from the rest. We know that the faster we deliver results, the more useful people find our service.

But in a world of accelerating change, we all need time to reflect. Think Quarterly is a breathing space in a busy world. It’s a place to take time out and consider what’s happening and why it matters.”

Sounds very candid, as Google almost always does. And after reading the book, in my opinion Google has succeeded to a great extent in its goal.

The Content

The first issue is dedicated to Data. If you are really looking for them, you can find the magic metrics that will help transform your business. Think Quarterly and the articles are structured to help the reader find inspiration and insights.

Places to see Sexy Data

As for the content, Think Quarterly has got something for everyone – from nerds to casual readers of technology. I enjoyed reading the roundup of 10 online destinations to find sexy data.

Fully Viral

Case studies part of the Fully Viral feature give enough insights to video content creators to successfully run a campaign in YouTube (which could be applied to any other similar service).

Visual History of Data Capture

The Visual History of Data Capture is a fun yet educational read and is quiet comprehensive in showcasing how we have come from capturing data from sticks to the cloud.

How useful could it be?

Well, the usefulness of Think Quarterly largely depends upon your profession and passion. If you are Geek looking to know more about the inner workings of a company like Google, this would be a must read. On the other hand, if you are engaged in a profession or business in a vertical covered by Think Quarterly, you might have treasure of data to mine.

It would be great if Google ventures a bit more into the consumer side of the equation and publish books that help people learn more about technology and Internet. A digital periodical dedicated solely to Internet security would be of immense help to the masses.

Besides that, I don’t see Think Quarterly as a Trojan Horse that might disrupt the publishing industry. Are they testing the waters to see how positive the reaction from the community would be if such a magazine or periodical were to come out? Ofcourse, they do. Large Corporations always have that constant urge to track and mine data, even if they don’t have any real use for them in the near future.

Historically, Google always tries to stay away from the pureplay content business. Take for example Google News or the much touted Google Music service. Think Quarterly could be used as a benchmark for the future of digital publishing and it always helps to be the pioneer of a new format.

Share Your Thoughts!

Will you read Think Quarterly regularly? Did you find the articles and coverage simple enough to understand?

Thanks to camera equipped mobile phones and cheap cameras, we’re literally flooded with pictures, both online and offline. Pictures speak a thousand words, but, at times, you might have to add a couple of words of your own to make them perfect. A funny crown or a tail or horns can liven up the images when shared with friends and peers.

It would be lot more fun if you could share the goofy image manipulation you’ve done of a popular celebrity or see a few created by someone like you. Founded by the uber popular meme creating legend Moot of 4chan, Canvas is a fun app that helps you share and play with images.

Overview

Overview

Canvas is currently in closed, private beta and you will have to apply for an account. I waited for over a month or so but if you have a friend using it already, ask him/her for an invite. During the beta period Canvas is using Facebook Connect to validate users and handle invitations. Only your friends already using Canvas will be able to see your photo and name in their invite panel. I got only one such invite, so they are pretty hard to come by. After Gmail, I guess it’s Canvas that has executed the clever plan of using invites to drum up the hype.

Ease of Use

User Interface

Even after signing in with your existing Facebook account (via OAuth), Canvas will put you through a short sign up process. After signing in, you will land on a page that is a collage of all the popular images that are floating in the Canvas ecosystem. All images tend to be funny one way or another with varying degrees of offensiveness laced on them. The language or content might be occasionally be a bit more offensive but largely Canvas promotes itself and strives to be a Worksafe site.

Genre Specific Categories

As I have mentioned above, Canvas is all about manipulating images and the ones displayed only make that fact crystal clear. Images are tucked into various categories based on their popularity, activity, comments received and the newest ones to enter the stream. Also if you’re looking for genre specific categories, try the drop down menu titled Everything. For now, images can belong to any one of the above mentioned categories but the developers promise that the ability to create your own custom categories is coming soon.

Remixing Images

If you’re planning on sharing an image, viewing their comments or replying to them, you can just hover over them to bring up the hidden options. It’s nice to see the badges (more on them later) with the number of upvotes an image has received so far. To see all the comments posted so far, use the expand icon on the top left corner of the page. Adding your perspective to an image is referred to as a Remix. Click the image you want manipulate (or spoil, based on your drawing skills and intentions).

Starting a Remix

Canvas has as many decent set of tools as the oldest version of Windows Paint (yes, that’s a snub) but taking into account that I am no Pablo Picasso and my drawing skills have not improved a bit from the Kindergarten days, it’s more than enough for me and most of us. You can always use Photoshop or other pro ninja image editors to create a snazzy remix and then upload it back. No one’s stopping ya! But with what’s available here, it is only possible to extract a few drops of lemonade.

Tools

They have got 11 different fonts including the crowd favorite Comic Sans. It’s a bit tricky if you try to add text to the image – you will have to click on the image and add the content from the left pane. There is an airbrush, eraser, flip tools, undo & redo, color picker and a couple of others.

Stamps

The real interesting feature is Stamps. Use the Stamp icon from the toolset and you will now be able to add an overlay to your current remix. Canvas allows you to search for stamps from their own collection. If you can’t find one that you like, upload your own or search in Google Images without having to move an inch from the app. Add a couple of words of wisdom and you are ready to unleash the remix into the world.

Before uploading the image, Canvas asks for a pledge that the image is clean and is not NSFW. Posts violating the terms of service will be removed. Repeat offenders will have their accounts deactivated. You have the option to submit your remix or original creation anonymously, but I guess they would be recording your IP to ban your account in case of any violations.

Sharing With Others

Dragging Badges for Upvote

Canvas has made sharing extremely easier with some new tools right below the stickers. Drag any of the share icons to any image to quickly post that URL to Facebook, Twitter or StumbleUpon. In the same manner, drag and drop badges on the images and they will get an upvote in the appropriate category. Threads are public now, so even non-registered users can click through if you share a link with them.

Final Thoughts

So what exactly is the point of this web app you ask? Frankly, there isn’t anything of significance that can change the world. But it’s absolutely ridiculous for us to expect every single web app to solve a huge problem. Canvas is pure, unadulterated fun and its about time we all took sometime to blow of some steam. Hope they add some better image manipulation tools in the future. If you got access to it, give your friends a taste of Canvas and send them an invite!

Share Your Thoughts!

Is Canvas funny and playful enough? See yourself uploading and voting up some goofy images?

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting SlingPlan.com. The developer describes SlingPlan as an all in one productivity tool designed to help entrepreneurs and small business owners better organize their digital information and gain back that lost time while using multiple programs!

Share, exchange, and collaborate with clients, team members, employees, and friends. SlingPlan can manage both your personal and business life information. It was designed by an entrepreneur for entrepreneurs.

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

Dashboard

Workspace Projects

About the App

Here are the top five features you can expect to see in the latest version:

1. Email Consolidation & Action Management
2. Personal & Group Calendars
3. Online Document Editing & Sharing
4. Complete Contact Management Tool
5. Central Consolidated Dashboard

Requirements: Browser Based – Supports IE, Chrome, FireFox, Safari, Opera
Price: $15+ per month
Developer: Sean Fiske