Archive for March, 2010

Flowtown Makes Connecting on Social Media as Easy as Email

Flowtown is one of my favorite new social media tools. It’s really a treat when you can connect with someone who let’s it all out and gives you the true inside scoop on the trials and tribulations of being a start-up technology entrepreneur.  In one of the most entertaining Skype Sessions I’ve done to date, I’m pleased to be joined today by technology entrepreneur, Ethan Bloch. Why I Heart Flowtown The time of email and social media convergence is upon us.  We’ve seen indications of this this in recent weeks with ExactTarget’s acquisition of CoTweet.  The truth is, this trend is only in the infant stages, and my prediction is that we will see more mergers like this.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if in the next few months, we see ConstantContact follow suit and acquire some form of social media aggregation tool. (And, if it were me, I’d offer to buy Hootsuite…) Flowtown is yet another example of social media communication melding with email marketing.  This slick, little piece of web-based software has the potential to make a huge impact on how businesses are using social media and, more specifically, how they will engage with the movement towards Social CRM in the next five years. I’ve written about how a social media tool, like Flowtown, is applicable in trade show marketing.  Some of the best ideas follow the “KISS” theory.  If you’re not familiar, KISS lovingly stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid”.  That’s exactly what Flowtown does.  The application makes it easier than ever to track down the social media profiles of the people you want to connect with, using human email addresses.  Once the addresses are uploaded, either manually or via comma-separated value spreadsheets, Flowtown quickly crawls the web and pulls back social media profile data, giving [...]

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Diigo Social Bookmarking: 5 Reasons Why It Rocks

It’s been my goal for the past two years for at least a portion of my career to be professional speaking.  With that turf comes the need for constant research. I’ve found a need to get good at things like boolean searching, basic image cropping, video editing and, most definitely, building presentations using Keynote (for Mac). The other side of becoming a professional speaker is in how you organize all your content and research information, especially if you are in the business of delivering customized presentations. As I’ve become more in-tune with researching various topics, social bookmarking has become a mainstay extension of my brain. First Tools When I first started on the path towards professional speaking, I was still working on a PC (I know, how sinful).  I developed my own organizational system, using Microsoft OneNote - which is actually a pretty slick program that comes the high-end packages of Microsoft Office.  OneNote boasts some great features, like being able to mark up articles visually, attach annotations and rich media, and organize through one heck of a folder system. The issue was that OneNote lived locally on my laptop’s hard drive.  When I left my gig at People To My Site and switched to my own MacBook Pro, transferring all of those saved articles was a major pain.  About halfway through, I gave up. Bookmarking On the Web Most of you have heard of sites like Digg and Delicious.  For the past two years, I’ve used Delicious as a private, online bookmarking system.  Take notice that I didn’t say “social bookmarking system.”  While Delicious does provide a social element in their system, using it has just never really appealed to me.  I’m busy connecting across multiple networks that aren’t focused on saving industry and trend information. One of the drawbacks I’ve [...]

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