Good Works Grapevine

Social Media Tools

There are so many tools out there and new ones popping up everyday. I’ll try to list my favorites here with a brief description of why I love them so much.

SOCIAL MEDIA

del.cio.us – This is a great tool for not only sharing your bookmarks with your friends (and the world) but is a great way to organize your links in one place. Use tags to ensure that you and your audience can find your lnks.

Facebook.com – What I like to refer to as “MySpace all grown up”. Great tool for growing an online social community. Facebook.com has put time and effort into developing applications targeting non-profits. Check out their Causes, Groups and Non-Profit Dashboard.

Flickr - Flickr is a cheap, versatile tool for saving, organizing and sharing photos. Use the Flickr API to feed your photo albums into your website or blog. Be sure to tag your photos so that they can easily be found. View my Flickr account to learn more about me and GoodDogz.org.

Flock - I heart Flock. I couldn’t live without it. Flock is a customized version of the Firefox browser largely focused on social media. Flock allows you to feed your Facebook.com, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Blog, etc directly into your browser. It also makes blogging very easy by offering a “Blog This” feature that enables you to send a blog post about a particular webpage directly to your blog. Download Flock and give it a test drive. Try it. You’ll like it.

LinkedIn - LinkedIn is a robust, online business networking tool. I’ve found it incredibly helpful resource for getting my non-profit and social media questions answered. Top executives, non-profit and fundraising professionals, techies and everyone in between have a LikedIn profile and are available to become part of your network. It’s easy to expand your network by joining the various LinkedIn groups. Post jobs and search for postings. Everyone should have a profile. It’s free and it’s effective.

Twitter – Microblogging – that’s what Twitter is all about. And it’s fun too! Twitter is a great tool for sending small bits of information (140 characters) to friends or colleagues within your network. I’ve most recently seem Twitter successfully used at NTEN’s NTC conference. Not only did it keep us “in the loop” to all of the happenings at the event, it brought us together as a community – of Twitterers. You can follow posts or “tweets” and be followed. Twitter also comes with a suite of cool accessories like Tweetscan (tool that lets you search Twitter tweets by keyword) and Tweetaholic (displays Twitterers with the most followers). TinyURL is a must to use with Twitter as it allows you to shorten very long URLs. Or download Twhirl to get a mini window that allows you to do all of these things. Give it a try and Twitter me!

NING - Ning.com is my new favorite tool. It’s essentially a network of social networks. And if you can’t find a network for your area of interest, you can start your own – and pretty darn easily! Their service is free and is a great alternative for building your own network from scratch. We’ll be taking it for a spin at GoodDogz.org and will let you know whether its as cool as it seems!

Yelp.com – This is one of my new favorites. Yelp.com is a community where folks can share reviews on just about any business – restaurants, hair salons, attorneys – you name it! Users can comment on each other’s reviews, plan to meet-up, etc. Very fun. Very cool. Come YELP with me!

YouTube – Need I say more. Huge community for sharing video. ‘Nuff said.

FUN STUFF

WooMe.com – Speed dating at its finest. I am the proverbial ball-and-chain, but this is an interesting tool for those who are wild and fancy free. But as my husband say, “It’s not OK to look.”

Geni.com – I love this little site. It’s a genealogical site which allows you to build a dynamic family tree with every detail you could ever want to include about your family. As you build your tree, you build a social network for your family. Pretty cute.