Thanks to everyone for coming along to the Digital Charities meeting in ActionAid yesterday. It felt like having a fairly narrow focus, i.e. tools that help us work more efficiently with social media, was very useful. And it’s definitely a good thing that we fleshed out some ideas for the next few meetings – more to be posted soon.
As suggested in the meeting, at some point we’ll probably want to collate a bit of a wiki style review of various of these tools. We could create an entry for each on this site for instance, put them all in the same category, then share learnings about each if we use them? If you’d be interested in doing that – let us know in the comments.
So anyway, here’s the beginnings of the list from what we did yesterday:
- Provides a visual layout of your Twitter and Facebook accounts activities.
- Requires you to install Adobe Air, sometimes gets overwhelmed by the amount of activity and freezes.
- Similar to Tweetdeck, provides columns of your social media activity across Twitter & Facebook.
- It is a website so no software download is required.
- Has a bizarre pricing system that seems to escalate rapidly the more you use it.
- Designed mostly for reporting by the look of it, although haven’t been able to produce accurate reports from it yet (Tom & Louise from ActionAid are trialling, so we’ll report back!)
- Like PeerIndex appears to create ‘eye candy’ reports.
- Gives you information about your most popular Twitter & Facebook content and who your influential users are.
- Gives stats on reach, influencers, etc.
- Mainly known for having a vaguely credible numerical value assigned to all Twitter users (although this was somewhat debunked by someone claiming their score went up considerably when they said nothing)
- Seems similar to Klout & Crowdbooster.
- Evaluates your performance on social media, suggests additional people to interact with.
- Most useful bit seemed to be that it provides very pretty reports (suitable for senior management!)
- Sounded interesting – apparently used by the White House, but couldn’t find a free version to test
- Is basically an automated search that emails you the results. Looks very handy for reputation management, and for ensuring you don’t miss mentions on a topic that you’re campaigning on, etc.
- If you want to find out what people are saying about a topic, and who is talking about it, this is great.
- Essentially a research tool
- Superb RSS feed monitoring tool
- Didn’t get a chance to install this one and have a look – so any reviews or tips much welcomed in the comments!
Other tools that were mentioned but not in so much detail were Radian and Sysomos, both quite expensive, and probably comparable to ThinkUp as mentioned above.
We should also give a very sincere thank you to Rolf who (remotely) inspired lengthy discussions about the campaigning and also pranking opportunities presented by IFTTT. Our conversation took a strange turn towards certain right-wing political commentators, and an app that ‘released the winged monkeys’ so I’ll leave that there…
Please add any of the tools I’ve missed in the comments, and I’ll try and stay on top of updating this until we choose a different format. Similarly if I’ve undersold one, or you’ve got additional info about what they can do, please point it out in the comments! FYI – not interested in hearing from the companies themselves, mostly as you don’t always seem to be that unbias. However charity discounts for tools mentioned would be welcome in the comments (just don’t Groupon spam us!)