My top five social media tools
The problem with this meme lark is that it gets time-consuming if you do too many. However, David Tebbutt has 'tagged' me to continue a meme started by Drew to name your five favourite/most useful blogging tools. Mine are:
1) Typepad - despite the outages it is still the best platform to introduce people and if used with your own mapped domain is 'business grade' for SMEs/SMBs. Unless you are a geek or have an IT department to support you then WordPress.org and Movable Type are just too hard. Most SMEs/SMBs aren't geeks, don't have an IT department and don't have time to mess around. Time is more precious than 0.0005% annual server downtime!
2) Statcounter - easy to use, cheap and looks smarter than Sitemeter. For evaluation it is essential, even though I don't think measuring a blog's success has anything to do with visits, popularity etc.
3) Zoundry - I used to prefer Qumana but it suddenly developed problems and wouldn't start. Uninstalling, cleaning my system, reinstalling - nothing worked and no reply to my email asking for advice. Now I've got used to Zoundry and like it.
4) FeedDemon - so I can use Newsgator Mobile I sync it with NewsGator Online, but rarely actually use it online as it just doesn't "feel right". Only problem is the synchronisation doesn't work very well and I still end up reading stuff twice. I'm probably about to ditch it in favour of NewBreak as my mobile RSS reader.
5) CrispyNews - I've only recently discovered this but have a couple of experiments going and some more interesting ideas to come as soon as I have time.
I deliberately haven't included any of the blog search tools I use as none of them are that much better than the others, which means you have to use them all.
My five tags are Tom Murphy, Stephen Davies, Simon Collister, Todd Defren and Adrian McMenamin (which is one I bet the other four and most readers don't know about - but there is a PR connection).
