As social sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Digg become increasingly more important to PR pros, we will need one centralized location to manage our online identity.  Recently, we’ve been playing with the top candidates, Internet browser plugins Yoono and Minggl.  Today, socialTNT shares our findings, so you can find the right plugin to streamline your Internet life.

Making browsing and sharing your Web experience a breeze

As we fight to keep ahead of the trends and remain competitive with our peers, staying on top of online news and commentary is a definite must. I, like many others, use Google Reader for my news stream and del.icio.us as a bookmarking tool, but have also been using Yoono, a browser plugin for Mozilla and IE, to surf and share the Web in a more productive way. By using Yoono, you can:

• Save links and snippets from the Web page including images, video, and quotes with Web Notes
• Have your social networks, IM clients, photos and music accounts in one place (Yoono supports Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed,
  Last.fm, Piczo, Twitter, AIM, GTalk, MSN, and Yahoo)
• Chat with your friends within your browser and quickly share links, images, videos, and music
• Easily share content with others across your social networking platforms

I’ve already started sharing relevant links with co-workers that relate to our client work.  It’s also incredibly useful when you’re trying to effectively catalog and share the barrage of information available to you on the day-to-day. Give it a whirl!

All your social networks at your fingertips

Minggl is another browser plugin that allows you to manage and access your social networks quickly and easily. A few of the standout features include:

• Minggl’s browser toolbar allows you to go straight to your social networking profile, friend list, and mail, eliminating the need to enter the site URL or take multiple steps to get to where you want to go
• Through Minggl’s “status blaster” you can universally update your status across your networks in one step – it supports Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg and Flickr, and there are plans to expand that list
• Minggl Notes allows you to add private personal notes on friends’ social networking pages that only they can see – check out out the mockup of Bill Clinton’s profile below for an example of this in action

What I really like about Minggl is that it consolidates your social networking life so it is easy to stay active without spending a lot of time maintaining each and every network you subscribe to. For many of us, it’s no longer an option to get involved with social media tools, and Minggl helps cut down the “time suck” factor that often results.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for the most bang for your billable buck, I would recommend going with Minggl for your social networking needs. While Yoono’s interactive capabilities are a fun and admittedly useful way to surf the net and keep in touch with your network, Minggl’s unobtrusive service stays in the background until you need to access it, cutting down on its potential to go beyond the realm of productivity into time-killing territory.

Both plugins are still in beta mode, so all of this could change. In fact, today Yoono announced availability on IE7, as well as integration with iMeem and MySpace.  We look forward to watching both plugins closely as they continue to develop and add more functionality.

What do you think? Are you already hooked on one or the other? Let us know in the comments!

[The above photo, "Internet" by transCam on Flickr, used under Creative Commons]

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2. “OMG!! Blogging Is Dead! Now What?: Quick & Dirty Alternatives”
3. “You Are Doing Your Clients a Horrible Disservice”

Flashback, last Fall: We couldn’t get on Facebook without playing a round of Scrabulous and Superpoking all our friends.  By Spring, however, we’d become tired of all the drivel and wanted something a little more utilitarian.  Today, professional social network LinkedIn answers our prayers by launching its own set of apps–for grown ups!

Unlike Facebook or MySpace, LinkedIn is putting the apps through a rigorous approval process to make sure that the apps are (surprise) professional.  The initial offering of ten productivity apps should prove useful for serious business folks.  Today, socialTNT takes a look at Company Buzz, one of the new LinkedIn apps that could become a powerful tool for PR and Marketing Pros.

Using Company Buzz to Monitor Conversations on Twitter

Twitter, Twitter, Twitter.  It’s truly the living web, a world where you can find what people are thinking about a product, company or topic in real time.  Company Buzz lets you search for key terms, shows you related terms that appear in Tweets with your search term, and graphs the volume of Tweets that mention your search term.  Take a look:

In the above screen cap, you can see the layout of the top half of the app.  In the top right-hand corner, you can see the list of search terms.  LinkedIn autopopulates your list with your company names.  You can remove these or add your own search terms.  In the screen cap, we’ve searched for McCain.  The query results are shown on the left hand side in traditional Twitter-feed style.

This screen shot shows the app below the fold.  Here’s where the app becomes a little more robust.  In the top right corner, you can find “Buzz Words.”  Buzz words are words that are found in tweets mentioning your keywords.  These can be incredibly useful for finding related words you may not have associated with your original search terms.

The box marked “Trends” graphs out the number of Tweets mentioning your keyword.  This is good for reporting, especially for a launch or event.

When building your search, you may want to add multiple terms for one search.  Just click on “Manage” in the “Topics” box.  Then click on “Edit” next to the query you want to change.

Then just click “Add an another search term,” type it in, and hit save.

We found LinkedIn’s Company Buzz to be a great monitoring tool.  One of the major drawbacks was lack of conversation threading.  That’s why we still recommend Twitter Search for conversation tracking. This is still a great tool for trending and monitoring.

Other apps on LinkedIn we found useful were SlideShare, Huddle, WordPress and box.net.  Check them out yourself, or you can learn more about LinkedIn’s new applications on TechCrunch or in Co-Founder Reid Hoffman’s video, below.

Like what you read? Add our RSS feed! [what’s that?]. Or start your morning with socialTNT in your InBox! Or read Chris 24-7 on Twitter!

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Whether Twitter, blogs, or the Main Stream Media, the topic this week has been the SXSW festival. Many in attendance feel the Conference and its presenters just don’t get it. Is it the promoters’ fault, or the audience’s? Maybe it’s a little bit of both.

In this corner, the Returning Heavy Weight Champion: The Organizers

I grew up in Texas and have attended my fair share of SXSWs. As an indie/alterna-kid In junior high and high school, I always followed SXSW. After graduating high school, I moved to Austin for college.

Originally, SXSW started out as something that was a celebration of independence and musical innovation. As it increased in size, it seemed, to me, to lose its edge. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a great place to see some of your favorite bands, but if they play there, they’ve probably already made it big in the underground. The real music is out on the streets, in garages and in hole in the wall bars.

The traditional conference model was, at one time, a great way for professionals to get together and talk about what’s going on. The SXSW organizers have assembled a good line-up of industry relevant speakers, but the way people exchange ideas has changed. Social media tools like blogging, Twitter, YouTube and streaming video have changed the way people communicate. That’s why, for me, looking to SXSW for innovation is like reading news from 2006; it’s great if you want to track progress, but it’s not going to tell you what’s on the cutting edge.

For interactive media, the truly innovative strategies and tools are being discussed in the blogosphere and, more rapidly, on Twitter. You don’t need to pay money to go to a conference; you can suck it all up here for free. But for the people who don’t have time to scan feeds or follow 500 Twitter friends, the traditional conference model still works.

And in this corner, we have the Underdog: The Audience

In the music realm, the majority of the attendees are usually suits and big wigs who want to get wasted and feel like they are a part of the underground again; anyone truly punk or indie can’t afford the price tag or goes to the unofficial events. The majority of attendees want to find out the next big thing to market and consume. And you’ll never be able to please anyone that wants instant enlightenment but doesn’t want to fall in the mud. Because they’ve built up this event and these speakers as having all the answers, when the audience sees the man behind the curtain is human, they throw tomatoes in revolt. In terms of social media, they want the tools and secrets, without taking the time required to learn and process the philosophy.

If you are a regular reader of this blog–or follow me or Marie on Twitter–you are probably more like one of the indie-kids. Remember: You don’t go to SXSW to see cutting edge, you go to see bands that have already had hits in the alterna-scene. Be realistic with the event, and you’ll have fun.

Aren’t happy with the conference? Next year plan your own rebel panel. Punk kids organize unofficial shows to protest the commercialism SXSW has become. Also, part of being indie is supporting your local scene. When was the last time you attended or organized a tweet-up, social media breakfast or event? Do you blog, share good links, tweet your ideas?

Who’s to blame? Let us know in the comments. Also, what suggestions do you have for organizers to help them embrace the hard-core fans? What can you do to increase understanding of social media?

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[The above photos, “rock 'n roll face” by BohPhoto and "Mons Punk" by To Tof on Flickr are used under Creative Commons]

Related posts:

1. “Please Standby: Rethinking Online Video Strategy”
2. “OMG!! Blogging Is Dead! Now What?: Quick & Dirty Alternatives”
3. “Small Biz Social Media Spotlight: Trula Breckenridge”

Today, all of us who have ever dreamed of integrating Twitter into the workplace have something to smile about; last night, the makers of WordPress unveiled a nifty new tool, to help pave the way towards a Twitterpated world. Prologue–like Twitter, but for Enterprise–is a group blog designed for efficient team collaboration and communication.

For me, Prologue is a great implementation of the instant communication, micro-blogging technology Twitter pioneered. It really seems to be a great tool for global companies with employees scattered across time-zones.

It works like this:

• Leave a status update, comment, helpful link or question, so that everyone on the team can see the progress of other members on the team, answer questions, etc.
• Tag each Tweet with a project-specific category to quickly filter through the other posts and find only information regarding a specific project.
• Add an RSS feed for instant communication.
• Better yet, add an RSS feed for each category tag to filter for project specific “news.”

Right now, Prologue is only available on WordPress. Make the blog private if you don’t want the world to see. (Personally, I’d love to see someone remain totally transparent and keep their Prologue Blog public.) Since the code is open, you should be able to adapt it to most enterprise scenarios.

Click on the screenshot below to see the demo blog set up by the WordPress team.

Do you foresee your company utilizing this for Enterprise 2.0 implementation? Will this be a Twitter Killer, or is it another testament to the greatness of all things Tweet?

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Recommended Reading:

“Twitterpated: A Twitter How-To”

“RSS for Success: A Primer”

“PR to Enterprise: Beam me Up!”

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Last Friday I was honored to receive an invite to participate in Seesmic’s Private Beta. For those of you who don’t know, Seesmic is the hottest invite in Silicon Valley. That’s due, in part to French Founder Loic Le Meur‘s charisma plus a lot of blogger outreach. It also doesn’t hurt that TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington is an investor.

So What Is It?

On its most basic level, Seesmic is a social network for people engaged in video conversations. Because of its use of video, people are apt to draw comparisons with YouTube. The design of Seesmic, however, is much more intimate than YouTube. Instead of being overwhelmed with content, when you login to Seesmic you can either watch the most recent videos uploaded (the public timeline) or record your own. Even Seesmic’s tagline, “Join the video conversation,” contrasts YouTube’s “Broadcast Yourself,” highlighting the underlying difference: YouTube is more for those wanting to create or share video content while Seesmic, on the other hand, is intended for short video messages woven together to create conversations. YouTube is about You. Seesmic is about the community.

Speaking of community, it has grown very quickly over the last month. On November 20th, Michael Arrington reported that there were 300 users. In a Twitter interview Sunday night, Loic said the site has about a thousand users. With almost half posting daily, Seesmic’s community is very active. Loic also stated that there are still around 7000 people on the waiting list for an invite. [See this video explanation of why they can't expand any faster]

Usability

Seesmic is very easy to use. My MacBook’s built in camera allowed me to just hit the record button on Seesmic and start talking for up to five minute. If you don’t have a webcam, you can also upload videos that you record with a digital camera. Because the site is powered by flash and Ajax, some users might experience a drain on their CPU.

Many people have called Seesmic a video Twitter. Since Twitter is text, you can easily read, re-read and edit before you hit send. Video feels much more spontaneous.

I have to admit, when the camera started rolling, I didn’t know what to say; it really felt like the first time I’d ever left a voice message: “Um, Hi, this is Chris and I, um, just wanted to say…” Thank goodness Seesmic allows you to playback your video before posting and discard if you aren’t satisfied. After typing a subject and a brief description, hit save to post the video. Voila, you message has been sent out to the community and, if you’ve registered your Twitter account, a Tweet is automatically sent informing your Twitter friends that you have posted on Seesmic. Now others can watch your video and instantly reply. And then the conversation starts…or continues.

[Loic does a fun 3-minute video tutorial of how to use Seesmic here.]

Initial Impressions

First off, I have to give mad props to the Seesmic team for creating such a beautiful platform. Scrolling through the Seesmic stream, I watched conversations discussing everything from light-hearted music trivia to more esoteric topics like the psychology behind Seesmic. Loic’s team makes it easy for the lurkers–or those not always on the site–to catch up on the day’s major meme’s by offering a daily review, appropriately titled “Seesmix.”

As a newbie, it was hard to figure out what to say. Twitter asks “What are you doing,” but Seesmic leaves you hanging. Since Twitter’s purpose has evolved as the site has grown, I’m not sure if this is really a big deal. Also as a newbie, I don’t have any friends to converse with. This, however, wasn’t intimidating; all of the Seesmic users seem very open. It’s also just a matter of finding people I know.

In the upcoming months, members will soon be able to send direct messages to each other. Users will also soon have more options like message recording through Skype and distribution through email, Facebook and YouTube. When Seesmic launches in February, tagging and video grouping capabilities will make it easier to follow conversations. This feature will prove invaluable as the site grows. I also see RSS capabilities as something very useful.

Applications

Due to the visual nature of the media, video has a stronger impact that text communication could ever allow. For that reason, I would love to see Seesmic incorporated into company websites. I see it as a place where customers can leave video questions to the company moderated by the Community Manager with conversation threads left for future visitors to see. I can also see Community Managers interacting with customers through polls, quizes or direct relations with the press. It might also be used for internal communications like a video IM.

As I play around with it, I’m sure more ideas will come up. Like any community, it’s going to take some time and energy to fully understand how it works. As I learn and experience, I will pass it on to you. Hopefully, I’ll also be able to pass out a few invites. In the meantime, check out my first Seesmic post.

Are there any quesitons you would like me to ask the Seesmic community?

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.443249&w=425&h=350&fv=] from www.seesmic.com posted with vodpod

[Above image used under Creative Commons License by domake.saythink on flickr]

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Related posts:

1. “Web 2.0 Expo, Day 2: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Loic LeMeur, Simeon Margolis”
2. “Please Standby: Rethinking Online Video Strategy”
3. “May I Have The Embed Code, Please? Evaluating the Oscars Social Media Strategy”