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]

Related posts:

1. “How To: Create an Online Multimedia Clip Book with Agglom”
2. “OMG!! Blogging Is Dead! Now What?: Quick & Dirty Alternatives”
3. “You Are Doing Your Clients a Horrible Disservice”

…if you don’t monitor for them on Twitter.

How would your clients take it if you didn’t respond to a negative article in a smaller daily, say the Oakland Tribune? You wouldn’t want to miss the chance to respond to a potentially harmful blog post, so why miss a Tweet?

Use Summize. It finds all Tweets about your client or from your customers–even deleted ones! When Twitter’s “reply” function is working, it can also track conversation around said Tweet! And now, it’s embedded in my favorite Twitter Client, Twhirl.

Our clients love it when we send them a Tweet to which they should respond. We’ve been using it for several months now.

Check out this search for Yoono.

When a person firsts install Yoono, it sends a Tweet to their Twitterstream saying “I’m testing Yoono.”

(Click to Enlarge)

Yoono also has someone manning a Twitter account. They catch the negative comments and respond. Note the elegance of Summize’s inline conversation tracking!

(Click to Enlarge)

But it also looks as though they didn’t see all the negative comments. Maybe they should use Summize (UPDATE: They do! See the comments below!)

How do you track your client and customer conversations effectively? Leave us tips in the comments!

BTW: Stay tuned for Marie’s comprehensive review of Yoono next week!

[UPDATE: On July 15, 2008, Twitter buys Summize.]

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Related posts:

1. “Reporters on Twitter? Say Twellow to My Leetle Friend”
2. “How To: Create an Online Multimedia Clip Book with Agglom”
3. “Twitterpated: A Twitter How-To”