Digital toolbox – always in need of an update…

Toolbox, raw and in flux

Honorable mention to few ”new” and great tools that I probably didn’t mention. Likelizer is a cool but simple tool to analyze and get ideas on how to improve your facebook page. Try it out. Socialbro is amazing when it comes to understanding your Twitter-crowd. More data than you could ever dream of. My favorite: it shows you the best time for you to tweet. It’s free if you use the version that’s in the Chrome web store (and if your accounts not to big).

I also talk about the importance to get these tools into your every day life. I mentioned the Mozbar, SimilarWeb, Klout extension, Rapportive and Ghostery as some examples of browser add-ons you should look into. They are available for most popular browsers, my links take you to the Chrome-version. My prefered browser.

Google-stuff [search]

1. Learn about all the good stuff in the topbar after a search. Compare a simple search for Toyota with this one that shows only news articles about toyota, posted in the last 24 hrs and sorted in chronological order.
2. Google News, click the settings wheel and adjust as you like. Crazy powerful.
3. Google Alerts – what it says. Simple setup, amazing value.
4. Google Dashboard – for personal use, all your google stuff in one place.
5. Google Ads Preferences, an example of advertiser responsibility and transparency
6. Google Trends, quick overview of whats happening with keywords. Can also be used to compare sites.
7. Google Correlate, amazing AMAZING stuff. And you can upload your own numbers (sales, traffic etc) to do really advances correlations. Love it!
8. Google DisplayPlanner, the pandoras box of internet intelligence. Take a day and dig DEEP.
   
9. Think with Google, an amazing collection of tools, research, reports and studies.
10. Wildfire, track (and compare) your competitors.
11. WDYL, Google having som fun.

A few quick ones to check your brand (or rather the competition;)

1. Addict-o-matic. As ugly as it gets, but still has a few good points as a meta-search.
2. Spyfu, to look into the world of paid search. Also look into their Kombat-mode
3. Similarweb, beautiful and well thought through tool to check out semi-open metrics about sites – your own or the competition. Careful though, at lot of estimates shown as facts.

Social media monitoring – mostly – for free [always google…]

1. Topsy, one of my favorite. Not everything, but the most relevant. Works amazingly well for a free tool, actually better than many of the paid ones. They also have the ”analytics-graph”.
   Another pro-tip, every mailadress you can dream up gives you a free PRO-account for 14 days. Brilliant.
2. Social Mention, cool in how it’s getting pretty good at doing sentiment. Don’t skip all the search options.
   Update: Social Mention is now a brand new part of BrandMentions bigger offering. Check it out.
3. The beautiful Tagboard. Pay a little and do like in Helsingborg. ’nuff said.
4. Check out any topic och domain from a Buzzsumo-perpspective.
5. SharedCount does what it says. Once you’ve done a search, save it as a bookmark/favorite.
6. Followerwonk aspires to teach you more about your followers. And much more. Here’s an example looking at what a specific users tweets. (Part of Moz = it’s super good)
7. Tweetfeel, one of thousands small and goofy tools. But it made you laugh. (Broken since the change of Twitter API)
8. Sentiment140, a more pretty (and less fun) version of tweetfeel…
9. Twitter has a good search by itself, and it’s great together with the Klout Extension.
10. Trendsmap is one of many cool, and useful, tools to aggregate twitter data.
11. Realtime is a brand new tool from bit.ly that shows great promise (might still be in closed beta)
12. 228 more tools in this wiki…

Ranking people [search]

1. Klout, the king of the hill.
2. Peerindex, the complex one.
3. TrstRank, the geeky and great API

Facebook stats and stuff [search]

1. Facebook ads. You will not belive how fun it is to poke around in the Facebook demogrpahics until you tried it. Massive learning experience.
2. Facebook insights, can also be used on your external website.
3. Facebook hashtags, what it says
4. Facebook Graph Search, like a playful linkedin-search.
5. Social Bakers has great aggregated stats.

Search engine optimization/understanding/toolsSEO [search]

1. Moz is the mother of everything SEO.
2. Woorank gives you an excellent idea of the current situation of your site, and checklists on what to do next.
3. But the first thing on the list is really to master the google webmaster tools.

RSS and the ways to access it [search]

1. Feedly for your browser
2. Reeder for your mac (also for iPhone/iPad)
3. Flipboard for your smartphone/iPad. My #1 tip to stay on top of news.
4. Zite, another personalized news app. If you work actively with it, over time it will be brilliant.
5. A list with every tool that ever existed. Might get outdated…

Let the machine work for you [search]

1. IFTTT is a excellent entry level tool to connect apps and services with open API to let you automate tedious tasks.
2. Zapier is like IFTTT on steroids. You can do so much more, but there is a learning curve. And a price tag.
3. Pipes from Yahoo is like Zapier on steroids. It’s crazy complicated and crazy powerful.
4. An article on more tools in this realm.

MORE!!!

1. Yes ;)

And finally, some case studies…

Finally, finally: Remeber Iris, kind of, fifteen years later. Whenever you have a rough day, take another look att the face of Jack Andraka.

Hope you enjoyed, I sure did. It was a pleasure working with you. And don’t be strangers, let’s stay in contact!

Photo: creative commons licensed (BY-NC-SA) flickr photo by Sorensiim_OLD