Community Breakfast June 2011 - Best Software - Notes

Hosted by UserVoice

Attendees

Amy Higgins

Ashley Jain

Eric Herberholz

Evan Hamilton

Jenna Langer

Jeremy Hicks

John Riley

[Kenneth Fax]

Meghan Krane

Moran Serr Hirsch

Van Riper

Goals
Most CMs were seeking to better:
 * Report on social media efforts
 * Collaborate with teammates
 * Highlight/collect content

Resources
The OneForty blog is known for featuring tool reviews.

Reporting tools

 * awe.sm - Reports on Twitter reach and ROI, all the way down to sponsor clicks. Lots of integrations.
 * PeopleBrowsr - Intense level of real-time analytics, including sentiment analysis. Expensive.
 * Crowdbooster - Reports on Twitter reach and recommends tweet times (and other things soon
 * Tweetreach - Reports on reach of Tweets and top RTers
 * TwentyFeet - Reports on Twitter analytics

Productivity

 * ThoughtBox.es - Colored to-do list boxes that you can move around
 * Evernote - Take and access rich notes from your phone or computer.
 * Wunderlist - Simple, multi-platform task manager
 * Time Out - Locks your screen at specific intervals so you can get up and take a break
 * Instapaper - Instantly save a webpage for later
 * Todoist - Simple to-do list
 * Gmail Undo - A feature in Gmail labs that gives you several seconds to "undo" sending an email
 * OmmWriter - Distraction-free writing tool

Collaboration

 * Podio - "Basecamp light" team collaboration system.
 * Yammer - Internal microblogging tool
 * Sococo - Virtual office and communications tools
 * Socialbase - Task management, with links directly to tools to complete them
 * CoTweet - Twitter app that allows you to assign tweets, see who replied, and easily translate tweets
 * Hootsuite - Twitter app that has multiple account support for those who handle multiple accounts
 * Google Docs - Access and edit docs from anywhere

Random Apps

 * Qwitter - Tells you when people stop following you on Twitter
 * Buffer - Fill Buffer up with tweets, it'll post them throughout the day
 * Bit.ly Chrome Extension - Instantly shorten the URL of the page you're on, get alerts when your links hit a certain number of clicks
 * Tweepi - Cleans out inactive Twitter accounts you're following
 * CheckThis - Easy web publishing app for limited-life pages

Content Curation

 * Zemanta - Places relevant related posts at the bottom of your blog post
 * Storify - Create stories with various forms of media and embed on your site (still requires manual curation)
 * Paper.ly - Pulls out top topics for a hashtag and aggregates them onto a webpage
 * Scoop.it - Aggregates content from across the web around a keyword, you choose which items to highlight in a newspaper-like format

Community Creation/Management

 * Lithium - Build, analyze, and manage communities
 * Gist - Shows email contacts' social information, reminds you to follow up with people

Sponsor Apps
Our sponsor UserVoice not only employs Evan, but also provides the location and food for our breakfasts. Check out their apps - Evan promises they're actually fantastic. Plus they start at $5/month.


 * UserVoice Feedback - Don't spend time manually collecting feedback - set up a forum where your customers can post and vote for ideas, leaving you with a prioritized list. Status updates allow you to keep these customers informed and engaged as you act on the ideas.
 * UserVoice Helpdesk - Track and respond to customer issues with a tool that is simple for both you and your customers. The Instant Answers feature helps customers as they start to send you a message, resulting in more customers helped faster.
 * - UserVoice Full Service - The full package: UserVoice Helpdesk and Feedback bundled together at an extremely competitive rate.