Organized over the Social Web

Last week I started the journey with many other Vayniacs to bring Gary Vaynerchuk to their town as part of his book signing tour. For those of you just coming up to speed on Wine Library TV, Gary opened the tour to the community to make what probably is the biggest decisions of the tour, the cities he is visiting. The whole process started with a simple tweet which then turned into an email and then spilled into the blogosphere and every other aspect of the social web. In a weeks time Des Moines responded in a big way and locked Gary into stopping at East Village Books on June 21st. 

To me this is amazing and speaks to the power of community driven actions. To make this Des Moines book signing happen it took just a few small actions and a lot of word of mouth. Over the last week, word of mouth allowed me to connect with more people than ever through my blog and from the response I know all of them are passionate as I am and wanted to help out any way possible to make the event successful.

For those of you looking for advice, help or nearly anything else the internet provides an endless wealth of knowledge and talent from infinite niches of people who are probably just as passionate as you.  To tap into this resource it just takes you being out there, open, polling and listening. A drill down into these steps is coming in the near future but before I begin I want your thoughts and feedback on the subject. How do you use the social web and how has it provided value back to you?

Tumblelog app for Facebook

Tumblr for a long time has been my microblogging service of choice, and recently I have discovered a great little facebook application to further promote ElephantsCrossing.com. Appropriately named, Tumblelog, the application is easy to setup and cleanly sits in your facebook profile.  

The screen grab demonstrates the customization options and it is great to see that users have the ability to filter out content based on type and even further promote their tumblelog via News Feed. Because I like to keep a minimalist profile I was also relieved to find I can set the number of posts to be displayed in my profile and videos I have posted on my tumblelog first show as a play button versus the video screen.  It should be noted however you can play the video from your facebook page and images are shown without requiring any additional clicks.

Overall this is a great facebook app and way to promote your tumblelog. I will surely keep this one around for a while and add one more reason for keeping a facebook profile to my list.  

Trying on ecto

Tonight ended up being a short night for computer productivity however I did have the opportunity to play around with some new software. My MarsEdit 30-day demo ended today and overall I can say I wasn’t impressed. In fact, the last couple of posts to my blog were drafted and published through the editor available on wordpress.com. So with tonight I did some googling and came across an old post on Problogger.net list 5 essential OSX blogging tools. This post lead me to ecto.

Ecto, much like MarsEdit supports a number of blogging platforms and after installing can be used in minutes to started drafting your post. The editor provides all of my main features needed to support your blog publishing and additional features can be added through plugins.

First impressions… I am liking it so far. Deep dive to come in the following weeks however one important note is the cost. I couldn’t justify MarEdit for $29.95 however if all of the same features are there in ecto and possibly more I have no problem paying 17.95 for a license.

Socialthing and Evernote invites

I just logged into my Socialthing account before bed and noticed that I had 10 invites available.  When I first offered out the invites I recieved from opening my account they were snatched up within 24 hours so lets see if Socialthing is still hot.  If you are interested post a comment and I’ll send you an invite; first come, first serve style (but does not include those who requested from previous post).

On top of Socialthing, I started using Evernote this week. I must say this is quickly becoming one of my favorite services as I divide my computer time between two machines and sometimes a third and I appreciate the syncing of notes and general availability from any machine with internet access. Evernote has been great for “clipping” how-to documents and creating reminders for me for when I get home. A great example of this is Gary Vaynerchuk’s book. I saw a tweet about it going on pre-order while at work. Instead of reading up on it right then I simply clipped the site and set a tag for “2review” and “2order”.  When I got home I had a nice little reminder for me when I jumped on my mac and was able to follow through with the action. That’s my plug so let me know if this interests you and you would like an invite as I also have 10 for Evernote.  

I like free stuff

Sorry all for not blogging recently. I wish I could say that I have been spending less time on the computer but the very opposite is true! I have been wrapped up in the world of online applications targeted for small businesses and I amazed by all of the services/features that are available.

As someone looking to start my own business, and often consults others on technology solutions, I have been looking into and using several powerful tools to help me stay organized and measure progress. The most amazing part from all of this is (besides spending a few dollars for domain names) all of the tools I am current using are available at no cost, as in free! In the future, I definitely want to spend some more time doing a deep dive into these tools and maybe write a review but in the mean time here is a list of tools I have been using to support my own online work.

Google Analytics: Own a domain and want to track pageviews, visitors, and other points of data to make a beautiful line? Google has a free tool just for you. Set up is easy and in a week I was able to review traffic to my site and understand who is providing referrals or correlate events in my day such as the Central Iowa Bloggers breakfast which ended up driving my second largest day for visits/pageviews.

Google Apps: Again if you own a domain I don’t know why not to use Google to provide a suite of communication and collaboration tools to your team. I am using the free version of their service and in a couple of hours I had email rolling using my domain along with a shared online calendar and document hosting/writing.  

37signals’ Highrise: A tool I just started using for all of those CRM based functions. Admittedly I need to start using it more to realize its full potential but with a clean interface and tutorials available for key features I am confident I can start using this tool to build and support my business well into the future.   

WordPress: This one goes without saying as you by reading this are looking at wordpress in action. The upgraded interface is a dream and is by far my favorite blog publishing platforms. However if you wanted to just setup an account to host a few pages there is nothing stopping you from doing that also.

Tumblr: Is quickly growing to be my favorite of all services. It is a lightweight content management system commonly used for microblogging or tumblelogging.  I love it because it is free and fully opened to make your tumble log whatever you want it to be. This includes using your own domain, editing the html and the CSS. Want to see it in action? Check out my tumble log at www.elephantscrossing.com. 

Twitter: Forget LinkedIn and Facebook, you need to have a twitter account. I have realized more value in twitter over the last couple of months than I have in the two plus years I have been using Linkedin and Facebook combined. Through twitter I have been able to build a network in my area which had lead to meeting even more people to collaborate with and a constant stream of information.

These are some of my favorite tools I have been using recently and are providing a real value at no costs. Setup for each is simple and it would do well for any small business to check them out before making any other technology investments.

So let me know what am I missing out on, or if you have some tips for using the services listed above in a different way to provide even greater value than originally marketed?