The latest dot com craze seems to be inventing a social media monitoring tool for brands – every day I seem to stumble on the name of a new system that does something different. The Social Media Monitoring Solutions Wiki attempts to list the different solutions and indicate what they monitor.
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The third Creativity and Technology conference looked at how agencies need to evolve for a digital age. Five main themes that kept making their way into conversation were identified.
1. Don’t separate interactive
2. Consider platform storytelling
3. Partner with tech companies, not just media companies
4. Game mechanics is the new marketing
5. It’s hard to laugh alone
In the debate about how to measure the value of social media investment there seem to be a few areas of discussion currently standing out from the many threads.The first is to ascribe a media value to your social media channels based on how many (impressions) ‘Likes’ or followers you have. The company currently pushing this view claim that, on average, a fan base of 1 million translates into at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year.
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There’s always something fun about the random generators you find online. Sometimes they even turn out to be useful for work when you are stuck without photoshop and you want to whip out a few powerpoint ‘it’s an integrated campaign, honest!’ slides showing how an idea can be pushed out to a variety of media. ‘Look, here’s the bus, here’s the bus shelter, here’s the billboard’ etc etc.
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Yes, it’s true. There is a tool that does it all – Axure. Create your wireframes, add the actions – then you have a working prototpye you can share with your client. Press another button and it spits out a word document with your wireframes and specifications in it.
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Smart draw lets you draw just about any type of chart you could want. From basic graphs, to a nice flowcharting tool (handy if you don’t have visio) My favourite is the crime scene tool where you can show where the body was found.
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I like to stare at it because it’s pretty. I’ve never bothered to look closely at it as the type is too small. I’m sure it does make a lot of sense though. It’s the type of image you want in a pitch book. It will make you look like you are so confident you know what you are talking about that a designer was assigned to the graphic for a good couple of weeks.
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This is probably the best chart I’ve seen for ages that explains the role that the different networks play. It’s not as pretty as the prism, but it’s lot more readable.
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Need to visualise something and not sure how? Had some tosser ask you to whip up a hyperbolic tree? This is the page for you. Hover your mouse over the item for a pop up with a thumbnail. Unfortunately the thumbnails are a bit stingy on the pixel size.
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Another good infographic. This is from Forrester for the way US audiences engage with social media. The older you are, the less likely you are to be constantly getting your status on.
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The perfect tool when an art director is stuck for a word and the copy writer isn’t around. The visual thesaurus maps words and their connections. You get a free amount of searches then you need t purchase it. At $2.95 a month it’s not bad. Especially if you are a crossword fan.
Continue Reading...Zamzar is a nifty site that lets you convert files to different formats. It converts documents which is handy, however the most useful thing is the video conversion. You can convert a file from your hard drive or you can use a url. This means you can download YouTube videos to your hard drive with it if you want to view or show them when you’re not online.
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Create word clouds with Wordle. Paste text in and it removes common words like ‘the’ and it creates of cloud of up to 150 words. Words used more often are larger. You can play with the layout to choose fonts, colours scheme or a vertical or horizontal mix of alignment.
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Enter the word you want in a box and then select the letter pictures you like. The site give you code to paste in your site that links back to the images in Flickr. You can also download the source code to do the same if you wish.
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