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A few days ago I attended the North Bay SocialBiz 2010 Media Conference in Petaluma, CA. For a conference in its first year, I thought it did a great job attracting quality speakers and was pretty smoothly run. I really enjoyed the keynote speakers, and met some great people. I also ran two roundtables (“Smart Monkeys Use Tools: A Review of the Best Time-Saving and User-Friendly Tools to Manage Social Media” and “Online Social Networking for Business: Where and How to Create Authentic, Trusting Relationships Through Blogging, Facebook and LinkedIn") and did a presentation especially aimed at non-profits called "Harnessing Social Media for A Cause: How Non-Profits and Other Mission-Driven Organizations Can Practice Effective Relationship Marketing Online". Let me tell you, by the end of that very full day I was quite hoarse from talk-talk-talking for hours straight!

In any case, I promised the attendees of both my “Smart Monkeys Use Tools” roundtable and those who came to the “Harnessing Social Media for a Cause” presentation that I’d post my admittedly incomplete and idiosyncratic list of social media tools so that they didn’t have to take notes. It also occurs to me that even those who weren't present might find this useful!

So without further ado, here is the text of my “Smart Monkeys Use Tools” presentation, and hey, if you have any others to add to the list that you like or have always wanted to try, feel free to leave them in the comments!

"Smart Monkeys Use Tools: A Review of the Best Time-Saving and User-Friendly Tools to Manage Social Media"

Are you suffering from Social Media overwhelm? Well, fear not. We humans are smart monkeys and know that for every problem, there’s a tool to solve it! Here are some of our favorite time-saving and user-friendly tools to help manage social media’s potential for overwhelm as well as track its effectiveness.

Let’s break this down into three categories of tools:

1. Tools to manage all the info that comes in
2. Tools to manage all the info that goes out
3. Tools to measure and track social media

1. Tools to manage all the Info that comes in (desktop or mobile)

RSS Feed Readers

• Google Reader (can also use iGoogle to organize all Google services in one place)
• NetNewsWire (for mac)
• Feeddemon (for Windows)
• Bloglines
• RSSOwl

Twitter Clients (desktop or mobile)

-allow you to group people you are following in “stacks” and see them all in one place. Also allow you to post easily to different accounts (e.g. personal and work) and sometimes even to different social networks (e.g. Facebook and LinkedIn as well as Twitter)

• Tweetdeck
• Twhirl
• Hootsuite
• Twittelator
• Seesmic

Alerts

• Google Alerts
• Notify.me
• Tweetbeep or Twilert: allow you to set up email notifications for keywords or phrases from Twitter

Lists (Facebook and Twitter)

-sort all your friends (and pages) into lists for easy skimming

-on Facebook, friends can’t see what lists they’re on, but on Twitter they can (so watch out!)

Finding New Content

• Technorati, Networked Blogs (search and find blogs of interest)
• LazyFeed (simultaneous real-time updates on every topic you care about)
• Who Should I Follow (find people to follow on Twitter)

2. Tools to manage all the info that goes out (and don’t forget: it's ok repurpose content where appropriate, but think before you crosspost!)

• Ping.fm: and Hellotxt: allow you to post the same update to various social media services (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn)
• Tweetdeck, Twhirl, Hootsuite, etc: Allow you to post easily to different accounts (e.g. personal and work) and sometimes even to different social networks (e.g. Facebook and LinkedIn as well as Twitter)
• TweetLater, Twuffer, Later Bro, FutureTweets: allow you to compose tweets ahead of time and schedule when you want them posted, and receive email digests of keyword activity so you can track trends. Some also allow you to post to Facebook later.
• Twitterfeed, Networked Blogs: lets you post your RSS feed to Twitter (e.g. so you can notify followers of a new blog post)
  
  
• Dlvr.it is a service that lets you distribute content via RSS feeds to your social networks and manage multiple content sources and outputs. You can also measure audience engagement and reach across your social networks, and quantify the impact of retweets and mentions on your audience size.

• TwitPic: lets you share photos on Twitter

URL shorteners (let you shorten URLs so that you can fit more in a tweet or update)

• Bit.ly
• Owl.ly
• TinyURL
• BudURL

3. Tools to Measure and Track Social Media (some free, some paid)

• Twitter Search, Backtweets: let you search for phrases or key words or URL of interest to you (e.g. your company or product names)
• Twitter Grader or TwitterCounter: provides all kinds of analytics for Twitter
• Monitter is a service that monitors Twitter mentions in real-time in a multi-column interface. Simply input a search term into a column, add or remove columns as desired, and get an automatically-refreshing picture of what people are saying about your brand or competing brands in your space.

• Socialmention: Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user-generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. It also gives you idea about the general “perception” of the brand in terms like positive, negative or neutral.

• SocialToo lets you keep your follower lists in sync across networks, and learn more about your relationships. Impressive features include creating surveys and sending them to multiple networks, tracking social media stats, auto follow, auto filtering and much more.

• Twitteranalyzer is an interesting tool that gives you statistics about your and your friends’ Twitter behavior. You can see how many followers are online presently, who retweets your messages, what people are writing about you, Twitter following stats, your Tweeting habits and many more.

• Twitalyzer is a free tool that gauges your presence and popularity in Twitter. You can track your virtual influence, links to URLs, the signal-to-noise ratio, your clout, your generosity, your tendency to share good info and tweets with others by retweeting and other useful measures of success in social media.

• Scout Labs has a web based social media monitoring tool with an interface like Google Analytics and it tracks almost all the online social media channels. It measures all the negative/positive signals and gives you reports based on the overall performances.
• PostRank is a scoring system developed by PostRank (formerly AideRSS) to rank any kind of online content, such as RSS feed items, blog posts, articles, or news stories. PostRank is based on social engagement, which refers to how interesting or relevant people have found an item or category to be. PostRank measures engagement by analyzing the types and frequency of an audience's interaction with online content. An item's PostRank score represents how interesting and relevant people have found it to be. The more interesting or relevant an item is, the more work they will do to share or respond to that item so interactions that require more effort are weighted higher.

• SWIX is like Google Analytics for social media. You wouldn’t run an important web-site without tracking your traffic patterns, nor should you invest in social media without understanding how it’s working for you. It allows you to have a dashboard of all your important numbers, such as total visits to your website, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, Facebook friends, Youtube subscribers, page rank, RSS subscribers, and much more. Free while in beta.

Anything else that you use and love? Anything you use and hate?