My tools for Social Media

English: Tools (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At our Personal Board of Directors dinner last night (attending were Gian Zoppo, Howard Weiner, Steve McCrudden, Tim Meyer), I realized I might help people by posting the tools and process I use to maintain my social channels. So, here it is in a nutshell, or maybe a little more...

First, my primary goal in maintaining a social presence on the internet is communicate my interests, both personal and career, and use social media as a way to both hold myself accountable to the goals I set in my personal and career life as well as let people know what they are.  I guess I have always felt an interesting person who is known by no one is not very interesting... and that sharing my interests helps me learn more in the process.  So, that is why I have a Social online presence.  

My typical method of contributing to the (online) world is to blog, then get the word out that I have blogged something new.  Sometimes I just send out a quick thought, in which case I don't blog it but instead I tweet, send an update to Linkedin and facebook.  I did that with a TED talk today.

So, my process when I have something significant to say is to first blog it (here).  To blog I use Blogspot coupled with Zemanta which gives me help in tying what I have to say to relevant things out on the internet already.  I can pull visuals from Zemanta (a plus on a blog simply for some eye candy) as well as related articles. So I write my blog, pull in related articles and visuals, and then post the new content to my blog for all to see.

Once I have done that, I use 1 of 2 tools to get the word out.  One tool is called Buffer, which lets me share my blog post out to Twitter, Linkedin and facebook as well as others.  The other tool is called Snapshot Social Media, which does similar things in a different way.  There are pros and cons to each (e.g., I can't post to a blog site from Snapshot unless it is Wordpress, and I have more ability to use local content in Snapshot than I do in Buffer).  I can't post to Google+ with either tool.  So, in any case, I use one of these tools to let people know that I posted a new blog article,  and I am done.

I use a couple other tools to monitor the social channels, mainly Tweetdeck and the stats page on my blog (from Blogspot).  

So there you have it!  What do you use that I am missing?

..Brian..