Three Photo Editing Tools to Check Out
I just learned about Dumpr from Download Squad. It’s a tool that offers free and pro photo editing options. Checking out this site reminded me to tell you that I’m also pretty fond of some other great web tools that you might not be using.
- A.viary is a hardcore photo editing app, kind of like Photoshop without the price tag and disk install. But it’s way cooler than that. It’s a whole lot of really interesting editing abilities and a whole community of people doing their own thing with the tools that makes this one a great choice. Note: it’s still in an invite-only beta period (when does that end, guys?), but maybe I can score you a few invites, if you’re interested. Let me know in the comments, and I’ll ask the team.
- Picnik is a lightweight photo editing tool that gets me through pretty much all of my needs right now. I use it about twice a day, and have found that it does most everything I need from a photo editor. It’s not really good with batch-based activities, but if you’re into editing things one at a time, this is for you.
- Skitch (the bonus round) acts as a screen capture and annotation tool. It’s super easy to use, has just enough tools to be useful but not so many that you feel bloated and misunderstood. I use it to do lots of odd jobs on capture screens and little images from web pages. Definitely good to have.
More and more, I’m choosing tools and applications that live in the cloud. Why? Because after dropping my laptop the other day and losing every on-disk application, I realized that there are lots of benefits to having my data and my tools available from anywhere there’s a web browser. There are some exceptions, of course, but when I find great web tools, I want to share them.
What about you? What are you using on the web that’s cool?
Web Side Sales Application for Small Business
Eventually, a good chunk of what we do will be on the web. For me, it already is. So, as applications come available that might be useful for one’s day to day, I like to peek at them and see the state of things.
One such application is Oprius. If you are a solo practitioner, or work in a small organization, and need to figure out how to build a sales/marketing practice, dOprius might be the right scale marketing campaign platform for you. It does a variety of things in a very integrated fashion, including letting you build call scripts for folks who have to hit the phones.
My favorite part of the application is contained in the graphic above, the “Phone Assistant.” Upon bringing up someone’s contact, there are some other fields for more information, a lot of ways to capture other data about the conversation.
The company is working towards engaging in conversations with their prospective community, so if you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments.
Advice for Traditional and Local News Media
Someone, a brave someone, from Boston’s local TV news scene asked a question to a panel with representatives from MySpace, Facebook, Eons, IBM, and a virtual worlds builder. She said she wanted to know the role of traditional media in this space, and what road she and her organization should get on for the future of media. Their answers were all over the map, but Jeff Taylor (former founder of Monster, current founder of Eons) had the start of a thoughtful answer, and his response blended with something someone else said earlier (either Jeff again, or Tom Arrix of Facebook): that if we observe the Superbowl ads for 2008, we’ll notice that the majority of them will point us to a web property. So, with this as backdrop, some advice.
Be Brief On Air, Go Deep Offline
The current champions of this method are NPR. They post all their subsequent materials, including longer versions of interviews, on their website for further review. For people you want to know about, watching or listening to just the snippets that make the news isn’t always enough. Having the option to go deeper is a great service that takes advantage of all the quality work a journalistic team has put into the experience.
This is a value-add for people interested in a particular story, but it’s also clever for marketing and understanding your customer base. We can track and observe and understand the behaviors of people, so that we may better serve them. That’s the first line value.
Integrate Local Social Media Types
Papers and TV are still missing an opportunity to “draft” independent media makers into their work. Move to an upstream, editorial and curation relationship with people who can go into their own communities, surface stories of interest to them, and then bring this body of work to editors and curators who can understand which of these stories are right for the air, which would do fine on the web, and which might merit further professional reporting, with a hat tip back to the original creator.
Embed Community Technology Into Your Sites
Pluck up the best of blogs and videoblogs in the area. Build community conversation sections, even if that invites critics to come out and shoot at your stories a bit. Build chat rooms for during-the-news discussion experiences. There are tons of ways to empower the voice of your audience to have reciprocal value. These are just a few. You probably have a few more.
Make Your Media Portable
Take some of the deep stories and make podcasts out of them. Give us embed codes for your media. Make a spot for metadata like user tagging. Give us ways to build your media into our sites and spread your word to more sources.
Switch Sensation for Causes and Empowerment
We put a premium on stories of what’s going wrong. Of course, it’s important to know about some of the bad news we’re getting out there, but why aren’t stories about where we can help coming to the fore in LOCAL news? Why aren’t we learning about people doing great work more often? Right now, they have that slot at the very end of the newscast, where the two or three people on desk make that weird half smile.
Push the empowerment stories up, and bring that into your deep web coverage as well.
Random and YOUR Ideas
One more thing: do we NEED everyone at a desk with monitors behind them, or sitting in fake living rooms? Aren’t there other settings? We haven’t mixed it up much for over 50 years. I guess this isn’t social media advice, but hey.
And what else? What do you think? How can we fix the news?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Velocity-Flexibility-Economy
Think that social media has nothing to offer your “traditional” business? I can give you reasons along any of three points of view: velocity, flexibility, and economy. As our tools come closer and closer to approximating and/or enhancing human interaction, and further away from requiring an abundance of technological expertise, those who are exploring and sampling these tools are at an advantage that can be measured in speed, adaptability, and cost of operation.
We aren’t talking about the marketing department. We aren’t equipping PR professionals. This isn’t a new set of tools for launching campaigns. These are tools to improve interaction, and they are incredibly powerful and game-changing when you consider how much less impact on traditional business resources most of these solutions have.
Velocity
In the United States, in 2008, a “smart” cellular phone costs as little as $150 USD for the device, and under $50 for an account with a data plan. Wifi hotspots are on the rise. A reasonably good laptop can be purchased for under $500 with built-in wireless capabilities. With these two types of units as the base system, we can deliver the following capabilities:
- Instant communication in voice, text, email, photo,video, and even geo-locative.
- Information browsing, including SMS-based and voice search (Google).
- Presence status information (Twitter, dodgeball, jaiku, pownce)
- Shared documents (Google docs)
- Voice Conferencing (freeconferencecall.com and tons more)
- Access to thousands of web-stored applications and data.
All without a cubicle. All without an office, an office manager, any infrastructure whatsoever. We can work out of coffee shops and libraries, at hotels and in the upstairs office, on the side of the road, or across the globe. Fast.
Flexibility
As recently as five years ago, we considered which software our organizations would buy based on the operating systems we supported. (Maybe yours still does.) Before that, we had to choose between Token Ring and Ethernet. Beta and VHS. (Now there’s Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, but you’re not falling for that, right?). Today, we are flexible. There are some considerations to be had, but with so many applications running in the cloud, accessible through browsers, so much of what we choose to equip ourselves with is a personal choice, and is a matter of our Internet access more than any other deciding factor.
- Office apps via Google or Zoho, or desk versions from OpenOffice
- Operating Systems for free with Ubuntu (and hundreds of other Linux distributions), or irrelevant with the browser being our true compatibility choice.
- Collaboration through wikis, shared spaces like Facebook, or in Ning communities.
- Conversations across multiple Instant Messaging vendors via Adium, or Trillium or Meebo
- Blog on Wordpress, blogger, movable type, vox, whatever.
- Instant databases through Freebase.com or Zoho
- File storage through Box.net and so many more
- Video hosting from Revver, Blip.tv, Brightcove, YouTube
We can choose from any number of sources, mix and match. Flexibility is abundant. You don’t have to choose what your neighbor chooses. Email can be gmail, yahoo, and whatever else. Just use a domain forwarding/pop3 scheme to keep consistency to external sources.
Economy
Why pay for it when you can use it for free? Cost doesn’t insinuate reliability any more than free predicts uptime. Google is free and it is more diverse than any of your data centers. If you have to consider budget when considering social media, as with the rest of the premise, things fall back to the humans involved. Lots of companies are using ad-supported software models. Others are using services and add-ons and behind-the-firewall implementations to support their efforts. The point is still the same: you don’t have to pay anything (or much) to get into the game.
- Use Skype for free voice conversations (and cheap for SkypeOut)
- Use Wordpress.com for free blog hosting, or Blogger, or Vox, or Tumblr.
- Facebook is free. Twitter is free. Gmail is free. Google Docs are free.
- Wikis are free. Freebase is free. Zoho is free.
- STORAGE is cheap (not free) for people making media. Price out 500 Gigabytes of storage these days and you’ll see that it costs less than you used to pay for a box of floppies in the mid 90s.
There are other “costs” in retooling your business practices and the like. And yet, what’s the return? If you’re faster, more flexible, and have cost the company nothing in licensing, what have you hurt?
Beware those selling you “solutions” that are “more robust” than what’s out there. What’s out there is working just fine for lots of people. People out beating the street doing important things are using these free apps, these web-minded apps, these “you can’t always be connected to the Internet” apps.
What’s holding you back? What are the reasons you’re hearing for NOT using social computing technology to enhance the way people do business at your company?
(And yes, security will be one of the prime answers. Let’s hash that out in the comments section. What’s YOUR take?)
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Photo credit, Ishrona
