I was thinking about utility belts. You know, Batman style. I’m thinking about this in two ways. In the first way, we could talk about the gear that people (like myself) use in this modern media making age. For instance, in my backpack, I have the following items (amazon affiliate links for some):
- Apple MacBook Pro
- Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3k digital camera and video camera
- Edirol R-09HR mp3 recorder
- Amazon Kindle
- iPhone 3G (thanks Alex for pointing out this missing piece).
- Verizon air card for mobile Internet
- and a few other things.
That’s one way to think about the new utility belt, as if it were the gear that connects you to the web.
Another way to think about it is like this: what software and methods for using it would best keep you equipped while navigating the web in doing what you’re doing. For instance, if you’re a salesperson, maybe your utility belt looks like this:
- LinkedIn – for networking, and for answering questions.
- Batchbook – for simple CRM.
- Radian6 – for competitive data (Radian6 is sometimes a sponsor of NML events)
- Google Maps – for finding places on visits.
- Google Docs – for keeping spreadsheets, sales docs, forms, etc.
- Twitter – for informational pulse.
- Socialcast – for internal company chatter.
- YouTube plus a blog – for lead generation materials.
- Flickr – for a visual database of your prospects, for sales materials, etc.
We could do this many other ways, and for several different organizations. We could think about how these tools allow us to navigate and parse and funnel and select. There are lots of ways you could see rolling different types of utility belts. For instance, what would a journalist’s utility belt look like, both physically and otherwise?
These are just thoughts along the way towards ways to make tools more useful to the human business. What do you think?
photo credit chanchan222
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