Mary in Vancity

I’m taking a social media class at BCIT right now.

I’ve always considered myself to be social media savvy – yet taking this course made me realize how much I still need to learn. Social media is such an organic medium, and it’s growing at lightning speed. It is changing the way we communicate with each other. From customer service to politics; information is flowing faster than ever before, and reputations are being made or broken at the speed of a tweet.

These are three cool tools I’ve learned in class so far.

The first one is called NetworkedBlogs. NetworkedBlogs is an extension of a Facebook application that allows you to connect to other blog writers from around the world. You share links with each other and can search blog posts for things that interest you.

This application allows you to syndicate your posts to either your Facebook or fan page feed, as well as twitter. It’s a neat little tool. The only thing that I found annoying is the procedure they use for verification of ownership of your blog. They request 7 of your friends “verify” you as the rightful author. It took me a couple of days to get verified.

Anther tool that I learned to use is Google Alerts. Now I know that this is pretty elementary stuff for some of you guys, but in my defence, I thought that Google Analytics was it, I didn’t know this existed!. Not only can you get search results everyday, they also get emailed to you. I learned a lot about MaryinVancity. Some restaurants are adding my reviews to their websites, and Social Shopper used my review on one of their deals.

Oh, and I also tweet a lot, but that’s not a surprise to any of you.

And finally, we have Klout. This is a tool that measures your influence online. It does so by using over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network.  The scores range from 1 to 100. 

This allows you to focus in certain areas of social media, such as what part of your content people are sharing with others via Twitter or Facebook.

So far everything I’m learing is very interesting. It’s giving me a bit of a headache trying to wrap my head around HootSuite, but I’m a pretty smart cookie, I’ll figure it out.