I had a poster that was nice enough to ask me what other social media sites I frequent. Well, I’m actually on quite a few so I thought I’d share the list. Please join me on your favorite sites.
Category: Social Services
Tell A Great Story With Storify
I love blogging and sharing information that I find across the web on any given subject as soon as I see it. I came across this great tool called Storify which lets you do just that in a nice visual format.
The way it works is that you pull information from Twitter, Facebook, Soundcloud, YouTube and many others into one big story that you can then share with your friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook. Now the idea of this is really simple and you would think that this would be really easy to use. Unfortunately, I found a few stumbling blocks when I tried it out. Once I developed my story, I couldn’t export it to other programs such as WordPress or Tumblr even though it says that you can do so. Upon further investigation, I found out that you can only do this on WordPress if you have a self hosted account and the plug-in (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/storify/?utm_source=Users). I also couldn’t find any way to delete the snippets that I had to create once I was finished using them in my story. Do they just sit there forever? That would seem to get confusing and cluttered after a while. There also doesn’t seem to be a standard help section or forum to answer questions.
Overall I like the concept of the platform because you can gather a lot of information very quickly and share it immediately. I also liked that when you publish your story to your twitter account, it also notifies the author or tweeter to let them know that their content was used in your story. This is a great way of course to generate goodwill with other writers and bloggers. I really hope they get past these small quirks because as it stands now this platform is a little limited. If you use this program with WordPress or Tumblr I would love to know how it works for you.
Here is an overview of Storify:
Do You Like When A Company Offers Live Chat?
I was asked recently how I feel about companies having a live chat on their website and if it actually helps visitors. I personally think it does because sometimes you don’t have time to talk on the phone and may just have a general question that can be answered pretty quickly through chat. I feel live chat is a very useful tool for a website and should definitely be used if you have the staffing. I like knowing that the company I’m thinking of interacting with and possibly purchasing from feels that I am important enough to have someone on staff dedicated to answering my questions in a timely manner.
I would really be interested in what you think about online live chat. Have you ever used this service and if so did you have a good experience? Please share your thoughts.
Getting Personal with Chime.In
There has been a lot of chatter recently about a new social service called Chime.In. I decided to check it out because I am a little bit bored with Facebook and although I love Twitter, sometimes I would like a little more interaction. This site is interesting in this regard. It’s like a cross between Facebook and a blog. You can create and join specific communities and find others who are interested in exactly the same thing. Of course you can add pictures, video, links and polls to your posts. You can also chat directly with people that are online right then about that subject. I like the idea of this because sometimes you have something to say right then and you want immediate feedback. You can create tags in different areas so that you can see when someone has replied to your post even if it’s not directly related to that particular subject. This could also be very useful for business sites as well as you could easily gear your followers over to a more personal live chat and you would already know that they would be interested in the subject matter. I’ve decided to give it a try and see if this will take the place of Facebook in my life. Please let me know if you try it and like it and we can enjoy it together.
