Connie Bensen

Today I’m sending you to my guest post on Darren Rowse’s blog, Problogger.net.

When Darren asked for a guest post we chatted about what the topic should be.

He suggested ‘Taking your Blog to a Community’ which is a broad canvas. I wrote a compilation of ideas for extending awareness of your blog or site to new communities.

Many of you read Darren’s blog regularly. If you’re not familiar with his work I recommend that you browse his blog (especially if you’re just starting to blog). He has amazing ideas.

Thank you Darren for the opportunity to share my community building ideas with your community. And thank you for introducing your community to my blog & work! That was one of my main points: Collaboration is a great connector.

I hope that you find the ideas useful. Building community is fascinating & very gratifying.

In writing this it occurred to me that I have enough readers to invite guest posts. So I invite you to email me with the topic(s) you’d like to write a guest post on. My email address is on the left under my photo.

I happened upon a meme-like post at social media snackers. And just yesterday someone asked about Evernote on Twitter so it must be time to talk about my favorite social media tools again.

My top 10 tools & platforms are:

• Livewriter (am blogging in it as I type!) — update on Livewriter features
• Evernote – the most awesome desktop organizational tool ever! I live by it
• Facebook – my networking lifeline (I have a profile/resume in LinkedIn but…Facebook is far more useful)
• Twitter – where I have ‘face-to-face’ conversations with my friends
• Skype is becoming more important
• Copernic – desktop search tool allows me to find email & files fast
• Wordpress brings you this blog
• Digsby is a great chat aggregator – love talking to Facebook friends!
• Snag-it totally rocks for screenshots! & blogging
• Google alerts for brand monitoring

What are your favorite 10 social media tools/platforms?

Connect with me on Facebook & Twitter if you aren’t already. I’ll be glad to share more info on these app’s that save me time!

Listening is an integral part of monitoring the conversations. As a community manager I’m not only actively listening but also noticing how other companies are listening & participating. It’s exciting to to see more corporations using Twitter! How do I know that they are? Well, upon mention of a product or company within minutes the brand or a representative is following me.

As a customer this means that I have direct contact with the company. It’s very powerful! And the personal touch means a lot to me.

Who are actively using Twitter?

• @MarketingProfs,@BulldogSolut (Bulldog marketing), @evernote
• people representing indeed.com, radian6 and many more!

The other part of this is monitoring what people are saying on Twitter about your brand. I use tweetscan.com in the same way that I have GoogleAlerts set up: a daily report on @cbenson, @cbensen, acdsee and ‘community manager’

@jowyang recently listed a number of helpful Twitter app’s.

And if you’re wondering what Twitter is – Lee LeFever of CommonCraft has a video on it:

If you’re not on Twitter yet, sign up & follow me @cbensen

Connect with me on Facebook (link under my photo on left – works for Twitter too!) & I’ll be glad to help you with Twitter.

*update* 2 more corporations found me today: @HRBlock & @carnivalcruises

And I shouldn’t have forgotten my friends at @batchblue & also @perkettpr

*update* here’s an excellent article on why Companies Should Use Twitter

How many times have you went looking for something on your computer & didn’t really know where to begin? …and wasted a lot of time searching for…

• an email that you know you received or sent? with the person’s name or topic?  but you have 5+ accounts)
• a document & you can’t remember if it’s an email attachment or on your hard drive?

I just don’t have the patience or time to spend looking for those types of things anymore.

So, copernic has become one of my ESSENTIAL desktop app’s. And it’s free which makes it great!

What it is:

It’s a desktop application that you download, install, and then it catalogs your hard drive. My sister was suspect of this, but she’s heard me rave about it enough that I think she may be using it. (She reads more email accounts into Thunderbird than I do).

How to use it:

Copernic installs a little search bar in the bottom right of your window

Type in your search term. In this case I’m going to look for email from Robin (from Rakscraps).

A pop up window comes up when you start typing.

The search results for Robin show 65 emails, 32 files & 3 contacts.

From here click on the "Open Main Window" & a full window opens with a bottom pane showing the details of the email or file that you choose.

The choice to Reply or Forward email from Copernic doesn’t work.

But you can open files from it, which is very handy!  This handy little app saves me a LOT of time!