Mfarhanonline Social Media News: This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum , where Mfarhanonline regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. In honor of Community Manager Appreciation Day on Jan. 23, we asked several leaders in community management about the apps and tools they swear by for their social media management. Whether it’s filtering through mass amounts of content, managing a project or professionally presenting a company, community managers provide and mediate communications both inside and outside of the business. Fortunately, there are a lot of resources small businesses can utilize for better productivity. Are there other tools or tricks you use to manage a community? Let us know your favorites in the comments. Organization “As a community manager, I find myself in need of a good way to create forms fairly often. Whether it’s sending our annual survey to our entire member base, sending targeted questionnaires or just collecting emails addresses for a certain set of people, Wufoo is a great solution. What it has that Google Forms doesn’t is that depending on how someone answers a certain question, you can determine what questions come next.” – Sarah Rapp, community manager at Behance “Shared docs, email and internal microblogging are great work, but combine all these and more to get the social work platform, Podio . Their apps market allows for wide range of project management and collaboration methods. They have an easy drag-and-drop interface for customization along with a slick mobile app. I think they are still free for up to 10 users. The biggest problem with Podio is transitioning users to a new platform.” – Mike Fraietta, enterprise community manager at News Corp. “I use TweetDeck for one reason only —! ; it all ows me to schedule my tweets for later. Also, the ability to manage multiple accounts is pretty handy. But the post later function allows me to do my social media gathering mostly in the morning and focus on other work later. Other than that, I keep a large folder of RSS feeds that I go through every morning looking for interesting things to share with the world.” – Asa Alger, community manager and interactive designer at Luxurious Animals Analytics “One app I love is Simply Measured . With so much data flying around in social media these days, it’s crucial for us as CMs to help our clients by cutting through all the noise and delivering quantifiable results that lead to qualitative change. This approach is helping brands we represent better relate to their fans and creating new opportunities by making real-world connections. It’s a great example of using online technologies to deliver offline results. We’re also using this data to identify influencers in real-time and monitor specific conversations that are happening around a particular event or brand. A few clients that we’ve been successfully executing this for include Warby Parker , Delta and Evian .” – Dave Brown, director of digital strategy at MKG , co-organizer of CMMeetup “ Sysomos allows me to measure the social buzz around my brand and its competitors. I monitor the conversations around keywords for each brand, and I am able to tell when there is jump in the amount of buzz around a specific brand. By looking at Text Analytics and Top Influencers provided by Sysomos, I am able to analyze why there is a spike in conversation. This allows our team to keep our clients informed about what conversations are happening around their brand and their competitors.” – Christina Dick, community manager at The Martin Agency “We’ve all explored the new Facebook Insights , but what’s fantastic about this iteration for community managers it to see how and why your content ! is sprea ding. It’s important to know — are we getting a lot of traffic from Facebook from what we’re posting to Facebook, or because users are posting it on their own? That can be found in the Organic vs. Viral graph in ‘Reach.’ This is valuable information to help inform your Facebook strategy.” – Sarah Rapp, community manager at Behance Presentation “ Screenr is a free way to record your screen for tutorials, demonstrations and to answer customer issues. The most important reason to produce and save screen recordings is for scalable learning, FAQs and detailed responses to your users. The drawback for Screenr is that it is only five minutes and has limited editing ability. For professional screen recordings, try ScreenFlow for Mac, Camtasia for PC and Screenr Pro .” – Mike Fraietta, enterprise community manager at News Corp. “Most community managers have some responsibility in customer service, and ZenDesk is a great solution to handle the influx of customer service inquiries. If your entire community is submitting tickets to one place, in the same format, you can quickly and easily assign these out to different members of your team or have non-visible conversations about a customer’s issue with another member of your team. It’s really customizable, so you can determine what fields people have to fill out, create reports, etc. Overall, it’s a really robust solution, and it makes customer service organized and efficient.” – Sarah Rapp, community manager at Behance “Not all of the ‘tools’ in my toolbox are in the form of an app or program. One idea that has served me well as the community manager for Fast Company is to never stop being the customer. It’s not a “tool” in the traditional sense, but I would consider insights like this to be of equal or greater importance in helping you do this job well. Tools come and go. But people matter most. If you can remember to stay focused on p! eople, y ou’ll never lose your way.” – Sheena Medina, community manager at Fast Company More Small Business Resources From OPEN Forum: – Pinterest for Brands: 5 Hot Tips – Social Learning Trends to Watch in 2012 – Is it Finally Time to Ditch Your Paper Business Card? Social Media reviews series maintain by Mayya
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