Backpack
Many of us who colaborate on the web find it difficult to keep ideas and projects organized. 37signals has a suite of productivity applications available but for this post I am concentrating on one: Backpack.
Backpack has a newsroom to keep track of activites going on with your team. You can make customized pages with which you can setup notes, todo lists and more. There is a calendar that can centralize everyone’s activities and also be used to schedule meetings. You can also use it to centralize discussions. I can not tell you how many times that I have said to an associate, “Do you have a log from that messenger conversation that we had?” I find the disscussion feature really handy. You can also set reminders that go to either an email address or text a user’s cell phone. Check out the intro video below for more information. There is a free (limited) account available, and different tiers of accounts available all with free trials.
Filtrbox for Monitoring Your Brand on the Web
The internet is big, right? And there are a lot of people on there, huh? So how do you know when one of them says something about you? This has been a problem for businesses for quite awhile. They want to know when somebody is complaining about them, or praising them. Or maybe they are praising their competitors. (if you want to learn more about why you should monitor your brand, read this article from The Online Marketing Blog). So services like Radian6 came along and helped enterprises begin monitoring and filtering out the “noise”. These services are hugely expensive for everyday people, so many (including me), began “rolling their own” using tools like Dappr (for creating RSS feeds), Yahoo! Pipes (for combining and filtering feeds) and NetVibes (a dashboard for displaying all your data). In fact, I had always planned to write about it here, but I have found a better tool. It’s called Filtrbox. It is a Radian6 for regular people. In fact you can create 5 filters (meaning 5 terms/brand names/etc) for free. I have been using Filtrbox for a few month now and have been really happy with it.
Here are some of the main benefits of using it.
- It monitors blogs, social networks, social news, etc for any mention of your brand.
- It tells you the sites “FiltrRank” which boils down to how influential a particular site is.
- You can set the “FiltrRank” so that you don’t have to see unimportant mentions.
- It emails you daily with a listing of your brands mentions.
Filtrbox creates an easy way to see what is being said about your brand/competitors/industry on the internet. End of story. Check it out!
**UPDATE**
Want to see proof of how these services work? Both brand monitoring companies that I mentioned (Radian6 & FiltrBox) have left comments below thanking me for write up, both are now following me on Twitter, and FiltrBox has contacted me personally and offered to send some schwag. How’s that for response? In less than 24 hours, both companies have made contact and are trying to build a brand relationship! The real test will be if any other brand monitoring service that I didn’t mention follows suit.
Name This: The Crowdsourced Naming Agency
“Crowdsourcing” is a huge buzzword in the Web 2.0 environment. It works on the assumption that the wisdom of many is greater than the wisdom of a few. Crowdsourcing has been applied a wide variety of businesses with varying success. T-shirts (Threadless), encyclopedias (Wikipedia), biomedical research and development (InnoCentive), nominal tasks (Amazon Mechanical Turk), etc, etc, etc. There is a new player to add to the list called Name This. Name This is crowdsourcing the name of your company/project/product.
Here’s how it works. Your company pays $99 and writes a brief summary about your business and any other relevant info about the name you are after. For 48 hours the community brainstorms, posts name ideas, and votes on their favorite name. Once the time is up a super secret algorithm determines which names had the most support and chooses the winners. The top 3 namers and their supporters get a pretty sizable chunk of the money and your company gets 3 market supported names along with about 200 other ideas.
The Name This model is not novel or original, but here is why it is interesting. The majority of crowdsourced services require participants to have some sort of skill or expertise. Name This requires none of this to participate. The ability to think creatively helps, but as you’ll see if you go to the site there are a number of participants who have not yet developed that skill. The beauty of Name This is in the simplicity. Name This is the most “mom friendly” crowdsourcing site I have seen and the companies seeking names don’t suffer because of it. Naming a company/project/product can be either the easiest or hardest thing in the world. Sometimes a name just comes to you and its an obvious fit. But sometimes its an arduous struggle. This struggle is greatly eased when a community of people put their heads together to create a great name.
There are some bugs with Name This (no editing/deleting of your own names, name proposal overload, mysterious algorithm), but there is a lot that can be learned from them. Keeping it simple, easily accessible, and valuable (to both namers and companies) goes a long way when creating a crowdsourced community or service.
