Social+Updating+Tools


 * Introduction to Social Updating Tools**

// These days we are bombarded by numerous sources of information in our personal and professional lives, from email to the internet, and to Facebook, all vying for our attention and impeding on our time (Barr, 2011.) //

Social Updating Tools provide a way for the user to update several social networking sites simultaneously, track what is updated and organize updates (__, 2011 __). One can enter an update on one Social Network such as Facebook and the other selected social networks will be refreshed with the new information. Some tools offer the option of a choice of appropriate selections for multiple postings. Widjaja (2011) reflects that social updating tools are helpful when running a busy company or with busy schedules where there just often is not enough time in the day to dedicate hours to several social networks.

When the user participates in several social networks, the Social Updating Tools allow the user to send an update to the user’s selected social networks. The user no longer needs to go into each social network, sign in, and duplicate the update.

Social Updating Tools also provide a way to select the updates received according to the importance to the user. For example, the latest Twitter messages may not be of interest. Some social updating tools allow the user to select the messages received. Therefore, updates are increasingly relevant and sorted by the user’s established filter. The Social Updating Tools services keep track of updates that allow for organizing and ensuring what updates are completed and when.

Business and marketing users find the use of social networks updating tools an efficient way to communicate across networks, employees and customers. Freedman (2011) recommends to his New York Time readers that social updating tools can help to selectively make one’s presence known or to respond to hundreds of people in a much easier fashion.


 * Background Information**

Individuals and businesses use social networking sites to share information with friends, customers and business associates. It is common for one individual or business to actively participate in various social Networking sites. As circumstances change, the site user may find it cumbersome and time consuming to go to each site and enter the same information so that each one is current. Social Updating Tools assist the user by simplifying the process and expediting the update to the relevant sites.

The number of messages a user receives runs the risk of overshadowing what is important to the user. In order for the user to have alerts to what is important to the individual, Social Updating Tools allow the user to filter messages and give priority to specific updates.

Existing applications such as Twitter, also function as a Social Updating tool. For example, #learnchat (__ Conner, 2011 __) is an online chat using Twitter. It has been used at conferences to take notes, send short messages to others in or outside the conference, facilitate comments and reactions or just for socializing. The updates can lead users to additional information kept elsewhere via URLs (Dennen,V.P., personal communication,July 26, 2011).


 * Social Updating Tools**

There exist numerous Social Updating tools; this review includes ten examples. Table 1 contains a summary, followed by a brief description of each one.


 * //Table 1//

//List of common Social Network Update Tools// ||  ||
 * Name || Link  ||
 * Selective Twitter on Facebook || [] ||
 * Hellotxt || [] ||
 * [|SocialOomph] || [] ||
 * [|Hootsuite] || [|http://hootsuite.com//] ||
 * t witterfeed || [] ||
 * [|Ping.fm] || [] ||
 * [|TweetBeep] || [] ||
 * Gist || [] ||
 * Rockmelt || [] ||
 * AddThis || [|http://www.addthis.com] ||


 * 1. Selective Twitter on Facebook (Previously called Selective Twitter Status.)**

The instructions are simple and require that the user end a tweet with #fb in order to update to the user’s Facebook status from Twitter. The tool assists the user to avoid confusing Facebook friends and swamping the user’s profile with too many updates. The user can leave certain updates on Facebook for longer periods. This app is one of the few ways to sync from Twitter to a FB fan page in addition to the personal profiles. A helpful video is available at [].


 * 2. Hellotxt**

Hellotxt Smartstreamassists users to access their most relevant updated information more easily. The user registers with Hellotxt and then selects the network(s) that will be updated when a message is submitted to Hellotxt. It also includes a doodle tool which can be used to draw on a photograph and post. For example, the user can draw a mustache on a photo and post it. This fun layer is likely to attract the artistic types that seek social updating tools. It is free and available for iPhone. A helpful video is available at **[]**__. __


 * 3.SocialOomph**

Although it reports many features and uses, SocialOomph can have emails turned into standard social updates and published on the users’ Twitter, Facebook, and other social accounts. SocialOomph includes free and premium features. The free or base features include: Schedule tweets, Track keywords, Extended Twitter profiles, Save and reuse drafts, URL shortening — Track your clicks, View @Mentions & Retweets, Purge your DM Inbox, Secure Twitter & Buzzaccess, Personal status feed — Your own tweet engine, Respect StatusNet site limits, and Unlimitedaccounts. For an additional fee of $3.97 a month, Oomph will automate and follow those who follow the user, vet new followers, and send a direct message (Twitter, n.d.) to new followers. It is marketed for supervisors who then in turn monitor employees’ interactions and updates. The user has control over who comes in the account. Among many other features, the free and the paid options allow a clout rating system and integrate with Ping.


 * 4. [|Hootsuite] **

Hootsuite describes itself as a ‘Social Media Dashboard.” It updates several networks at one time including Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Ping. The user can also get social analytic reports, allows for team collaboration, schedule updates, assign tasks and translate to languages. Companies that currently use Hootsuite include Papa John’s pizza, Martha Stuart, LA Times, and the White House. It features weekly tipswhich may be found at [].

Twitterfeed lets the user post content directly to LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. It boasts to be “by far the largest publisher to Twitterand Facebook, with over 800,000 users pushing more than 1.6 million feeds to over 2 million Twitter and Facebook accounts, every day.” Twitterfeed features changes the dynamics of searching for information to the information the user seeks finding the seeker. The accompanying blog offers many suggestions.
 * 5. t witterfeed **

Owned by Seesmic, Ping.fm markets itself as a simple and FREE service that makes updating your social networks a snap! Inc. magazine opines that it is the best smartphone app for business. It describes its ‘coolest feature’ as the ability to customize alerts so the user is notified only when specific tweets are posted. It provides real time analytics and a plug in called ‘6th degree.’ With 6th degree plugin, the user can review conversations by priority, select work tasks, allocate priority and topics of inquiry, assign employees to specific inquiries, record status and file notes for future record, access a full history of conversations between staff and customers. Instructions for use on the iPhone are available (Sperling, 2011). It is recommended by Snyder (2008).
 * 6. [|Ping.fm] **

TweetBeep describes itself as “Google alerts for Twitter.” It keeps track of conversations that mention the user, the user’s products or company, and anything that is tagged. The service provides hourly updates and keeps track of who's tweeting the website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL. It assists with reputation management, catching all @replies and @mentions, finding job and networking opportunities, or keeping up with a favorite hobby. TweetBeep has been featured in the [|Wall Street Journal] (Flandez, 2009) and the [|NY Times] (Boutin, 2009). The service is free but it provides a premium service for $20.00 a month which allows 200 alerts, a 15 minute alert option, and no advertisements!
 * 7. TweetBeep **

Gist for BlackBerry® smartphones is a personal tool that enables the user to access and organize all contacts in one place. For a 90 second review of what is Gist the CEO, T. A. McCann, provides a video ( [] ). To learn how to get started, Robert Pease (2010) provides a webinar ( [] ) and follows it with another one to make the most of using Gist, ( [] ). The latter reviews the dashboard and demonstrates how the personal interactions from calendars are integrated and filtered according to daily appointments as well as how to get help. Pease describes an activity called ‘morning coffee’ which is a search for new information he does each morning. As the information he seeks comes up (e. g. about his competitors, colleagues, products), Gist easily provides a way of sorting, tagging, organizing, posting or sharing this information through Twitter into one or more social network accounts. ‘Preparing for a meeting’ is another activity where Pease uses Gist to look up the profiles of participants included in the meeting notice in any of the connected social networks’ shared contacts list without having to access each one separately.
 * 8. [|Gist] **


 * 9. Rockmelt**

Rockmelt is a web browser that includes a built-in social update interface. It lets the user control Facebook and Twitter. It also allows for extensions to add other social networks. One can chat on Facebook or post a link to Twitter and Tumblr. It boasts to be easy as Chrome and provides instant results. Instant notifications can be postponed until one can get them. It reportedly runs better on a Mac operating system. There is also a Rockmelt for iPhone. It reports a recent update which adds many features and resolves old issues (Rockmelt, 2011).

Promotions describe this tool as “the smartest sharing tools.” As visitors use AddThis across the Web, the tool will instantly personalize their experience with choices most likely to be effective at increasing social referral traffic to the user’s site. This is done what is described as dynamic personalization. It determines optimal user choices by analyzing a massive amount of online sharing activity. Algorithms factor in overall and local popularity, click-back effectiveness rate, language, per-user service affinity, and more. It offers choices including [|Facebook] and [|Twitter integration]. It supports [|over 70 languages]. AddThis offers analytics that include audience analysis, measures content impact across social streams and allows sharing of reports easily across internal and external contacts. It has a forum to address problems (AddThis, n.d.).
 * 10. AddThis**

Key Issues Regarding Social Updates


 * 1. Social Updates made easier**

AppAdvice asks, “…with the rise of social networking, there are always apps out there for you to see what all your friends are doing and what not. But what if you just want to post a quick update and nothing else?” (Chan, 2011). By the time the user posts the update by entering on the first network, it is likely that there is a distraction by the other posts and the user is distracted. Later, the user must log on and post the same message on each of the social networks were the user is active. Because one user usually belongs to many social networks, posting one update can be time consuming. The Social Network update tools push the one message to several selected social networks with one submission and also feature ways to extract the most important messages the user receives.


 * 2. Not all are happy with Social Updating tools**

However, not all users want their messages coordinated by social networking tools. According to Natale (2010), there seems to be two types of people who use social media. One type includes those who use automation tools to multiply their presences across the Internet. There are also those who think auto-anything is a sin against nature and social updating tools encourage the laziest users (Natale, 2010). It seems that many are like Natale and fall somewhere in between these two extremes. Sometimes users need some help to manage all the social networks (Rob, 2010).

Those who receive the messages pushed by one social networking update tool, sometimes more than once because of multiple social networks, may naturally consider this sender’s convenience, a nuisance. In fact, Natale describes that he understands that using some tools is considered obnoxious behavior by some people. The business person will need to be aware of these individuals and properly use the social updating tools or lose these customers, (Natale, 2011)

A Microsoft comment reviews how to view social updates of a specific friend in windows Live Messenger (Microsoft Feed, 2011). It has also provided guidance on how a user can hide the updates of a specific friend, how to appear offline for a specific friend , sound setting for a friend and how to add a Facebook stream in Windows Live Messenger. It also describes how to view social updates of a friend in Windows Live Messenger by selecting the friend from your list, right click on friend’s name, select “View social updates”, and after selecting “View social updates”, you can see the social updates of your friend on the other part of the friend’s list. After following these steps, the user can view all the social updates of a friend.


 * Solutions**

For those who do not want updates, helpful guidance for disabling social updates is available from Hotmail, (Yahoo Answers, 2011). The answer indicated that it could eliminate useless e-mails ("_ commented on your status", "___ sent you a message", "___ asked you a question") from Facebook, Formspring, etc. These take a lot of space and considered quite aggravating by many. There were similar suggestions for others. The solution to not getting updates is unclear and those who seek to find ways to do it seem to have difficulty getting an answer. Yahoo explains that the question and response were taken down according to its community guidelines.

For those that do want ways to manage updates, adopting one of the tools described in Table 1 may be helpful.

Social network updates can also be a way to engage others in a large or online class or conference. By establishing a Twitter protocol (#nameofclass), the participants can respond to leader's prompts or each others' threads about the learning event. (V.P.Dennen, online meeting, July 18, 2011).


 * FOAF** (an acronym for **[|Friend of a friend]**) is a [|machine-readable][|ontology] describing [|persons], their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe him or herself. FOAF allows groups of people to describe [|social networks] without the need for a centralized database **(Friend of a Friend, n.d.).** More details of the project are located at[].


 * SIOC (**an acronym for **Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities**) aims to enable the integration of online community information. SIOC provides a Semantic Web [|ontology] for representing rich data from the Social Web in RDF. It has recently achieved significant adoption through its usage in a variety of commercial and open-source software [|applications], and is commonly used in conjunction with the [|FOAF] vocabulary for expressing personal profile and social networking information. By becoming a standard way for expressing user-generated content from such sites, SIOC enables new kinds of usage scenarios for online community site data, and allows innovative semantic applications to be built on top of the existing Social Web. The SIOC ontology was recently published as a [|W3C Member Submission] , which was submitted by 16 organizations (Cloud, 2004).

The combined efforts of SIOC and FOAF have better enabled the user to access multiple sites and portability between social media sites.

An example of using social network updating tools for leisure adventures is theKylePetty“Charity Ride Across America” (http://www.kylepettycharityride.com/news.php).


 * Summary**

For those who for personal or business reasons join several social networks and find it overwhelming to send an update to each network separately, there are many options that the user can adopt to push an update into multiple networks with one entry by using a Social Updating tool. Likewise, those who find receiving so many messages that one can miss important information, can also select a Social Updating tool to filter the messages received.


 * References**

AddThis (n.d) Forum. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from ([]).

Barr, S. (2011). Managing the flow of information with social tools [Updated]. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from [].

Boutin, P. (2009). All you need to know to Twitter. New York Times. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from []

Chan, Christine. (2011, January 12). QuickAdvice: Get In And Out Of Social Updates With Sociable. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from []

Cloud. (2004, October 7) SIOC. Retrieved July 24, 2011from[].

Conner, M. (2011). Welcome. //#lrnchat: Where Learning and Social Media Meet//. Retrieved July 30, 2011 from [].

Flandez, R. (2009, July 13). Tools for Tweets: New software lets small businesses get the most out of Twitter. //The Wall Street Journal//. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from __ [|http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020448230457421549249672473 8.html?mod=googlenews_wsj]. __

Freedman, D. (2011, March 2). Tech tools that help a small business seem big. //The New York Times//. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from __ [] __

Friend of a Friend (FOAF). (n.d.) Retrieved July 24, 2011 from __ []. __

HootSuite Hottip. (n.d.) Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from ([]).

Jenny. (2011, May 31). Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from __ [] __.

List of Social Networking Websites. (n.d.) Retrieved July 24, 2011,from

[].

McCann, T. A.(n.d.) What is Gist in 60 seconds. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from [].

McCauley, Andrew. (2010, May 21). Updating Facebook – Must Have Tools [Posting on Facebook and Twitter]. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from [].

Microsoft Feed (2011, January 14). How to view Social Updates of a Specific Friend in Windows Live Messenger. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from []

Natale, C. (2011, July 5). 7 Tools toAutomate Your Social Media Management. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from

[]

Pease, R. (2010, January 20). GistWebinar, Tips in getting the most from Gist. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from []

Pease, R. (2010, February 10). Gist Webinar, Three steps to getting started with Gist. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from []

Rob, Diana. (2010, October 16). Balancing Work and Social Media Addiction.Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from __ [] __

Rockmelt. (2011, July 21, 2011). RockMelt Updated to 0.9.62.313: Improved Performance, Better Mac OS X Lion Support. Retrieved from [].

Snyder, C. (2008, September 2). Ping.fm Ready to Stream Your Life. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from []

Sperling, Lisa,(2011). Seesmic for iPhone post to multiple accounts. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from []

Styler 402. (2009, October 9). Hellotxt Review. Social Media Update Tool. – Video. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from []

Styler 402. (2010, October 11). Socialoomph Review. Social Media Update Tool. – Video. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from []

TMS Media Relations. (2011, May 4) Gossage To Utilize Social Networking Tools To Update Fans During Kyle Petty' s Charity Ride Across America'. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from[]

Twitter. (n.d.) What is a direct message? Retrieved July 24, 2011 from ([]).

Twitterfeed blog (n.d.) Retrieved July 24, 2011from[]

Widjaja, Wilson. (2011, May 24) 5 Tools For Updating Multiple Social Networks. Retrieved on July 24, 2011 from

[].

Yahoo Answers(2011) Retrieved on July 16, 2011 from[].

Terms & Definitions


 * Retweet – (RT) –** Retweeting is how Twitter users share interesting tweets from the people they are following. They copy and paste the original tweet and send it out. To give credit to the original person, users usually put “RT” plus the originator’s username at the beginning of the tweet. Here’s an example:

// - // The Twitter user @benparr tweets: //I just heard that Apple is releasing new iPods in July!//


 * Tags: [|__Twitter Tools__], [|__Facebook Software__] , [|__Social Media Tools__] , [|__Automatic Status Update__] , [|__Social Networking Tools__] , Update multiple social networks, social media, Social Update Tools,**