23 Mobile Things -- Thing 8 : Social Media Management Tools

Thing 8: "...the opportunity to explore tools to help you manage all of your social media."

I'm on Facebook (mainly personal), Twitter (mainly professional), and LinkedIn (professional). I also mange our library Facebook and Twitter accounts. I have Google+ but I don't really use it. I was on Foursquare but I've pretty much abandoned that.

So looking at Social Media Management tools or apps was a little problematic for me -- I wasn't too impressed with the options that I found or I really don't think that I need them. I was interested in Slices that Heather (@HevWam) talked about in her Thing 8 blog post but I can't find Slices -- guess they've disappeared. 

I do use TweetDeck as a desktop app via my work PC. There isn't an iPhone or iPad app but that's okay. TweetDeck gives me the ability to keep track of both my Twitter account and our library Twitter account all at the same time. I can have multiple columns of display -- news feed, each account, mentions, maybe a hashtag content I'm currently following etc. Here's a snip of what it looks like (not all columns are shown):

For now this is probably the only Social Management tool that I really need. If I want to share something across platforms (say Facebook to Twitter or LinkedIn to Twitter) I can do this directly from those apps/products.  

I guess if I was really in the market for a Social Media Management tool I'd look more closely at Cloze -- it seems to offer a lot of integration with options.  

23 Mobile Things -- Thing 7 : Content Saving & Sharing

For Thing 7: "We all save things we find on the web--ideas, essays, pictures, blogs, news sites, whatever strikes our fancy. The traditional way to save things is with bookmarks in a browser--or many bookmarks in multiple browsers. This is great if you only use your desktop or laptop, but many people now have multiple devices with different browsers and probably different bookmarks on each. How do you find all those great sites when you are on any of your devices?"

Pinterest

I've had a Pinterest account for awhile that I setup via PC. I didn't dive right into Pinterest for two reasons -- One, I'm already heavily-vested in too many other social networks that I didn't feel I needed or could handle more "fun things" bombarding me. And two, after trying it for awhile I wasn't too pleased with it. For example: I'd saved "aka pinned" a item and then I went back just a day or two later to that pin and the content was gone. The pin still showed on my board -- picture and all -- but the linked information was no longer available. Yes, I know this happens all the time and it can happen via any bookmarking system. I guess in my naivety I thought maybe Pinterest had come up with a way of actually capturing/archiving the content for future viewing -- not so. So I use it for ideas & that's about it. jd-Points

Bitly
For years I've already used TinyURL but they don't have an app. So I thought about Bitly, their app, and how I might be able to use this for our Library. 

Using Bitly I could save & share our oh-so long library links in a shortened form. Some links are long because they either go through our proxy or they display the full folder hierarchy address. Shortening is awesome because it eliminates the possibility of link address breakage. jd+Points

Here's a snip of some of the links I shortened via our iPad using the iPhone app (no iPad version app at this time but this worked just fine):

Another Bitly option is to "Bundle" shortened links. So I took some of our most used links -- like several of our most used databases -- and I bundled them together to provide one link to multiple resources.

This snip shows our "databases" bundle:

Sharing a bundle? Here's a snip showing the options for how easy it is to share: 

Yes, this has provided me with some good ideas for easily sharing our Library links. jd+Points

23 Mobile Things -- Thing 6 : Creating & Editing Documents

For Thing 6: "When it comes to creating and editing documents, most people would probably still say they prefer using a computer over a mobile device. But there are some apps out there that are making creating and editing documents a little bit easier ... use at least one of these apps and create or edit a document." 

CloudOn

I decided to try CloudOn with our library iPad. Since we usually work from PCs with the Office Suite I thought this might be a good app to test. At times I use our library iPad out in the stacks on various projects and often I need an Excel file. In the past I've just put the Excel file in our Google Drive and used it via this. But this hasn't always been the easiest to work with when dealing with a larger spreadsheet. There tends to be a delay in scrolling or you don't always know if you're really in the correct field -- not good if you're entering or updating data.

I created a CloudOn account for our library:

This was very straight-forward and easy.

Light bulb tip: 

Files available from our Library's Google Drive:

File that I selected to work with:

In edit mode:

After saving, I was given the option to add an editor or mail the file:

After saving it displays "edit" information:

Overall this app seemed straightforward and easy to use. I'm going to give this more of a test-run with high hopes. Being able to easily work across platforms and software with ease is definitely a plus. jd+Points