Jess Ostroff is Managing Editor at Convince & Convert. She also acts as Director of Calm for the new virtual social media assistant agency, Don’t Panic Management. You can find her tweeting about social media, martinis, and music as @jessostroff.
As Jay mentioned in his post yesterday, there’s a serious influx of information out there, plus an increasing urgency to get things done better and faster. It can be overwhelming to stay up on what’s happening in the world while also tending to your day job. Between our new newsletter, the One Social Thing, and the handy tools below, we hope to give you enough time- and sanity-saving techniques so you can go home at 5pm, be with your family, and even take up a hobby.
While a few of these tools can be used solely as a creative outlet, they can also serve as a way to harness creative energy that can be put toward your content marketing efforts so you can maintain a cohesive, high-quality, and consistent strategy.
DivvyHQ
Self-proclaimed as “the spreadsheet-free editorial calendar system,” DivvyHQ lets you “divvy” and conquer your content marketing efforts.
If you’re a blogger or individual consultant, you might only need one calendar. If you’re an agency or a freelance community manager, you might need to manage several calendars. DivvyHQ lets you set up and keep track of tons of different types of content on multiple calendars at once. It also lets you easily assign pieces of content to individuals and reminds those people when things are due through email notifications so you’re not hounding people for that guest post, newsletter copy, press release, podcast, etc.
Through their subscription model, DivvyHQ lets you manage virtually any type of content that you can think of, and keeps it all in one organized place for everyone on the team to view. And if your editorial calendar is currently in a spreadsheet, that’s no problem. DivvyHQ lets you upload your current calendar and converts it into the DivvyHQ format, so there’s no painful learning curve to worry about. You can also assign editors and publishers to each piece of content so that your workflow is completely streamlined and efficient. After their 30-day free trial, you probably won’t remember how you managed your content without it.
If you haven’t heard about Pinterest, you’ve probably been hiding in a fantasy land where the internet doesn’t exist. But, if you’re reading anything online, you’ll know that Pinterest is all the rage these days among everybody from runners, chefs, photographers, moms, and more. Aside from simply pinning things like “recipes to make” and “gadgets to buy,” Pinterest is a great tool for storing ideas and inspirational articles, especially if you’re a part of a collaborative team.
The great thing about Pinterest is its versatility. Collaborative pinboards provide a nice clean way to keep press mentions, blog post ideas, inspirational artwork for advertising campaigns, or even funny things that your team collects around the internet for moral support. It’s much easier to glance at a Pinterest board than sift through countless circulated emails. At Convince & Convert, we use a collaborative pinboard where we can all pin ideas for our daily newsletter, the One Social Thing.
Creating collaborative pinboards is easy, and you can choose who you want to be able to pin to it by inviting people via email. From inside your Pinterest account, click the “Add” button, and select “Create a board.” Once you have the new board screen, you can select your board name, category, and decide who can pin. Make sure you click on “me + collaborators” in the last step. Then you can start pinning! That’s it.
Pinning things on the fly becomes even more seamless with a browser extension like the Pinterest Button for Chrome, which lets you pin directly from the site you’re on with the click of a button.
Don’t forget that collaborative pinboards are still public, so don’t use them to collaborate on secret missions!
GroupHigh
If you’ve ever launched a blogger outreach campaign, you know that influencer identification goes beyond the Klout score. You also know how time-consuming it can be to not only find relevant blogs, but then manually pull out the blogger’s social networking channels and email addresses to get in touch with them. GroupHigh pulls out that legwork on your end, promising a simple and effective search tool that filters through the thousands of blogs across the Web and only sends back the ones that fit your criteria. That way, you can spend your efforts focusing on your communication with the bloggers.
In addition to the blog URL and SEO rank, GroupHigh also pulls in location, total number of shares, and social profiles of the blogger (including number of fans/followers on each channel).
Finding the bloggers is only the beginning, of course. GroupHigh also lets you track engagement and touch points so you can stay on top of blogger communication and keep the relationship strong.
GroupHigh offers different packaging for brands and for agencies so you can find a pricing model that’s best for your team.
Springpad
Springpad hasn’t hit the mainstream market yet like Pinterest has, but there’s a chance for it to go there soon if it plays its cards right. Described as what would happen if Pinterest and Evernote had a baby by GigaOM, Springpad provides a visually appealing way to store things online based on interests. While it is similar to Pinterest in a lot of ways, its latest release reveals some really cool social updates that may even make it more useful than Pinterest. For example, instead of just pinning whatever content exists on a web page, Springpad lets you categorize that content with their pre-populated categories such as business, restaurant, recipe, book, movie, album, TV show, etc. Then, when you add a note to one of your Springpad notebooks, it automatically identifies other things you might like based on that note. Kind of like related videos on YouTube, but with less cats.
What’s really awesome about the new Springpad features, however, are its productivity tools, which automatically sync with your mobile devices and calendars. You can add things like an alarm, a checklist, a task, or even a new contact and save them directly to a new or existing notebook.
You can also set reminders or tasks from springs that you’ve already added.
Like Pinterest, Springpad also has a nifty browser extension so you can “spring” things from wherever you are. You can also add collaborators you to your notebooks, similar to Pinterest, but Springpad allows private notebooks so your world domination plans can be done in stealth mode.
Which fancy new tools are you using to make your daily social media life easier to manage?
Note: We wrote about these tools because we like them. None of them are paid affiliates.