Nifty Word Cloud Generator tool

Found this fab word cloud tool called Tagxedo via an Italian digi blog I read.

Have a play, it's very versatile: use your own words or scrape a site using a URL, and then twiddle and tweak the variables until you have the image you want. Then choose how you want to save it and in what format (Jpeg, PNG, large file, small file, tumbnail etc). Great. For the shapes and the saving feature I'll give it extra points over Wordle.

Here's one I made earlier. 

Evaluating digital propositions the KPMG way

This KPMG tool designed to help you evaluate the strength of your digital idea's value proposition has been sitting on my "tabs to read" radar for a week or so now but I am glad I finally got around to playing with it.

Useful to have many of the many metrics you should consider stacking your idea up against in one place.
Not all of them will be relevant to every proposition, but it was food for thought I considered worthy of sharing, so here's the link to the working version for you to play with. 

Remember, that as is so often the case with ideas in the digital realm, it's choosing the right combination of ingredients, that are the secret to a successful recipe.  Too many and your offering becomes flavour overloaded, too few it's too bland and dull, too many expensive ingredients and the number of diners who can afford the dish drops.  Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes it's not, it depends on your objectives.

Digital alchemy is a dark art but ask yourself some sensible questions, and base your answers on your knowledge of who you are trying to engage with and you stand a chance of making the "specials" board and then letting the diners rave to their friends and come back for more.

Nice image I found from Bristol restaurant the Olive Shed via Bing

Brands need to learn to freewheel a little...

Brands have spent years and millions of $/£/€ carefully crafting their brand image. Brands help us make choices.Brands naturally form part of the fabric of the many conversations we all have everyday.

Brands have been loved, praised, reviled and denigrated at conversations around dinner tables, in the pub, in bars, on the telephone for years and years. But whilst the brand owners really knew these conversations were happening they couldn't really measure or tap into them. So a head in the sand approach was fine unless a particularly determined consumer was persistent enough to deal with horrible customer service freephone number queues and listening to 15 rounds of Vivaldi's spring allegro to really make their feelings known.

Then what has become known as Web 2.0 occured. Consumers suddenly got a voice (albeit generally a written one) via IM, email, blogs, Twitter, status feeds on Facebook, all manner of places where all of a sudden their voices could reach far further than just the people around the dinner table. Suddenly, the brands couldn't ignore the conversations anymore. Thoughts were being shared far and wide, right there in black and white or green or blue or pink. Yesterday 112k new blogs were created, the day before it was 123k. That's a lot of personal publishing platforms, whether they reach 14 ,44 ,400 or 40k people.

Brands are no longer controlling the conversation. Shock! Horror! I was sent a link to this presentation recently that illustrates the journey for many brand owners quite nicely.

It astounds me that so many brands who would never dream of giving up their old world daily "press clippings" service still haven't got around to implementing any serious form of buzz monitoring. Yet the word is on the web now not in newspapers in the same way that it was once upon a time. There arebuzz monitoring tools a plenty. Some you pay for, some are free, but these days there's no excuse for not listening even if it's only on an ad hoc dip basis.

I particularly like the "Big Buzz" feature of Ice Rocket for giving me a snapshot of what's happening in different spaces. Check it out.

Someone also shared with me yesterday this cool desktop social monitoring app called Social Seek. I've been playing with it this morning, having selected "Starbucks" and "London" as my keyword and location, and it's been burbling away happily all morning revealing all sorts of things...For me, these tools, provide great insight into how consumers reallly talk about brands, rather than the way brand managers think consumers talk about their brands. Armed with this understanding, we can then create content and experiences that are relevant to the consumer and help harness those conversations for brand advantage, using the influential connections between consumers to get our brand into places our ad $ just can't buy. Ignore at peril.

Time Savers...

I had an extraordinarily busy week last week with limited time to keep up with the new developments in the wired world (ironic really given that I was delivering an intensive 3 day course on digital marketing), but one thing I did trip over was:

BingTweets - an interesting mash-up of Bing (the search / decision-making engine) and Twitter. Run a search. Try it with something topical. Why a time saver and why do I like this? Because it gives me search results plus a notion of real time and what's being said about that topic right now, without me having to use multiple tools. As I said to a friend last week, it would be an interesting exercise to do live with clients to make them realise the real context in which people naturally talk about their brands, rather than the version they prefer to believe.

Not so new, but a service I love and find incredibly useful when I've been away from my inbox for a few days is an email "snooze" button provided by a site called Hit me later. Basically you can forward an email to a given email address and specify when you want it back (i.e 4 hours, 24 hours etc and it'll send it back to you at the designated time, meaning it appears at the top of the email pile, which I find incredibly handy as a means of prioritising / not forgetting important emails when you have a full inbox and lots of FYI's / junk to clear out before you can actually deal with the important stuff.

These are a few of my favourite things...

So many to choose from, but hey, this is my very own publishing platform, the beauty of which being I can say what I want,when I want.

So here's a cheer and free plug (I do work in marketing and advertising after all!) for several sites/apps that I've found incredibly handy time after time after time.

If you haven't tried them do:

SnagIt: A fab tool (with a free trial period) that's incredibly handy for taking screengrabs with functionality well beyond ye olde "print screen" trick so you can capture full scrolls of web pages at a touch of a button, annotate them, resize them and all manner of things that make evidencing your point in presentations so much easier, and having consistent sizes to your screengrabs without hassle. Love it.

YouSendIt: My very own free FTP service - really useful for sharing large files, that otherwise won't go through some people's mail servers

LogMeIn: A brilliant (free) remote desktop application that allows me to provide all manner of useful helpdesk services to those a little less technical than I, saving a lot of heartache and frustration on all sides

NX Powerlite: In these days of creating Powerpoint files full of graphics and images, file sizes rapidly tot up, and this very cool tool, (also with a free trial period) does amazing things to crush down your file size without compromising quality (visibly) nor faffing about with winzip or similar.

Kiss YouTube: With more and more content taking a multi-media format, there are innumberable occasions where I need to be able to grab stuff to share at times where I might be in places with no interweb connectivity (shock, horror, indeed these still exist!), and this handy site allows me to convert most videos on YouTube into FLV's. Then I use this to convert them into something a little more universally shareable or friendly...

Media Converter: This is really handy (especially the Firefox plug in) to convert files from one format to another i.e FLV's to WMV's, MPEGs, AVI's etc

Pixlr: There are frequently times when I haven't got my own laptop with me full to the brim of editing software, but need to tweak something. Pixlr is a reduced down functionality, web based Photoshop equivalent that I find very handy.

And then of course there's Skype. VOIP calling is hardly new news these days but with 405million subscribers (May 09) there's a lot of people out there using it and it's amazingly handy to keep in touch with friends, family and business contacts near and far, without racking up ridiculous phone bills, and with the added benefit of video calling. I know of 90 year olds using it to keep up with their great grandchildren. I have a friend who was able to show off her new son to me at 3 days old despite us living either side of the Atlantic. And I have another friend whose 2 year old daughter thinks all phone calls work with a visual element and was recently applying a mobile phone to her arm to show off a recent bruise to her grandmother! Digital native!

Go play