Hraba Hospitality Consulting » hellotxt http://www.hrabaconsulting.com/blog HHotelConsult hoping to make sense of his brainpan's thoughts, rambles, ambles, and more. Hotel Industry banter, social media thoughts, and general blather. Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:35:11 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 10 *MORE* Time Saving Tools/Sites for Hoteliers http://www.hrabaconsulting.com/blog/2009/05/19/10-more-time-saving-toolssites-for-hoteliers/ http://www.hrabaconsulting.com/blog/2009/05/19/10-more-time-saving-toolssites-for-hoteliers/#comments Tue, 19 May 2009 20:20:48 +0000 Michael Hraba http://www.hrabaconsulting.com/blog/?p=697 I was ranting and raving about not being able to keep structure or organization with social media, so I took some time to find some useful programs to help me out.   Well…. this is pretty cut and dry:    A quick, succinct post for you to be made aware of (and yet another onslaught from) useful social media tools.  Social Media is simply a tool in itself… so they are tools for tools.  With some of my friends’ more sophomoric moments of wit… they might suggest including myself would make it a third tool.  =)

A list of 10 tools that you might know of, or might not.  As many of these lists go you will likely act as I do…. Stoic, dismissive, and blase…  I will find myself say, “I know all these already,” ……. and then my eyes humble me by finding an exciting new gem.

1) I am very pleased with Google Voice.  The sheer amount of functionality is not only superb… but it is useful without being daunting.  I do not know if this is public yet, but if you forgot about your own Grand Central account… go ahead and log in, because that is what Google Voice was built on.  Basically, among other things, the real timer saver is voicemail messages that can be both emailed or texted to your phone, and they provide transcripts that are voice to text.  Need to hear the 14th our of 22 voicemails IMMEDIATELY?  Never wait again.  Hell.. just read it.

2)  Flock browser, which I extolled here.  It integrates Digg, Flickr, FB, Youtube, Twitter, Myspace and more into a convenient sidebar… if you like a pic or article,  auto-upload from your sidebar without leaving the webpage.  It has an RSS reader that killed Google reader for me… it has a media bar that is insanely simple to use for download/upload, and I can post blog posts on the fly.  It has saved so much time I cannot even tell you…. it also remembers all accounts, I.E. 6 gmail accounts, 5 flickr, 6 youtube, 3 blog accounts, 2 FB, etc.  Incredible time saving tools there.

3)  As for the managing of multi-twitter accounts, I like twhirl.  I know there are other options, and I am all ears, but for now this provides a simple way to post relevant articles or have conversation thoughout the day from a desktop dashboard environment of multiple accounts.  When they are all grouped, I lose my mind, so I like seperate streams.

4) As for managing twitter accounts, try out TWEEPULAR. Easy bulk follow, bulk unfollow, and more.  Very cool.

5) This is old hat, but for managing scheduled tweets, and more to the point *brand keywords*, try Tweetlater.  I sell it short here… it does a lot of stuff, and I still haven’t grasped all it’s offerings.

6) I also use Twitterfeed to pipe in about 500 RSS to about 10 twitter accounts.  I doubt you will need it like that, but you surely can find relevant corporate hotel or property level blog feeds into the account while still using it for conversation.  Very efficient, and very useful.

7) URL SHORTERNER – With Twitter moving away from tiny.url, I must say I was immediately mesmerized, captivated and moved by BIT.LY.  Not only will you be able to post to your twitter account from there, it manages multiple twitter accounts *AND* post to FB, among others.  Bit.Ly wins…. with functionality beyond the above!

8) Following online conversation: Blogpulse, Backtype, & Social Mention.  I am fairly certain Social Mention should cover the other two, but it doesn’t hurt to set up alerts and field them as they trickle in.  Or flood.  Depends on your brand.

9) I don’t really like Digg, but I use it.  That being said, Delicious.com with it’s simpler and new URL, works for me.. really well.  Does anyone use Reddit?  Digg is too confusing for me, and apparently Reddit has a lovely little community going on.  But Delicious is by far the easiest to search, log, and come back to, at least.. for me.

10) You may also want to consider cross posting / status updating sites… which can walk a fine line between heaven and disaster.  You may want to look at Ping.FM as the industry leader for the time being.  But with many on the way, even ones on the verge (hello AtomKeep).. and if you are interested in something that allows you to crosspost, manage 60 accounts and more…

Try HelloTxt.  It’s a newer (at least.. to me) site I am *REALLY* excited about, and albeit remaining calm and skeptical, it seems to be able to manage all 12 twitter accounts, linked in, FB etc… but what is big about this one is that it seems I can manage FACEBOOK PAGES…
That means that a hotel can post independently to a twitter account, a personal twitter account , a personal FB account, and a Branded FB page, as well as a (single) branded Flickr account, a branded wordpress blog, and more.  I am very excited to see how I utilize HelloText with Flock.  But being able to do this from ONE SINGLE LOCATION?  That is unusually exciting to me.  I need to get out more.
Life might be getting easier for us, little by little.  Of course these will be obsolete by the time twitterfeed picks up this parsed RSS 30 minutes from clicking *publish*
[meekly pushing *publish* button]
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