10 Tools That Will Make You a Social Media Guru

These 10 tools will help you manage your individual or business social media accounts without breaking the bank.

10 Tools That Will Make You a Social Media Guru
Do you aspire to be a social media guru but find yourself befuddled by the large number of social media tools available? Here we help you narrow the options for managing your social media accounts by identifying 10 of the best online tools. All are either free or available for a reasonable subscription fee that any individual or a small business can afford.

Bitly
Bitly, probably the best-known UR- shortening service around, helps keep the links that you post on your social media accounts neat and tidy. Under the hood, the service features real-time analytics so you can track actual clicks. More importantly, the service supports the use of one custom domain name for free and implements all the necessary logic. You can brand your shortened URL the same way the big-time players do, like nyti.ms (The New York Times) and econ.st (The Economist).

Buffer
Buffer ranks among the most popular social media message scheduling service available. You can share content and schedule posts across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ pages with a single click. The service makes it possible to stagger content throughout the day, constantly populating your social media feeds with new updates. Buffer also offers analytics about the reach of your posts and makes it easy to re-post popular content.

Hootsuite
Hootsuite is an advanced social media management dashboard designed to help organizations or power users manage multiple social media accounts. The online service works with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ pages and other popular social networks. It offers a comprehensive range of reports that let you gain greater insights into ongoing social campaigns. Hootsuite starts off as a free service for individuals; various subscription tiers are available for power or business users.

Pagemodo
The Pagemodo social marketing suite can help small businesses quickly create engaging visuals for Facebook. Its features include tools to manage Facebook pages and to create customized, eye-catching cover photos, visual posts and even custom tabs for contests. New posts go live immediately or according to a schedule, and they can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other platforms.

Social Mention
The Social Mention real-time social media search and analysis tool scrapes user-generated content across more than 100 social media sites for mentions of a given company name, brand, product or search term. Considered among the best free listening tools on the market, Social Mention's analyses delivers relevant results, with metrics that includes unique authors, reach, frequency of mentions and top keywords.

SocialBro
SocialBro helps businesses better target and engage with their Twitter audience. It can analyze followers' timelines of followers to generate reports (such as the optimal time to tweet for reach and engagements), to identify key influencers and competitors, and to gain general analytics insights. SocialBro works best when coupled with a scheduling tool such as Buffer or Hootsuite. It's free with basic features for accounts with less than 5,000 Twitter followers.

SocialOomph
The SocialOomph Web service offers a long list of productivity enhancements across supported services. That list includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Plurk, as well as blogs built with WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and Moveable Type. Available for free with some basic features, the paid version of SocialOomph can schedule Facebook updates and LinkedIn shares, automatically follow back followers, search for worthwhile Twitter friends to follow and even tweet via email.

Sprout Social
The Sprout Social management and engagement tool can post, monitor and analyze multiple social media accounts from one location. The service offers the ability to monitor messages across Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn personal profiles, all through a single inbox. A paid service that comes with a free 30-day trial, Sprout Social also offers real-time brand monitoring and comprehensive reporting tools to help users understand important metrics.

Tweepi
The Twitter-only management tool Tweepi makes it easy to identify (and get rid of) followers who unfollow and inactive users, as well as to find interesting new users by scraping the followers of specified Twitter accounts. The paid version offers smart shortcuts that let users quickly follow or unfollow large number of users at a time. It ranks among the more powerful tool for managing Twitter accounts with thousands of followers.

TweetDeck
As its name suggests, the free TweetDeck (now owned by Twitter) is a Web and desktop solution for monitoring and managing Twitter feeds on a single screen. TweetDeck incorporates powerful filters based on specific keywords or conditions. It also offers the flexibility to customize the display to show or hide columns to better focus on what matters. TweetDeck is available for the Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari browsers, as well as Windows and Mac computers.

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Virtual reality gains a small foothold in the enterprise

Prototypes and simulations based on virtual reality can save companies millions.

The rapid growth of the mobile sector has had an unexpected dividend – by bringing down the costs and improving the quality of motion sensors, screens, and processors it has helped usher in a new era of virtual reality technology.

Systems previously available only to largest manufacturers or to the military can now be put together with consumer-grade technology at a fraction of the price, and companies are already taking advantage of the opportunities.

When it comes to virtual reality, one of the biggest bangs for the buck is in virtual prototypes. Virtual models of buildings, oil tankers, factory floors, store shelves or cars can now be uploaded into a virtual environment and examined by safety inspectors, designers, engineers, customers and other stakeholders.

The Ford Motor Company, for example, has long been using virtual reality when it comes to prototypes and simulations, but the new wave of virtual reality technology is dramatically expanding its reach.

Ford's Immersive Virtual Environment lab, one of several areas in which Ford uses virtual reality, for example, has recently added the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset to its virtual reality platforms.

It's used in combination with a shell of a car where the seat, steering wheel, and other parts can be repositioned to match those of a prototype car.

“If you look at it, you'd think it was a very stripped-down vehicle,” says Elizabeth Baron, who heads up the lab. But when engineers sit down in the driver's seat and put on virtual reality headsets, they're virtually transported into the interior of the prototype.

Elizabeth Baron shows how Ford uses Oculus Rift.

“You have a gas pedal, brakes, steering wheel, a door, and when you're touching stuff, it's real,” Baron says. “But when you're looking around, you're seeing the virtual data. That's where the Oculus is specially useful.”

The Oculus Rift is the head-mounted virtual reality display that ushered in the current age of virtual reality with a $2.4 million Kickstarter campaign in 2012, followed by a jaw-dropping $2 billion buyout by Facebook earlier this year.

The Oculus Rift hasn't officially hit the market yet, but developer kits are available from the company for $350 each and more than 100,000 have already been sold. The device combines a high-resolution screen, motion sensors, and a set of lenses. The motion sensors track where the user is looking and the lenses stretch out the screen so it covers most of the user's field of view. The result is a very convincing illusion that the wearer has been transported into a virtual world.

“I'm extremely excited about the developments in the headspace scene and the work Oculus has done to bring low cost, wide-field of view to the market,” Baron says. “I'm just over the moon about it. The good thing for Ford is, with our approach for using different display technologies, we're already ready to take advantage of the developments that come out of the virtual headset space.”

Another virtual reality system is a CAVE (computer assisted virtual environment), which is a room with large screens on three walls and on the ceiling. Users wear stereoscopic glasses for a holodeck-like effect – life-size, 3D images of objects appear in the middle of the room, so that engineers can walk around and examine them.

Another system allows users to walk around inside a large open space while it tracks their position. “We can put an F-250 [super duty truck] into that environment and you can walk around it like it's a life-sized vehicle,” Baron says. “It's like an inspection tool for what we're producing and what our customers might take delivery of. That's a really important aspect in our product development process.”

A virtual environment allows engineers to dial up different lighting settings, to see how the exterior would look at noon on a hazy day, or in the evening or under mercury vapor lights. Virtual environments also help enable long-distance collaboration, she says.

“We also have a virtual space in Australia, and if they're immersed and we're immersed at the same time, we can see where they are in the virtual environment and we can talk to each other,” she says. “We can say, 'Look at this, look at that.'”

And virtual reality allows the company to look at many more prototypes than would have been possible if they had to be actually built.

“There is no way we could build thousands of prototypes,” she says. “We would only be able to build a handful. But also, there is no way we could check in the physical world all the things we check in the virtual worlds. We can make intelligent decisions about our design, with respect to how we manufacture it, and that's a huge time save and cost save.”

Ford is expanding its use of virtual reality, she adds. “We're actually creating another virtual space here in Dearborn [Michigan] to handle the overflow,” she says. “We're so packed. We can't fit in what we can do in one day. It's been shown to be so valuable.”

Ford also uses virtual reality for manufacturing assembly simulations, to help ensure the health and safety of workers, for training, and to study how drivers behave.

“We have driving simulations, another virtual reality application, where we'll bring in people who haven't slept all night and ask them to perform some tasks,” she says. “And then perform an analysis on how they respond versus someone who's had their fresh cup of coffee and they're bright and cheerful in the morning.”

Other manufacturing companies are also upgrading their virtual prototypes from simple 3D graphics on a monitor to fully immersive virtual reality systems such as those made possible by the Oculus Rift and similar devices.

Medical device companies, for example, are among the early adopters, says Jeremy Duimstra, a professor of user experience at University of California San Diego and CEO and creative director at San Diego-based MJD Interactive, which counts Disney, Red Bull, P&G and Titleist among its clients.

“Being able to virtually interact with a device in the design phase, without having to build physical objects ... allows for more innovation,” he says.

Plus, there's the cost savings of materials and manpower of physically mocking up hundreds of prototypes. “Build the product virtually, test it, iterate, and only build when you know it's right,” he says.

Jeremy Duimstra
Environments that are physically dangerous for people are also ripe for going virtual.

“Our oil and gas clients are definitely interested in this space,” says Mary Hamilton, who heads up the digital experiences research and development group at Accenture. Immersive virtual reality allows people who might be in different locations to visit a difficult-to-reach facility, to get views such as X-rays or schematic views that might be impossible in real life, and enables low-risk, lower-cost training for new employees.

Marketing applications are also expanding, she says.
For example, low-cost head-mounted displays will allow retailers to replace their immersive CAVE environments – which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up. Companies can use the technology to have focus groups walk through virtual stores, interact with different shelf layouts, or even try out new products.

“It would significantly lower costs, allow companies to do more of this, and allow them to do it in multiple locations,” she says.

The second wave
One virtual reality wave has already come and gone, in the 1990s. Movies like “The Lawnmower Man,” devices like Nintendo's Virtual Boy and virtual reality arcades made the technology hot, but by the time “The Matrix” came out at the end of the decade it was clear that virtual reality technology was too expensive and too bulky for widespread use. In addition, graphics quality was poor and high latency and poor head-tracking combined to make users nauseous.

As a result, virtual reality became limited to high-end, narrowly focused applications such as military simulations, movie special effects, and training and simulations in manufacturing, oil, and the medical industries, says Jacquelyn Ford Morie, formerly a virtual reality expert at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies. Virtual reality immersion therapy has been used for a decade now to treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and to manage the pain of burn victims.

“Now we have this second wave of virtual reality,” says Morie. “The difference between then and now is that it's affordable. Instead of a $30,000 head-mounted display, you now have a $300 head-mounted display.”

jacquelyn ford morie
Jacquelyn Ford Morie is founder and chief scientist at All These Worlds Inc., a Los Angeles-based virtual environment consulting and development firm.

The general population is also more used to technology than they were 20 years ago, she adds, and there are more companies creating content for the new virtual reality platforms. Her own company creates applications in virtual worlds for NASA and other enterprise clients.

“We're doing things like making virtual worlds that will help astronauts on long-duration space flight missions,” she says.

Today, most enterprise virtual reality is internally focused, she says. That is likely to change as more of this technology gets into the hands of consumers, and she's looking forward to working on consumer-focused projects.

“If everyone has a 3D head-mounted display, there's no reason not to feed a preview of that new product,” she says. “Create emotionally evocative, 3D immersive ads, so all of a sudden they feel like they're on the mountain, about to ski down with my new snowboard.”

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YouTube served malicious ads

The ads redirected victims to the Sweet Orange exploit kit, which tries to install malware, Trend Micro says

Malicious advertisements, some of which were displayed on YouTube, redirected more than 113,000 people in the U.S. to harmful websites in just a month, Trend Micro said Tuesday.

Although online advertising companies try to detect and block such ads from being circulated on their networks, bad ones sometimes get through. Such ads can be very productive for hackers. It can mean a large pool of victims if shown on a high-traffic website.

"This was a worrying development: Not only were malicious ads showing up on YouTube, they were on videos with more than 11 million views -- in particular, a music video uploaded by a high-profile record label," wrote Joseph Chen, a fraud researcher, on Trend Micro's blog.

Google, which owns YouTube, did not have an immediate comment.

Chen wrote that users viewing the ads were bounced through two servers in the Netherlands before landing on the malicious server, which is located in the U.S.

That server had the Sweet Orange exploit kit installed. Sweet Orange checks if the computer has one of four vulnerabilities affecting Internet Explorer, Java or Adobe Systems' Flash application.

If the attack is successful, the kit delivers malware from the KOVTER family, which has been used in the past for ransomware, Chen wrote. Those attacks try to extort a victim by either encrypting their files or tricking them into paying a fine.

The KOVTER malware is hosted on a subdomain of a Polish government site that has been hacked, Chen wrote. The attackers had also modified DNS (Domain Name System) information on that site by adding subdomains that led to their own servers, but the method used to accomplish that was unclear, Chen wrote.

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Cisco welcomes Dimension Data to global cloud initiative

The company compared its Intercloud to international roaming for hybrid clouds

The sun shone outside the Cisco Live conference on Tuesday even as the clouds gathered within, and that was exactly the kind of weather Cisco was hoping for.

Hosting and cloud provider Dimension Data signed on to use Cisco's Intercloud platform, Cisco executive Rob Lloyd announced in a keynote address that emphasized hybrid clouds and making IT infrastructure easier to set up and manage.

Cisco will sell cloud services using Dimension Data's Managed Cloud Platform, including IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) and SaaS (software-as-a-service) offerings of Microsoft SQL Server and SharePoint, said Lloyd, who is Cisco's president of development and sales. The services are available now through 10 Dimension data centers worldwide, which will expand to 13 by the end of September, according to Cisco.
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The services coming through Dimension Data will be aimed at medium-sized enterprises and at smaller service providers that want to resell cloud services, especially in the developing world, Lloyd said.

Intercloud is Cisco's architecture for linking private and public infrastructure around the world into a single cloud. It will let enterprises and service providers host workloads anywhere and move them around based on regional needs and compliance requirements. Cisco is using Intercloud to offer its own services, backing away from earlier pledges not to compete with its service-provider customers, but is still counting on partners to bring their infrastructure to the party.

Australian carrier Telstra, a longtime Cisco customer, was the company's first announced Intercloud partner. Dimension Data, a Cisco partner for 23 years, and parent NTT have now joined in, Lloyd told Cisco Live attendees.

Lloyd compared the concept to international roaming on cellular networks.

"We're going to embrace all cloud partners ... in the countries where we do business around the world, and in partnership with our cloud partners," Lloyd said.

Hybrid clouds are the future because they combine the easy expansion possible on a public cloud and the security and control of private infrastructure, he said. Cisco's platform for building those clouds, and the foundation of Intercloud, is ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure).

This platform, Cisco's entry into the SDN (software-defined networking) sweepstakes, is designed to simplify network provisioning, management and teardown, and make infrastructure more secure. It works in conjunction with Cisco-designed silicon on the recently introduced Nexus 9000 switch, but its benefits have also been extended to much of the older Cisco gear, including the Catalyst 6000 series and Integrated Services Routers, the company says.

Cisco has a lot riding on ACI, which was announced less than a year ago, and it may take a while to get the mass of its customers on board. Two IT engineers attending Cisco Live, both from large U.S. retailers, said they were just learning about ACI for the first time. The technologies they're now looking to adopt -- converged network-computing-storage platforms for one, and VoIP for the other -- are far from the cutting edge of Cisco's agenda. Cisco says it has 1,000 customers in the pipeline to adopt the Nexus 9000 and ACI.

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