Interactive Marketing Cafe

observations and strategy by melonie gallegos

What’s the best Twitter photo service? January 6, 2010

Filed under: Uncategorized — Melonie Gallegos @ 8:18 am

None at the moment. Here’s what I really, really want:

  • Reliability
  • Option to also post to Facebook Fan Page or profile
  • Syndicates to Flickr
  • Tags and search features to search by tags
  • Post by email, SMS or Web
  • Site is mobile friendly so everyone can easily view pics from their phone
  • Ratings
  • Multi platform sharing features
  • Also hosts video and syndicates to YouTube

Posterous covers most of the items in my wishlist but it’s a broader host for all types of content, not a clean photo gallery. At its core it’s another simpler type of blog. For Twitter I prefer more focused apps like Twitpic. Ow.ly and TweetPhoto. I switched to the latter months ago and am switching back with high hopes and am dissapointed to report that TweetPhoto has been unreliable one too many times so I’m ready to switch. It has a habit of not posting to Twitter, then days later broadcasting all the photos it didn’t tweet at one time. “The sunset over the beach today” sounds a little ridiculous at 7am 5 days later… It also has struggled with half working features like tagging with no ability to search by the tags. TweetPhoto has tons of potential hopefully they’ll sort it out. Until then I’ll save myself the headache with Posterous orĀ  Twitpic. Ow.ly is in my consideration set, which is your best option if you’re a Hootsuite user, it has full featured tagging and ratings plus great sharing functions. If they expand their reporting features on files and photos, and add email submission I’ll be more apt to use it. I use Hootsuite but my tool of choice is still TweetDeck because I like it’s interface just a little bit better for personal use – particularly on managing lists. Of the three Twitpic is the least feature rich, they offer tagging, no ratings, no integration to other social networks. If I had time this morning I’d create a comparison chart – if you have one please share.

A final note on Twitter photos. I’ve thought a lot about the best tool for photo contests and my recommendation is to let your followers use what ever they choose to submit photos on Twitter. The more requirements you put into submission that take the user out of their normal behavior the less participation you will get. Ask them to use a hashtag in their post and it will easy to pull up entries through a search. This will work fine for random winners or best photo chosen by you. If you want to award best photo chosen by users you’ll have to look further into running it on one platform that offers tags and ratings, and a working search function to pull tagged photos.

If you have other suggestions please share them in comments your feedback is appreciated.

 

List of Online Survey Tools October 12, 2009

Filed under: tools — Melonie Gallegos @ 1:45 pm
Tags: ,

I asked the question on Twitter and got some great recommendations on free online survey tools so thought I’d share them here.

Survey Monkey

http://www.surveymonkey.com

It’s free and a well known favorite that’s been around for years. My issue with it has a wonky outdated feeling interface. It’s somewhat limited in features.

4Qs

http://4qsurvey.com/

Customer driven website optimization, looks interesting.

Insightify

https://insightify.com

Pretty sleek, I’ve never used it and it’s in beta free then will transition to a free to paid platform. Will have to try it out I love beta.

SurveyGizmo

http://www.surveygizmo.com

Looks sleek and feature rich and has a limited free level that overall looks not so free. Never tried it but it might be worth its buck.

FluidSurveys

http://fluidsurveys.com/

Another web2 looking option – and they are on Twitter – always a plus ;-) I’ve never tried this one.

Survey Methods

http://www.surveymethods.com

Zoomerang

http://www.zoomerang.com/

I’ve used this before, been awhile so it’s time to take another look at it. A good platform and worth the money but not so free on the minimum level.

PollDaddy

http://www.polldaddy.com/

Survey Pirates

http://www.surveypirate.com

Free survey tool, no limitations, no trial accounts.