Involver brand marketing for facebook

I was just banging on about how time consuming updating all the various social media platforms is and how more tools and integration was required. I was just catching up on Mashable and saw an article about Involver. They provide free tools allowing you to syndicate twitter, youtube and rss feeds to your facebook pages. This is unbelievably powerful and I have instantly got it set up on one of my pages. I will have to report back on how it goes. For now I advise you check out Involver facebook page applications.

Who is going to build me a social media master tool?

As many of us do, I manage social media profiles for various brands. How many passwords, user names and whatever else I have is unbelievable. Browsers do a good job of managing these. What we do need though is a tool that can help us manage brands profiles, so it is quicker and easier to update all the various services.

Tubemogul is a great video tool. You only have to upload your video once, and it automatically distributes it to every other major video site out there. On top of this is collects great stats.

I have been working a lot with Flickr recently, and it is slow work. It would be great if i could simultaneously upload to picasa as well using the same tool. A Tubemogul equivalent would be very handy.

In terms of blogs, Wordpress has it covered. I love Wordpress and it never ceases to amaze me how powerful it is. Managing multiple blogs can be a hassle but Dreamhost are a fantastic host and have an option to auto update all your wordpress installs in one go. This beats the hell out of manual updates.

Twitter and other forms of status updates, like Facebook are harder to manage. Twhirl is the best I have found so far for managing multiple twitter accounts, but it has no Facebook integration. This is an area which can and will see a lot of improvement in the near future. Integration with blogs is already happening and the results are pretty good.

Newsletter management and autoresponders are mostly done by Aweber for me. It is just a solid tool with great usability, functionality, support and pricing. I cant really fault it. If I were to be picky I guess they could make templating easier and synchronisation with blogs a bit simpler – however it is by no means complicated.

A marketing mega tool is what I am after. Any ideas anyone?

New series of the Apprentice starts

I have always been a massive fan of the Apprentice ever since it launched. I have pretty much watched all the UK and US series and enjoyed them. It is great to see business based shows reaching the masses although I am doubtful they offer any real business value. If nothing else they might make people aspire to more than being a footballer or a rock star.

This season started off as usual with the back to basics task whereby the teams have to do some really simple task in order to make the most money. It is always very similar and in previous seasons has involved selling coffee, flowers, lemonade and that sort of thing.

As (almost) always – it is boys vs girls to start with. All the usual ridiculous characters are there battling to see who will be the alpha male on one side and queen bee on the other. Both teams managed to pick passable names relatively quickly for a change too. This part is pretty painful watching so we can skip over it.

The task was cleaning. It didnt matter what they cleaned – they just had to clean stuff and whoever made the most profit won. The obvious choice here is cleaning cars. Interestingly the guys team did some shoe cleaning for a bit which seemed to be going well – they made £60 an hour between three of them which by far tops what they were making with cars. However they only did the one hour then went on to clean cars.

The car cleaning from both teams was pretty ridiculous. It is by no means difficult, or complicated in any way to clean a car. Yet somehow both teams struggled – even with simple concepts like closing car doors before pressure washing. To cut a long story short, the teams spent £100-£200 on cleaning materials and turned over £250-£300. We are looking at roughly £100-£150 profit per team of 7 or 8 people. This means essentially each team member generated only £20 profit in a day. How are these the greatest up and coming business minds of the country? Kids make more money selling lemonade outside their house.

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