My Pitch Log Mashup, Vol. 9 - Social Media Explorer
My Pitch Log Mashup, Vol. 9
My Pitch Log Mashup, Vol. 9
by

Jason Falls
Jason Falls

Time to clean out the inbox again with a Pitch Log Mashup. As a reminder, this series is a collection of the sites, services, platforms and programs I get pitched by PR folks, start-up entrepreneurs and various others that I either don’t have the time or the interest in really writing full blog posts about, but are probably somehow still interesting or useful for you.

And if you’re interested in pitching me something, increase your chances and read the “How To Pitch SME” page. If you’re wondering why your pitch didn’t make it on my list, see the, “How To Pitch SME” page. If you’re still not sure, re-read the, “How To Pitch SME” page.

My Pitch Log Mashup, Vol. 9

Search Innovation From Someone Other Than Google

Innovation in search these days is generally limited to Google and some other guy down the hall at Google. The main reason is that if you’re a start-up trying to take on Google, Yahoo or Bing/MSN, well … you’re nuts. Sundar Kadayam, then, by definition, is nuts. But he might just be the right nut to do it. Zakta.com is a new search engine that offers not just keyword-rich results, but those with social relevance. It allows you to edit your search results, save them for later, share results with other users, see their culled results if they’ve shared them and more. Kadayam is calling it a personal search engine. It’s the closest thing to the next big thing in search I’ve seen. Kadayam isn’t a new face on the scene, either. He’s the former founder and CTO at Intelliseek and was also with Nielsen Buzzmetrics. If you take anything away from this post, go to Zakta.com and give it a test spin. You can learn more about why it’s different on the Zakta blog.

Need To Log It? Elog it.

Elog.com appears to be a Tumblr or Posterous like service with a couple of interesting twists. To create your own page of content, you just email them and your email is formatted and placed online. What’s interesting is that you can create as many pages as you want with whatever content you want on them and edit that content by emailing the page number (automatically assigned by elog) @elog.com. I don’t like the random assigned number and wish you could go in and edit the URL, so long as it’s unique. Here’s the test page I created. But it seems to work seamlessly and has some potential. Check it out and see what you think.

Agers Active?

There’s a new global social network for Boomers out there called ActivAgers.com. The site looks well done with plenty of connection points and features, but from what I could tell at first glance has little activity. Not sure how viable it will be long term unless they have some big membership push. They don’t seem to have a specific focus other than Boomers which have more targeted places to go, like VibrantNation.com, which is a fantastic community site for boomer women. (And it’s based in Louisville, so I’m kinda biased towards it.) Still, ActivAgers.com is out there. Give it a look see if you’re looking for those Boomer targeted sites.

DM me

There are more than a few dozen build-your-own website tools and sites out there and the one that pitched me recently doesn’t necessarily stand out. But dm-2.com just unveiled display advertising to its offering to allow users to automatically build in monetization for the blog or website they build there. It looks like a simple enough site to use if you want to whip up your own DIY small business site or blog without having to know much about the web or web tools. Of course, you could just use WordPress or Blogger, but then you’d have a “blog” not a website you can update the content for, right? (There’s no difference between the two. Just sayin’.) Give dm-2.com a look see. Might be interesting for you.

Innovation Station

And in the, “There’s a social network for everything,” category, BulbStorm.com has emerged on the scene as a social community for innovation. I kind of like this concept, though. It allows companies or creators/thinkers to test out new concepts in a protected environment, gather feedback from other users and tap into ideas from the community around the product or service they’re pitching or building. Apparently, there are already some consumer product goods companies there testing the waters and getting consumer feedback. I don’t quite get how they drive users there to provide the feeback yet other than those who have ideas of their own they want to share, but the concept has the foundation of something cool. Give it a look-see, especially if you’re looking for consumer feedback done cheaper than market research or are a VC firm looking for a cool idea to latch on to.

Logical Media?

Media Logic has a new product that promises, like a bunch of others, to make it easier on brands and marketers to monitor and participate in social media. They’re calling it a social media management solution, claiming it will make social media monitoring and engagement quicker and more efficient so brand managers can go back to the good stuff. It looks no different or less interruptive in a marketer’s day than any other number of the social media dashboard type sites out there. Perhaps its worth looking at if you’re in desperate need to spend more money for someone to tell you that you’ll need more people to handle the volume of work associated with such an animal? You be the judge.

Researching Past Tweets?

Tweetscan has announced a couple of neat product offerings for those of you so obsessed with Twitter you think that the micro-blogging service is all social media is about. For $20 a year, you can search the Twitter archives (Tweetscan allegedly has them all … who knew?). This could be useful for product research or similar historical data needs. You can also have your personal account archive for a suggested donation of $4.99. It can come to you as a wiki or a CSV file. Frankly, I might pay the five bucks just to have all of mine. My boys at LifestreamBackup.com are good, but I don’t think we have a full, global archive of Twitter … yet.

More Twadvertising

TweetMemes.com is an interesting concept. You can find out quickly what people are talking about in mass quantity on Twitter, whether it be via hashtags or a particular search term. But the service’s latest venture has me kind of scratching my head. Now companies can buy “Featured Tweets” that show up as sponsored links on the service So if you go to the website, the first few Tweets on the page are paid for by companies willing to spend $50 per day. I’m not one to say there’s a right or wrong way to use Twitter, but it seems rather disingenuous to the service in general to allow a sponsor to interrupt the natural results from what is truly getting the buzz on the website for the given day. Just say’in. They claim it can help drive a lot of traffic to your website. We sure hope so.

That’s this week’s entries. There are more pitches in the cue but this should give you all enough to chew on for now. If you have a pitch for me, go back to the top of the page and click through to the instructions. If it’s really good, I’ll devote a post to it. If it’s relevant but not earth shattering, it will end up in one of these.

And if you check any of the tools listed here out, please jump in the comments and let me know what you think.

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About the Author

Jason Falls
Jason Falls is the founder of Social Media Explorer and one of the most notable and outspoken voices in the social media marketing industry. He is a noted marketing keynote speaker, author of two books and unapologetic bourbon aficionado. He can also be found at JasonFalls.com.

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