OK so this post is a few weeks late and I haven’t blogged in a while, but since it seemed to go down well at Social Media World Forum and got featured on Slideshare’s homepage (woohoo!), I thought it’d be worth putting my presentation on my blog too. This is what I presented at SMWF 2010 in London. Lots of free tools to use for social media research and measurement, in addition to, or instead of, paid-for tools, depending on what you’re trying to do and what your budget is. The Google analytics bit comes with the disclaimer that with most social media campaigns you’re not aiming for high volumes of traffic, but good quality traffic and high engagement in the place that you’re active, rather than just trying to pull people to your site.

Continuing to share my delicious links, here’s mine tagged with Aggregator:

• Addictomatic: Inhale the Web – Social search engine mashup
• Aggregation | drupal.org – Drupal aggregation plugin
• Virb – Social networking site where your profile is built from feeds
• Dipity – activity aggregator visualised in a timeline
• FriendFeed – obviously
• Fuser – email and social network message aggregator
• HelloTxt – multiple status updater
• Pageflakes – it’s like NetVibes
• ShowYourself – It’s a widget, it’s not about flashing your bits
• Socialthing! – Got bought by AIM and is now AIM Lifestream. Like FriendFeed.
  

Similar articles:

• 25+ Ways to Manage Your Online Identity – Mashable
• How To Manage Your Online Reputation – ReadWriteWeb
• The Web Profile Aggregators – Somewhat Frank
  

Continuing to share my delicious links, here’s mine tagged with Advertising:

Good advertising blogs

• Advertising Lab: future of advertising and advertising technology
• Eaon Pritchard’s blog
• Osocio – Social Advertising and Non-profit Campaigns
• CST Advertising – Home of Dave Trott’s blog
• adwomen – Feminist commentary on adverts

Specifically good items

• Influential Marketing Blog: An Insider’s Guide To Marketing On Flickr
• tesco value shampoo – spoof ad
• Sprint: Plug into Now. – Massively awesome and interesting data visualisation on today’s production
• Orange online ad dimensions / specifications – For reference
• HSBC: No “goodservice” in Sight – and Orange Ad Campaign: I Am Lost? -  about using ’search for …’ as an online advertising tactic

I’ve been wondering how I can feature my delicious links on blog posts, so I just decided to start at the beginning of the alphabet of tags containing at least 10 links. I don’t like those automated services that just post a blog of your daily or weekly links – I wanted to group it better. I don’t tend to save the obvious stuff to delicious, but tend to save things I’m not so likely to remember how to find via Google. So, in the order that I discovered them, here’s a few random tools & articles about accessibility. Some are pretty old but still relevant:

2007 links:

• ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing A journal
• CSS: Map Pop Accessible CSS image map tutorial
• Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) W3C guidelines (the obvious one)
• Mike Davidson: March to Your Own Standard Controversial opinion piece
• ATRC Web Accessibility Checker Tool
  

2009 links

• Web accessibility training courses by the RNIB
• SiteRay – test, compare and improve your websites Creates great reports on website accessibility and lots more, useful for before-and-after tests for clients if you’ve rebuilt their site

I would say the most important thing I’ve learnt about accessibility over the years is that it’s not just about deaf people, blind people, or those who can’t use a standard keyboard or mouse, but about anybody who needs to or prefers to access websites in a different way. So it’s about designing interfaces that allow users to choose how to get around to best suit them, and allowing them to personalise the way online media is displayed.