The day I discovered this wonderful plugin Chris Brogan happened to write a blog post about how “nifty” it is.

This plugin is so great, I actually think WordPress should incorporate it as a stock feature in a future update. Having a visual representation of all of your outgoing blog posts is great for someone like me, and it has definitely caused me to blog more often (every day so far).

I schedule posts ahead of time and when breaking news happens–like the arrival of #newtwitter–I can reschedule them to a later date to make room. Because of this plugin I now think about blogging from a weekly perspective rather than one day at a time.

If you’ve been struggling to keep your blog updated or you just want to get more organized within WordPress, you need this plugin.

What do you think?

The email cycle from College Humor. Boy isn’t that the truth.

Email can be a death trap for your productivity if you let it. Some emails need to be seen and responded to immediately, but the vast majority of the email we receive throughout the day is unnecessary.

I’m an avid Gmail user. I have the Chrome extension and desktop notifier, so as soon as I get an email I know about it. When I’m away from the computer? My Droid phone is synced with my Gmail account as well.

Between my work email accounts at VaynerMedia and MakeUseOf, blog email account here, and personal account, I get a lot of email from a lot of different places.

How do I stay organized?

The first thing I do is have all of my accounts forward email to my main Gmail account. I leave a copy of every email on its respective server just in case I ever lose something important, but for the most part I never log in to any of my other accounts.

In my main account, I enabled the option to reply from the same address the message was sent to, so whenever I hit ‘reply’, the message coming from me will be from the address the original sender used.

Wisestamp handles all of my email signatures. I’ve written about the brilliance of Wisestamp before.

I use the hell out of filters and labels in Gmail as well. Every incoming message goes through some kind of filter and gets labeled based on predetermined criteria. For instance, all of my MakeUseOf emails are labeled with a red MakeUseOf tag.

Color coding labels makes it so much easier to skim your email and delete unwanted messages. In my case, if a message doesn’t have a label, it’s probably junk mail, and gets deleted or unsubscribed from in most cases.

For additional tips, Kevin Rose wrote a great post about saving time with email on his blog.

What do you do to keep your email account at inbox zero?

Today I wanted to talk about a great app I use called WiseStamp. WiseStamp is an extension for Google Chrome and Firefox that allows you to take control of your email signatures. And by take control, I mean put your signature on steroids.

WiseStamp allows you to keep track of multiple email signatures, including those for Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and AOL. It enables you to customize your signature with fonts, colors, pictures, and even social links and feeds. Allow me to show you how I’ve used this extension.

Here you can see the app’s layout. The editor allows you to set a default signature, change settings, and it gives you a lot of options for editing and incorporating your brand into your signature. You can be creative while still maintaining your professionalism. Below you will see tabs to add social profiles to your signature as well. There are dozens of profiles to choose from.

On the RSS tab, you can add your blog’s RSS feed. This will place a link to your most recent blog post at the bottom of your signature, which is a great way to garner attention for your blog/brand.

When you’re done creating your signature, you can hit preview. Here’s what mine looked like after I finished. In the settings, you can choose to auto-insert your signatures into your emails or you can simply add them by clicking the WiseStamp icon.

Will you be using WiseStamp to brand your email signature? What other apps do you like using? Leave a comment below!

There are many ways to market your brand on the social web. You can create videos, host webinars, write ebooks, or chat on social networks. One marketing tool that is often overlooked, however, is the PowerPoint presentation.

That’s right, our old friend Mr. PowerPoint. If you don’t have time to make a fancy video or write an ebook, then maybe you should just make an outline of what you want to convey to your readers. Throw a few interesting graphs up with some pictures and you’ve got yourself a nice slideshow for your audience.

SlideShare is great for this. Slideshare is a website that allows you to upload your PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, and Word documents to be viewed and shared with their online community. Let’s go over some of the benefits to using SlideShare:

Sharing Your Slides

Making things sharable is what allows for your content to go main stream and find a lot of viewers. Once uploaded, your presentation is a part of the community on SlideShare. Your slides can be favorited, downloaded, emailed, and—most importantly—embedded.

That’s right; your presentation can be embedded all over the web. Take a look at this nice presentation I found on SlideShare:

SlideShare supports both WordPress and Blogger blogs for embedding their content. Presentations can also be shared on social networking sites, which brings me to my next point…

Getting Social

While viewing a slideshow on SlideShare’s website, you have the option of posting it to your Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz accounts.

I know what you’re thinking. “What’s the big deal Steve?” Well, posting to your social accounts can have a positive impact for you. Driving traffic allows your view count to go up on SlideShare, thus making your presentation more popular in the community.

As you might imagine, the more popular your slides are the easier it will be for users to find them on the website.

LinkedIn

One popular place for posting SlideShare presentations is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a professional community and since slide presentations have more of a corporate feel to them this might be the perfect place for you to reach your target audience.

LinkedIn has a SlideShare presentation app that allows you to post your slideshows right to your LinkedIn page for all to see. I’ve seen a lot of people utilize this tool to market their brand.

Searchability

I know ‘searchability’ isn’t a real word, but let’s roll with it anyway. One key thing to think about is that your presentations are searchable within SlideShare. This means that people can find your content simply by going to the website and typing in what they’re looking for in the search box.

So remember to title your presentations properly. Utilize keywords to allow people to find your slides more easily.

Conclusion

Like I said, if you don’t have the time to make a video or write an entire ebook, creating a slideshow can help you market your brand effectively online. Even if you do have videos and ebooks maybe it would be a good idea to summarize them using SlideShare to increase visibility.

Whatever you end up using it for, SlideShare can be a useful marketing tool for you. Be sure to include your contact information in your slides so people can find you!

What do you think about using SlideShare for brand marketing? Will you be adding this tool to your arsenal? Leave some thoughts in the comment section below!

Image Credit: cfi02

When building your community, keeping track of your social brand can be a difficult task. One of the main difficulties you will face is deciding how to divide your time amongst the many networks you have developed a presence in.

In order to keep organized in your social community management efforts, it would be nice if there were applications that can let you manage multiple communities at once. Well, you’re in luck, because those applications do exist and they can be very useful.

Out of all the choices available to you, I have picked the three social media clients you can’t live without. These three have been widely accepted and have been constantly innovating since their inception. Enjoy.

TweetDeck

“TweetDeck is the leading browser for the real-time and social web.” As the first client to really move into this space, TweetDeck has always been a popular choice for managing your Twitter feed.

Since then, however, TweetDeck has become so much more than just a Twitter client. Here are some of the features that make this application so useful:

• Supports Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, & LinkedIn
• Create and manage lists of friends and users
• Built-in re-tweet, @reply, and direct message
• Create, share, and view photos and video
• Search and follow topics in real-time

Seesmic

Seesmic, my personal favorite, is another great client for managing your social networks. They have multiple applications for you to try and they are all pretty impressive, including Seesmic Desktop, Seesmic for Windows, Seesmic Look, and Seesmic Web.

Seesmic is very similar to TweetDeck as far as options are concerned. The one thing that stands out to me is Ping.fm integration.

If you don’t know, Ping.fm is a service that allows you to post content simultaneously to almost every social network. Seesmic purchased Ping.fm not too long ago and has stated that they will be integrating it into all of their clients very soon. Awesome.

Hootsuite

Another client that has come a long way is Hootsuite. Hootsuite is one of the best at brand monitoring and has most (if not all) of the great features that TweetDeck and Seesmic have.

Hootsuite has a bit of a different layout than the aforementioned but it is very customizable and allows you to track statistics, monitor what is being said about your brand, and build lists of your contacts.

It supports Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, WordPress, and even Ping.fm. You can use Hootsuite on any browser and it works on any operating system. They have apps for the iPhone and Android as well.

Conclusion

So these are the social media clients you can’t live without. I hope you give them all a try and pick which one you like best for your community management. These companies are constantly innovating so check their websites for updates and improvements.

Using an application to manage your networks should hopefully save you a lot of time in the long run. You can also customize these clients and use them to manage your marketing campaigns or however you see fit. Make sure you follow the 4 C’s when developing your social brand.

Did I miss your favorite application? Is there a social media client you just can’t live without? Leave your thoughts, comments, and ideas below!