23 Mobile Things - Thing 8 - Social Media Management Tools

As you can see, I am social media connected!  Going in to Thing 8, I am intrigued by the possibility of using one app to compile all of my social media conversations.  Sort of like the one ring to rule them all in the Lord of the Rings!  Let's see how this goes.

Cloze

The hardest part of setting up my Cloze account was to remember all of my user names and passwords for my social media accounts.  After much time and brain strain, success!  After playing around with my Cloze settings, I now get an email with current updates to my social media accounts.

As a newbie Clozer, my first observations are:

1. Cloze has a bonus over Hootsuite in that you can add your email accounts to your Cloze stream.
2. How does Cloze decide who I am losing touch with?  I am sure it is some sort of algorithm, similar to what Facebook uses to populate your Newsfeed with the posts they think are most important to you, how almost every site on the internet brings specifically selected advertisements directly to your screen, and how Amazon recommends products they think you cannot live without based on your past searches.  I understand the reasons companies do this, but who is important to me cannot be determined by an algorithm.  Just sayin' Sorry, I digressed.

Hootsuite

First of all, Hootsuite wins in the name/logo category.  I love the owl.  I know, this is not a very sensible way to evaluate an app, but I'm just being honest here. My favor toward owls is due to recent snowy owl sightings.  They are totally awesome birds!

Photo Credit: Zoma Olson (me)

Now, on to the actual app.  Downloading Hootsuite and setting it up was much easier than Cloze because my user names and passwords for the various social media accoutns were fresh in my brain from siging up for a Cloze account.  I did encounter trouble setting up my new Hootsuite account.  After trying several tweaks to my wi-fi setting, I ended up turning off my iPhone's wi-fi and using my service provider's data.  This allowed me to connect my various social media accounts to Hootsuite.  It turns out that Hootsuite is blocked at our school.

My newbie observations for Hootsuite are:

1. I wish Hootsuite supported Blogger and Instagram.  This is a wish for Cloze, too.
2. The ability to schedule tweets and posts is neat.  I'm not sure why I would use this feature, but it's nice to know it is available.
3. Being able to Bump to connect with people is just plain awesome.  Bumping is fun!

To be honest, I am not sure if I will continue to use either Cloze or Hootsuite.  Although it is nice to have all of my social media feeds in one location, I don't really have a problem checking each one individually.

Back when I was participating in 23 Things on a Stick, our school's filtering software was an irritant.  I am sure the school district has to err on the side of caution, but it continues to hamper my 23 Mobile Things learning experience.  As mentioned above, Hootsuite was blocked, but Cloze was not.  The Minnesota Multitypes are using a Tumblr blog to share participant posts and answer questions for 23 Mobile Things.  My boss is using Tumblr, Scott's 23 Things, to track his 23 Mobile Things progress.

As you can see, I will not be trying to override the Tumblr block at work/school.  It is categorized as "porn" by our district's filtering system!  Yikes!