Most business owners have an email address at their website’s domain. My main email is adam@youbrandinc.com and this is the same email address that is on the You Brand, Inc. website, my business cards, almost every social account I use, but most importantly, the email that I give to my clients.

If you are like me and you need to keep on top of things in your business, Gmail POP3 Checker is a must have.

Gmail POP3 Checker:

• Checks your email every 8 min (sooner if you donate to the developer)
• Know exactly how long it has been since your emails were fetched
• Works with Google Chrome and Firefox
• Most importantly, helps you keep on top of you emails which is necessary in today’s fast paced digital world

Ps:

If you have a website domain and you are still using an email address ending with @gmail or @hotmail or anything that is not your website’s domain, you should consider setting up an email account with your domain and then using the POP3 to import your messages into a service like Gmail.

Not only does it look more professional, but most importantly, you don’t own your other email address. I own adam@youbrandinc.com and if for some reason Google decided to shut down my account, my email would continue to be sent to a server and email address that I have control of.

Sure PPC within the stream of a social network might seem like spam (I would kind of agree) but we are starting to see more and more users and influencers take to this model.

Watch Video Overview Below

Making PPC Income

The network allows you to do two things. First you connect your social accounts. This gives an influence score. This influence score defines you pay per click rate. This is the amount you get when someone clicks on an update you send out in the social sphere.

So far we are well on our way to retirement with your test account having made a bank busting $1.47.

Advertising

The other side of this network is the ability to advertise. We tested out a network on a few offers and I share one of those in the video above. Essentially you set up a campaign, how much you want to spend per click, and your budget. From there your off and running.

The Bottom Line

Networks like these are a crap shoot. Ultimately social isn’t a great place for inline advertising but if you have an offer that fits into entertainment and fun this can work for you. I’d still watch networks like MyLikes to see if they do get a larger user base and greater reach but ultimately in it’s current state it’s tough to really take it seriously.

Essentially a very robust comment stream with multiple contributors. These interests help to group your personal interests and also allow you to connect with other Twiners that share your interests as well.

A Twine can include: Bookmarks, Pictures, Videos, and soon more. Also other Twiners then can leave comments on your Twines and the links to the content giving praise or criticism to those links. The power of Twine is where you can create Twines and share insights, links, posts, and other content within the twine. Others who are interested in the same topic can add comments, additional links, posts, blogs, videos, the list is endless.

Twine Moving in the Direction of the  New Semantic Web [you tube video].

To begin Twining go to Squidoo-HowtoTwine.

You can also get a quick overview of the most current Twine news from Marketing Direct Candice Noble as well as you can visit their Quick start Twine at Twine Get Started

Check out some of my and You Brand Twines:

The InternetGuru’s Favorite stuff Twine

YouBrandInc Twine

Niche Branding Twine

SWIX is like Google Analytics for social media. You wouldn’t run an important web-site without tracking your traffic patterns, nor should you invest in social media without understanding how it’s working for you.

Here is what I like about Swix:

• It allows you to have a dashboard of all your important numbers, such as total visits to your website, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, Facebook friends, Youtube subscribers, page rank, RSS subscribers, and much more.

Finally a social media dashboard

• It’s easy to use and set up, you essentially add a new pod (network) and it’s then part of your dashboard.

Swix allows you to set up Pods (accounts and networks) to track your social media activities.

• Ability to track ROI on a rudimentary level. (this isn’t a limitation on SWix it’s more of a limitation on how you need to track ROI and social media.)

Track ROI and social media. Also track campaigns and events.

• It allows you to run campaigns, such as messaging, or track traffic spikes around a particular event.
• Team setup, so if you have a team you can give access to reports and tracking.

These are the main features that I like but overall the ease of use and the ability to see all relevant information is what I like most about this analytic tool.

What I Wish It Had

• Tracking of interactions across social networks. Yes I know this is almost the holy grail of social tracking.
• Tracking of twitter mentions, this wouldn’t be that hard and is actually in a few applications I’m testing now.
• Ability to add your own manual updated tracking metric. For instance, I do a podcast, I’d like to be able to track subscriber numbers in this application, even it I have to enter it manually once a week.

Check It Out

This is a great application and if your looking for a good way to track progress of your social media outreach I would suggest you check out Swix, I can only seeing it getting better.

FollowWonk allows you to easily and quickly find your target market by searching Twitter user bio’s.  I like this tool better than others because it allows you sort your search, search by location, friend/follower counts, and displays the results in a very easy to use list.

I put togehter a quick video:

Mentioned in this video:

• http://www.FollowerWonk.com
• http://www.Twellow.com
• http://www.locafollow.com

To be fair this isn’t a new idea. You might have heard of the Firefox based browser Flock. While I tried to use Flock and really wanted to love it ultimately it just didn’t grab me.

What RockMelt Does Great

Being that the this is a chromium-based web browser, it just feels that it runs faster than both the latest versions of IE and FF. Beyond the speed what has struck me even more is how the Rockmelt changes the browsing experience.

If your like me, you might have a few browsers open, multiple tabs, etc. With this browser and the “edges” of apps and updates you feel as if all your main connections and favorite sites are within every window. This is what has surprised me most of all while using it in my primary browsing.

Social Connections

If you are a heavy user of both Twitter and Facebook then the integration with both these networks will be a great feature. Essentially on both edges of the browser there is a section called the “edge” (might of took them a while to come up with that one). Essentially you have a notification box that when you click it gives you the stream of updates and conversations.

Instant Update

You can also use the edge for your favorite sites or feeds. Ready for complete over the top plugs… maybe you want to follow your favorite Twitter list or follow the RSS feed of your favorite marketing blog or maybe how about your favorite new media podcast. You get the idea.

One advanced way you could use this is to create a Yahoo Pipes feed based on the top websites you visit. From there you can follow this feed in one of your edge boxes.

Easy Sharing of Stuff You Find

Sharing to your social channels is one click away. There is a button at the upper right that allows you to easily share an update to Twitter (multiple accounts) and Facebook. Plus if you have email connected such as Gmail you can easily send an update via email or even send a Facebook message.

What Rockmelt Could Do Better

The extensions could be handled a lot better. One thing I should mention if you use Chrome and have quite a few extensions installed you will have to re-install them for Rockmelt. You are able to pull in your bookmarks but will most likely have to rearange them if you are using your bookmark bar heavily.

Another thing that I wish I was able to do was turn off the notifications. These pop-up as you get a message or you have unread Facebook updates. While easy to ignore they can still be distracting when you are focused on other work or doing things such as screen captures or video conferencing.

What About Privacy?

From all communications I’ve seen from the company they do take privacy very seriously. They don’t retain browsing history but as with everything else (and we learn with Facebook every 3 months) all that can change.

[pro-player width='480' height="385' type='video' image='http://media.youbrandinc.com/blueprint/tweet-brand/FirstFrame.png']http://media.youbrandinc.com/blueprint/tweet-brand/tweet-brand.mp4[/pro-player]

Essentially it allows you to create your own application and communication with Twitter. This allows you to create a branded link for how you interact with Twitter.

If you didn’t watch the video above this tool essentially makes it easy for you to create your own branded link in the line below your Tweet. The example below you see that I sent the tweet below from YouBrandInc. When you click that link it goes to our website.

You can set this application to be any name that is not already registered with Twitter and link to anywhere you want.

It’s rather simple to set up and includes AIR application to connect to Twitter.

To get this tool visit this website here.

They include good walk throughs on setting up both their application and creating the authentication on Twitter.