Fred Ducrot

5 Awesome twitter free apps to manage your social networks

With the rise of the importance of twitter as part of your professional and personal branding strategy, using the twitter native web interface is not the right way to go.

Instead, you can use great free to use apps that will make your life so much easier.

So here are the tools I use on a daily basis to manage my tweeter feed. Hope you like them as much as I do!

1. Flipboard: 

I already had the opportunity to write about flipboard. If you own an ipad, it is the perfect tool to read your tweeter feed in a pleasant and relaxing way as you have a preview of all urls included in the tweets you receive. Perfect for a sofa twitter session!

2. Bufferapp: 

Bufferapp is a FANTASTIC app. It has extensions that fit into Chrome and Firefox.  One single click automatically generates a tweet that will be scheduled according to your favorite timetable. This is so clever that I cannot work without it anymore. Two further comments:

• The bufferapp website enables you to organise by simple drag and drops the schedule of your tweets. You prefer having a great tweet sent at the best time for your followers? simply drag the tweet up or down your list. 
• I would also strongly recommend  having a look at the analytics tab that bufferapp  offers. It’s interesting to see the number of clicks, retweets you got! 

Last but no least, bufferapp is managed by two really cool guys very active on Twitter. I shall recommend you to subscribe to @joelgascoigne and @leowid. They regularly send some great articles and links.

3. Socialbro:

Oh my god. How did they do it???? This app is a chrome extension or a desktop program (available on every OS). Basically, this is the ultimate business intelligence tool for twitter. These guys have achieved what most large BI companies cannot do these days. A simple but rich, instantaneous but detailed BI tool. This app will dig deep into your twitter data and present it to you in a super easy to read and manage collection of graphs and visual indicators. 

It also must must be noted that it integrates with bufferapp by if you wish so. In short, it automatically defines in bufferapp the best timetable for you to send your tweets so that you reach a maximum of followers.

Socialbro is, you understood it by now, a must have

4. Hootsuite:

Hootsuite replaces the usual twitter interface. This is a very useful twitter editor to check your tweeter feeds and write tweets of your own. Its graphic interface is super slick and very customisable. You can also integrate your linkedin feed if you wish to. This is a great app. I used tweetdeck for a while (now owned by twitter) but I must say Hootsuite is so much better. 

It must be noted that Hootsuite has some great apps for Android and Ipad.

5. Itweetlive:

I have been trying this app for a few days now. If I find it sometimes slightly confusing to use, it has an amazing and simple functionality to search for topics on Twitter. These guys have developed an awesome search engine that queries twitter on the fly and enables you to dynamically refine your search by either adding new words or clicking on suggested words.

I wish I could have had such a search engine during my corporate years. I also wonder why Google is not looking at it. The google algorythm and this funtionality would make it the killer web search engine!

I strongly recommend you to have a look at it!

Do you have other ones to recommend? Please feel free to contact me at: @fredducrot

Flipboard: The ultimate tool for an entrepreneur?

I am fortunate enough to own an Ipad. I use my ipad to check my twitter feed as I monitor the startup and tech world as part of my day-to-day activities. Knowing what’s going on in the tech and entrepreneur world is a must when you are launching a web startup!

I have been using Flipboard (http://flipboard.com/) on my ipad for three weeks now and would like to share here why I believe it is the ultimate tool for an entrepreneur.

My linkedin and twitter feeds send me dozens of news per hour. Even when you use an app like hootsuite, it is difficult to see what article you should read.

To overcome this difficulty of sorting out the great stuff from the noise, flipboard is a game changer.

If you don’t know how it works here is a summary:

Flipboard organises and displays your various feeds (twitter, linkedin, facebook etc..) as an interactive magazine.

Where it makes a huge difference is that it resolves all the urls included in the posts you receive and presents the first few lines. Thus you can choose to read the rest of what becomes an article. This is such a huge time saving app! No more time wasted clicking on the url and waiting to see what comes up. In Flipboard, it’s real time!

Moreover, flipboard enables you to “turn” pages as with a real magazine. This makes this such a comfortable read like in the old days!

I find this tool so good that it could become even a justification for buying an ipad altogether!

Too old to become an entrepreneur?

These last few days, there has been quite a few tweets and blogs about entrepreneur age that are trying to identify the pros and cons of being older when starting a business:

- Jason Crawford’s blog: Click here

- Sarah Lacy’s blog: Click here

I find the subject quite interesting. Indeed I am long past my twenties… I am even closer to my forties than anything else (I am 38..).

So why have I taken the plunge of setting up a web startup? There are several reasons that you may agree with:

- First and foremost I have an idea that has been acknowledged as quite good by many professionals in the industry. Ideas are not the privilege of the younger ones!

- This idea comes from an extensive experience in consultancy. A younger person may not have had enough background to think about it. Funnily enough the young web designers and experts I have interviewed to setup the team were excited by the project but could not relate completely to it due to their lack of working experience.

- My startup being global I will rely on my international business experience to offer a product that is truly universal across the business world. A twenty years old geek has rarely travelled and worked in the UK, US, Asia and most European countries…

- My 15 years IT experience will enable me to execute and deliver by avoiding some of the traps that younger entrepreneurs may fall into. I have not “seen it all” but I have delivered (and sometimes failed) a few international projects during my 15 years as a consultant and IT professional.

- I have a family and a pretty large mortgage. So beyond the dream of delivering this product I have a real motivation to succeed and make this business profitable. I need the money to ensure that I keep on providing what my family needs on a day to day basis. I simply cannot live on French fries and burgers while coach surfing for the next 2 years!

That being said, young people are creative and fearless - that’s a real asset.

But wisdom and experience can also be powerful assets.

Two investors have already acknowledged that my profile and my age were an important part of their decision making process. This prove that you can raise funds even when you’re not the next 22 years old Mark Zuckerberg!

Dare, Do!: 8 tips for new entrepreneurs

Useful sites to benchmark web competition

I have spent the best part of January writing my business plan. Anyone who’s attempted to write such a document will know that it is not an easy task. The market research section is especially tricky.

I found myself spending quite a significant amount of time searching the web for information on potential competitors or other web startups. Thus, I’d like to share with you some tools I have used:

1 - Traffic analysis:

If you want to advertise on your website, you need to guess what the traffic will be based on what others do and how much market share you can grab. I used the following sites:

• Compete.com: provides free of charge analytics on unique visitors.
• quantcast.com: Very elegant and detailed. Free of charge analytics on unique visitors, visits and page views. Careful! By default, it presents this data for the US only. You have to change the parameter to global if you want worlwide stats.
• Alexa.com: Deemed by some as the “reference” on the web. I found it sometimes useful but plagued with useless information like regional ranking showing by default results for Peru or Romania….

2 - Information on competition:

It is quite time consuming to find relevant information on other startups. Here are some of the sites I have used:

• Wikipedia.org: I know this is not ground breaking news and Wikipedia can  sometimes be an untrustworthy source of information. Nevertheless, the interesting bit is at the bottom of a wikipedia page: The “Reference” section enables you to find a host of interesting articles and stumble upon some great stuff.
• quora.com: In the past I never used Quora. I found it very interesting and useful. Don’t forget to have a look on the right inside of the page in the “related questions” section. There is some great info in there!
• crunchbase.com: This website is a sort of database for technology companies. It provides good data especially on funding rounds for startups.

Last but not least, one should not forget that sometimes the data you are looking for is sitting on the site that that you are directly benchmarking.

So I could not emphasise more the fact that it is mandatory to read through the “about us”, “investors”, “press”, etc sections of most websites.

They hold tons of priceless information especially financial reports. They’re not only for accountants. When it’s a web company it can hold traffic analysis, market share and even more!

Is the web bad for you when you are launching a startup?

I am right in the middle of writing my business plan. Business plan is important and the market research section of the plan is critical. This is why I have been spending these last few days browsing the web in search of data and relevant information.

One can be only overwhelmed by the amount of information available on the net. But what I find the most difficult to work with is what I shall call “rebound”. You’re on a blog and then there are 10 links that are interesting and usually unrelated to you study but soooo interesting….

Thus you “rebound” from site to site and end-up wasting a couple of hours. So yes you found some other interesting stuff but you have not achieved you original target.

So, I had to define a methodology to keep moving forward and not become one of these internet addict spending their day browsing and never achieving anything.

1st - Switch off twitter. Twitter is evil and is great at the same time

2nd - If there is a link that interests me but is unrelated to my study, I open the link in a new firefox window or tab and keep it for later on.

3rd - I pause every 45 minutes to get a bit of fresh air so that I don’t get dragged into the vortex of multiple web sites

4th - I am trying to go the gym more often because sports helps you refocus on your target

So far it has worked pretty effectively even if sometimes temptation is hard to fight….

Do you expect a plumber to forge his tools before starting working on your sink?

One of the goal of my web startup will be to help professionals changing the way they work. I am seriously trying to work around these simple examples.

• Do you expect a plumber to have to forge his tools before starting to work on your bathtub leak? No but this is what is happening in most companies when it comes to writing deliverables

• Ask yourself this question: In your day to day job, what is the proportion of tasks being asked of you that are out of your core competencies? Probably between 20 to 30% of your time is spent dealing with budget, HR, forecast, regulation or process definition issues.

• Why Michelin starred chefs share their recipes through books, blogs or TV programs? Because they have understood that:

1. The recipe does not make the cook but greatly helps to reach a good result
2. A bit of self promotion never hurts
3. Sharing helps other professionals

Do you you agree with them? Do you recognise yourself or someone you know in these?