The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success

Chapter 25. Publish

A significant number of tools in the social media ecosystem allow you to publish and distribute information to audiences narrow and wide. E-mail is a good example. How many newsletters do you typically receive each month via e-mail? If you're like most people in business, you probably receive more than you have time to read, yet there are probably a few that you take the time to keep up with and peruse. Why? Because the information is valuable to you. This makes newsletters via e-mail one of the easiest and most popular ways to reach employees and customers. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

This chapter introduces you to a number of tools, some of them very different from one another, that allow you and your company to create, manage, publish, and distribute content. To be fair, some tools profiled in other chapters could just as easily be classified in this chapter. Again, that's one of the problems with any classification system; there are exceptions. Rather than debate the exceptions, however, this chapter tries to present a reasonable lineup of tools whose common attributes and intended functions qualify them as publishing tools.

This chapter presents information on the following companies, tools, and applications:

• Blogger

• Constant Contact

• Joomla

• Knol

• SlideShare

• TypePad

• Wikia

• Wikipedia

• WordPress

As you read each profile, keep in mind that its features and functions may or may not be right for your particular business. Use the Tool Scorecard at the end of the chapter ...