Reviews

Sarah Worsham / May 18, 2009

Need Quick Mobile Site? With Unity Mobile, Be Up in Ten Minutes

I played around with setting up a Unity Mobile site last week for a review I wrote over at New Media Hub. While the article is geared towards media publishers, I think it has some good info for anyone interested in creating a mobile website. And as the title of this article says, I was able to create one in about ten minutes.

Priced at $99/month, Unity Mobile provides all the tools for local media companies to create a mobile site fast. By using their templates, adding some images, text, and RSS feeds, a publisher can create and activate a mobile website in around 10 minutes. Revenue is generated via CPM or CPC based advertising networks with 50% of the revenue going to the publisher. While publishers cannot sell their own advertising, Unity’s system is ideal for local media who want to concentrate on delivering their content on mobile devices without worrying about finding advertisers. – Quick Mobile Site? Unity Mobile is up in ten minutes – Sarah Worsham – New Media Hub

You can try out Unity Mobile for free. They have 30 day trials, but even without the trial, you won’t be charged until your site actually goes live. If you happen to give Unity Mobile a try, I’d love to hear how it works for you.

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Sarah Worsham / Apr 20, 2009

Tr.im – Twitter Stats You Need

In my effort to find or create the perfect Twitter utility, I’ve been experimenting with various url shorteners to see what kind of statistics they can give me. Today I started playing with Tr.im and, so far, I’m pretty happy with the results. One of my requirements is that it work with Twitterfeed, which I use to send RSS feeds directly to my Twitter account. What I’m looking for in terms of statistics is how many clicks each url gets, and then an overview of clicks for all links.

Tr.im isn’t quite my perfect Twitter stats service, but it’s the best I’ve seen so far (other than getting some 503, service unavailable errors, which may be related to Twitter issues). I’m able to see the clicks on up to 15 tweets – or tr.immed urls, as they call them – from the dashboard, along with aggregated country information for those tweets.

The exciting part is when you drill down into one of your tweets. From the summary you can see the breakdown of humans vs. bots for the clicks (at least in their estimate), along with more detailed information about each of the human visitors, including location, operating system, client/web browser, and how long ago they clicked. On the timelines page, you can get a visual representation of when clicks happened for the first 72 hours (or at least you should, but it wasn’t working for me). Referrers will give you known websites that are referring to the url. Agents shows a breakdown of visitor browsers and operating systems (platforms) and the locations page will give you a breakdown of click location, similar to the summary (although now it includes bots).

Tr.im, which is part of the Nambu network (a twitter client, currently for Mac and iphone), also offers some additional features, including a Firefox extention, a Mac dashboard widget, bookmarklets, and ubiquity scripts. For Mac users, the dashboard widget is a really nice addition which frees up a tab in your web browser. I’ve only been using Tr.im for a few hours, so we’ll see how it handles my tweets throughout the day – and whether something better catches my eye.

Technorati tags: social media, twitter, business, trim, marketing

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Sarah Worsham / Mar 16, 2009

Connect With Nearby Customers with Nearby Tweets

Ever want to connect with people nearby that may be potential customers (or actual customers)? What about running promotions or events by using Twitter? Nearby Tweets give you a list of both nearby people on Twitter and what they’re saying. You can easily change the location and search radius if you’re interested in what’s going on in another location, which would be a great way to monitor conferences and events. Possibly the best feature is the ability to search for a keyword in a specific location. Using this feature, you could monitor what was being said about your company or product at a specific location. If you present at events or conferences, this would be an easy way to get instant feedback.

Nearby Tweets is easy to use and very intuitive. When you go to the site it already has a pretty good idea of where you are, but you can easily put in a specific address, radius and keywords. Just hold your mouse over the change location/add keywords button and an interface slides out where you can make changes and update the page. To help you understand how to use Nearby Tweets, they have pages for both personal and businesss uses. If you come up with a use not on the page, I’m sure Brian Cray would love to hear it.

Technorati tags: twitter, social media, social networking, business, marketing, nearby tweets

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