September 9, 2011

One of the most popular conference presentations that I’ve ever given in terms of the audience reaction at the end of the session was a session entitled ‘A toybox of tools to enhance your online communications’. It was an indulgent session that threw strategy out of the window for a while and just looked at some cool and useful (and mostly free) online tools that you could use to enhance your marketing and communications activities. I’ve been asked to repeat that session a fair few times since I first did it (incidentally it was also the first time I ever used prezi, one of my all time favorite online tools). The attention that I got from that session and the requests for more since have left me suddenly realising that this should be a regular theme for my blog…

And so I give you Tracy’s Friday Favorites…

From now on, every Friday I shall aim to share with you a cool/useful tool, site or resource that you can use to add value to your marketing-communications or other engagement activities, or even just for your own self interest. These will be randomly picked and shared, and will swing enormously from stuff that is mindblowingly useful to stuff that is mindnumbingly useless (but nevertheless cool). Just a little fun for a Friday, but hopefully with something useful to it.

So, this week I am kicking off with a fairly well known site, a much-loved one and one that did indeed feature in my ‘Toybox’ session two years ago, but I still love it and use it as much now as I did then: Wordle.

Wordle.net is a site that you can dump in a random selection of text to create beautiful word clouds. You can manipulate the word clouds, changing the size of words, the colours, fonts and layouts. I’ve seen these used in marketing and communications, and also seen them used regularly in reports as a creative way of sharing feedback about an organisation, product or idea.

I’m redeveloping my personal website at the moment (tracyplayle.com) and used this to drop a nice little wordle in about things I like. Silly, but I’m sure you can come up with a world of other wordle uses.

 

And here’s a little 2 min video showing how easy it is to create one:



I have a fair few ideas and sites already in mind to share with you in future Friday Favorites, but I’m also very happy to receive suggestions for others that you’ve found that you think I should blog about. Or if you’re a company launching a cool site or product that you’d like me to review, then send it through. You can either email them to me (tracy@picklejarcommunications.com) or tweet me (@picklejar).