The Naked Pheasant

So – what is ‘The Gun Cabinet’? Well basically it’s all the weird and wonderful (mainly wonderful) things we encounter which either make our lives easier either as PR professionals, social media strategists, and occasional commentators, or as people who like to do clever / silly things with technology and online wizadry.

The links and tools we have here are all those we have been sent, stumbled on by accident, or saw someone else using and thought ‘i’d like a punt at that too’. If any of these are client related we WILL tell you, otherwise please consider this a compendium of clever, useful, insightful or inspiring links which we hope you’ll like too.

We’ll be developing examples of what can be done with some of these you might not be familiar with in due course, or explaining why we like them, and if there is anything we’ve forgotten, or you’ve done something with one of these you’d like to share, send it over and we’ll add it.

Keep an eye out for regular updates and examples of what we’re doing with these, but in the meantime here’s Things We Like – a.k.a. The Gun Cabinet

Presentation Tools
Animoto – A free tool, best used for creating quick, short videos from existing images/video footage which don’t require much text.

Stupeflix – Another, more flexible tool for creating professional looking video content from existing images or video.

SlideShare – Upload and share, publicly or privately, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents or PDF files with this free tool.

Xtranormal – Create fun animated movies from text

Prezi – Online presentation tool, allowing you to zoom and share content on a virtual white board to create dynamic, live presentations.

Twitter PPT Integration – Tools to integrate Twitter streams into your presentations

Yudu – A fun tool to help you publish digital magazines

Monitoring & Measurement

Google Analytics – Provides web analytics and insight website traffic

Trendrr – Track the popularity and awareness of trends across digital and social media

Ellerdale – A simple tool to help you manage up to the minute conversations around a brand, topic or whatever else

Mentionmap – A very simple tool to identify the characteristics of online influencers

Social Mention – Social media search engine with basic analysis

Board Reader – Simple search engine for forums and message boards

Social Media Map – ok, so it’s not a tool per se, but it’s a very good map of social media in 2010 (article)

Search

Technorati – Comprehensive tool to discover and measure blogs

Ice Rocket – Real-time blog search

SharpReader – RSS aggregator (article)

Spezify – A visual search engine, pulling in content from across various digital formats

SwiftRiver – A tool designed to consolidate the deluge of updates that flood the internet during a crisis (article)

Google Keyword tool – Provides keyword suggestions for Google Ad Words

Search based keyword tool – Provides keyword suggestions for Google Search Terms

Twitter tools

Tweet Level – Edelman’s tool to measure Twitter influence.

PeerIndex - a new tool that aims to measure an individual’s social media capital (article)

Tweet Feel – Real-time search of Twitter sentiment around any given topic

Listorious – A search engine for Twitter people search and lists, helping you to find relevant people

Collaborative Working

Imagination Cubed – Share ideas through this multi-user online whiteboard

Base Camp – Easy-to-use web based project management and collaboration tool

Images, Filming & Photography

Corbis – Comprehensive selection of royalty free images

Getty – Rights-managed or royalty-free photos, footage and music (disclosure: Client)

Other

Google Sidewiki – Allows you to publish helpful information about any website, within your browser

Pitch Engine – Helps you pull together traditional press release content into a social media release