So why is it so difficult to measure ROI when it comes to social media? Firstly, it’s difficult to measure the quantitative nature of human interactions and conversation. It can also be problematic to measure the benefits of elements such as time with brand, brand positioning and the building of trust. The benefits of using social media are generally qualitative in nature – for example, social media campaigns can increase loyalty and influence – and as a result can be problematic to monitor. Social media has many different aspects and as such it’s impossible to measure ROI in just one way. Breaking down these qualitative attributes into understandable chunks that we can measure, understand and translate easily into a business context is an essential step in measuring social media ROI.

Here’s is a list of a some tools and services available. If I’ve missed any obvious ones, or indeed obscure ones, please feel free to leave a comment.

• Argyle Social is less about monitoring trends and sentiment, but more about aggregating your social media accounts and analysing only hard numbers and direct outcomes of your campaigns.
• bit.ly is a ubiquitous URL shortener that not only makes it easier to share links, it allows you to track your own links (or your competitors) by simply adding a + to the end of any bit.ly URL. This feature will let you view how many clicks you’ve received, top referrers, and the location of the clicks.
• Cymfony is a social listening tool that pulls information from traditional media, social media and proprietary data to provide insight, identify influencers and answer your specific market research questions.
• Google Alerts, albeit not strictly speaking a social media tool, setting up Google Alerts for your name, your company name and your products this simple step will help keep you in touch with what people are saying about you and your brand.
• Involver Audience Management Platform offers a dashboard that manages all of your social media applications, monitors communication, and provides analytics based on actionable measures so you can see the true ROI of your actions.
• MediaVantage is designed for PR professionals. The tool gives you instant access to TV, print, online and social media content that is relevant to your brand’s reputation, your industry, or your competition.
• Networked Insights’ “Social Sense” product line offers simple social media listening tools to monitor what is being said about your brand and your industry. Their “Social Sense TV” product allows you to survey the buzz surrounding specific TV shows so that you can make your traditional media spend more efficient.
• Objective Marketer is a site that allows you to create the content and strategy and just steps in to objectively analyse how people have interacted with the content you have posted. By measuring clicks, views, likes and more, the Objective Marketer discovers trends and finds out what is working for your brand and what’s not.
• Radian6 is one of the most popular social media monitoring sites. Radian6 scans an impressive number of social networks, news sites, blogs, discussion boards and video and photo sharing sites in order to find out what people are saying about your brand in these channels. The data is analysed and delivered to your dashboard, complete with presentation ready graphs.
• Spiral16 is a monitoring tool that scours the entire web, not just social channels, to collect digital content about your brand. Their findings are then presented a unique 3D Virtualisation that allows you to quickly find the information that is relevant to you and your brand.
• Spredfast is an analytics platform. Spredfast tracks and measures your campaign’s effectiveness based on content output, how many people were reached and if they were engaged. They also offer a benchmarking feature that allows you to compare the effectiveness of your campaign against other strategies in your industry or against similar campaigns in different industries to see where you stack up.
• SWIX is a tracking tool that goes beyond clicks and measures how much people are engaging with your social media content. SWIX shows you your performance on over 70 distinct audience and engagement metrics across 20 of the most popular social media platforms.
• Trackur monitors who is talking about you and what they’re saying on the web based upon a set of keywords you enter. You can see how influential the people and sources talking about you are so you can man- age your reputation accordingly.
• Trendrr is a site that analyses blogs, micro-blogs, search engines, social networks and even video to see what people are saying about your brand and provides numerical analysis to help you understand what it all means.
• Viral Heat is an analytics-based social listening tool that shows you more than a stream of mentions, but allows you to see each mention and analytics about it as well as overall trends concerning your brand.
• Visible Technologies is a monitoring tool that provides you with a dashboard of analysed data on what people are saying about your brand and helps companies delegate responses and workflow.

Here’s is a list of a some of the services available. (If I’ve missed any obvious ones, or indeed obscure ones, please feel free to leave a comment).

• BackTweets is used to search for particular links on Twitter. It also has an advanced search option, which makes your searching more flexible.
• Emotion Stream is a data mining research project that searches for emotion patterns on Twitter. The goal behind this project is to develop algorithms to find trends about what is making people happy in real time by using Twitter data.
• Klout allows you to track the impact of your opinions, links, and recommendations across your social graph. It collects data about the content you create, how people interact with that content, and the size and composition of your network. From there, it analyses the data to find indicators of influence and helps you interpret the data.
• Monitter, as its name implies, is a simple Twitter monitor that let you “monitter” the Twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are talking about in real time.
• Spy is an easy-to-use tool that visualises the conversations on Twitter, Flickr, blogs and other social networks and enables you to listen in on the interactions you’re interested in.
• Twazzup is a dashboard that monitors Twitter; it will tell you every time your keywords are mentioned in a tweet. It will also categorise your results by link popularity, contributors, tagging clouds, and users. Unique features like avatar mouse-overs that give more details about that user’s relevant tweets make Twazzup a surprisingly powerful and valuable social media monitoring tool.
• TweetBuzzer lets you see which brands get talked about most on Twitter. You can see and track the top tweeted brands in a 24 hour, 7-day or 30-day period.
• TweetEffect lists all the Twitter updates that had an effect on your follower numbers. Updates that made people leave are displayed in red, others in black.
• Tweet Grader is a tool from HubSpot that allows you to check the power of your Twitter profile. It looks at a variety of factors including the number of followers, power of those followers, and the level to which you are engaging the community. It takes just a few seconds to generate your free report.
• TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis algorithms to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. The service analyses your last 1000 tweets and works best on users who have posted more than 1000 updates. It also works best on accounts that are operated by a single user and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than as a content distribution platform.
• Tweettronics is a tool to analyse, discover, track and engage with Twitter conversations about your products, brands and topics.
• TwiBuzz is a tool that tells you how often people are using Twitter to tweet your favourite keywords in real time. It plots the current and historical tweet rate in tweets per minute (TPM) for your search terms. TwiBuzz tracks a predefined list of terms, but you’ll find that it’s easy to add to that list. Once a term is added, TwiBuzz will have its first TPM data point for that query within a few minutes.
• Twitalyzer is a tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on dozens of useful measures of success in social media. This powerful tool can help you measure the influence, popularity, velocity, and generosity of your Twitter account.
• Twitscoop is a real-time visualisation tool, which enables users to “mine the thought stream”, provided by Twitter. Its algorithm cuts every English non-spam tweet into pieces (“tags”), and ranks them by how frequently they are used versus normal usage. It detects growing trends in real time, identifies breaking news, and monitors specific keywords. It also creates custom graphs that display the activity for any given word on Twitter.
• Twitter Counter is a great Twitter service that offers updated statistics of your followers, the users you’re following, and daily tweets. You can also compare absolute growth of multiple twitter accounts or contrast them with your competitors’ expansion, enabling you to track, measure and redesign your strategy.
• Twitturly tracks the URLs flying around the Twitterverse and provides a quick, real-time view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Each time someone tweets a URL to his or her followers, Twitturly takes note of it and applies it as a vote for that URL. The more votes a URL has in the last 24 hours, the higher it ranks on Twitturly’s Top 100.

Define the Objective

Don’t let Nestle’s Facebook Page issues happen to you. Determine how you want to portray your brand socially. You should also develop a plan for engagement in more routine situations. This includes knowing the goals, knowing the business and knowing the voice.

Before beginning anything, the first step is discussing the goals and objectives at the highest level. It may sound simple, but the most important attribute to display here is the ability to listen. Then base the strategy around several big ideas that help solve the challenges unique to each project.

Consider these scenarios: when a blogger raves about your product, how do you turn this goodwill into collaboration that benefits both parties? How do you create customer advocacy programs? How do you internalise and execute on feedback about your, or your competitor’s product? How do you deal with disaffected customers? What about irate bloggers? You need to think through all these scenarios and figure out how you will activate the right resources within the organisation.

Decide Where and What to Monitor

The notion of the social customer should reflect not only your current paying customers, but also potential customers and industry thought leaders. Monitoring can help you figure out where these people are, and therefore what channels are best for you to listen to and engage.

Monitoring is keyword-based, and thus selection of the right keywords is important. At the very least, you should be tracking your company name, brand names, product names, names of key executives, competitor names, competitive product names, industry keywords, and your tagline or most recent marketing efforts (e.g. Did you run a special promotion for St Valentine’s Day, Mother’s day or August Bank Holiday?).

Implement

Even the best plans go unrealised without resources. Implementation is something to think about on the front end. Many people consider social media “free”, but in reality it’s a real commitment and requires a lot of time and attention.

Test and Track

After you implement, you need to make sure you’re paying attention to successes, failures and your brand perception.

Conversations are happening across many channels and social networks all over the world. To make matters even more complicated, the signal-to-noise ratio is not in your favor. This is why your monitoring must be intelligent and actionable. You should be triaging all the social media messages that come across your field of vision, so that you can focus on what’s most important.

Some good tools for keeping track of your brand online include:

• Alterian
• Brandwatch
• Google Analytics
• Radian6
• Sprout Social
• Trackur
• Visible Technologies

In Analytics, as in general web terminology, a domain is the name of a website, such as simonwhatley.co.uk or google.com. You should create a separate Analytics account for each domain. A profile, on the other hand, is a set of specifications for tracking traffic on a single domain. You can think of a profile as a single set of rules for Analytics to use in processing the traffic on a domain. Since you can create 50 profiles in a Google Analytics account, multiple profiles are a good way to view your data through different lenses and isolate certain segments.

Profiles are closely associated with filters, which can be used to include, exclude or change the representation of certain information in a report. Filters aren’t necessarily required, but using them will help you define what data you see and how you see it. Since filters affect the way data is displayed in your profiles, it is important to get them set up as soon as possible. Filters added after your account begins collecting data will not affect your old data.

This is semi-advanced stuff, but just remember to leave at least one “real” profile where you don’t filter at all — I generally call this profile “No Filters”. That way, you can work on the others without making mistakes on the data that you are relying on to guide your website decisions.

Profiles and Filters

It doesn’t matter in which order you set up your profiles and filters, but you need to do them in the same sitting.

Here are some important filters I create by default:

1. Banner Adverts — Track visitors who enter your site via your banner advertising campaigns. You can use this profile to compare analytics provided by the website on which your advert is displayed.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
   • Filter Pattern: banner
   • Case Sensitive: No
2. Email Campaigns — Track visitors who click through to your site via one of your email campaigns. This is especially useful if you’re using email campaign managers such as Campaign Monitor and MailChimp that allow for Analytics tags to be automatically applied to email links.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
   • Filter Pattern: email
   • Case Sensitive: No
3. Direct Visitors — What are the numbers of visitors who directly type your URL into the browser address bar to get to your website? This is an interesting profile since many users automatically use a Google Search as a way to navigate to your website, even if they know your URL.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Campaign Source
   • Filter Pattern: direct
   • Case Sensitive: No
4. New Visitors — How many visitors are new to your website is the first step to working out how to “convert” more visitors.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Visitor Type
   • Filter Pattern: new
   • Case Sensitive: No
5. Returning Visitors — An important segment, returning visitors like your website and the content or products it provides.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Visitor Type
   • Filter Pattern: returning
   • Case Sensitive: No
6. Referrals — Where have people come from and in what numbers? Knowing that 1000 visitors came from xyz.com is important for any marketing strategy.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
   • Filter Pattern: referral
   • Case Sensitive: No
7. Internal Visitors — “Big Brother” is watching! This profile is not entirely necessary, but is useful for determining how people in your organisation are using your website.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Visitor IP Address
   • Filter Pattern: (Use regular expressions to set rules for different IP exclusion and inclusion scenarios e.g. 192\.168\.0.*)
   • Case Sensitive: No
8. Overall (External) Visitors — Similar to the “No Filters” default profile I have set up, this one serves as a sanity check for visitor numbers that are not part of your organisation.
   • Filter Type: Predefined, exclude, traffic form the IP addresses, match
   • IP Address: (Use regular expressions to set rules for different IP exclusion and inclusion scenarios e.g. 192\.168\.0.*)
9. Organic Search — Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages (SERPs) that appear because of their relevance to the search terms. Understanding how many visitors find your via organic results as opposed to paid results will help you determine where to concentrate your advertising efforts.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
   • Filter Pattern: organic
   • Case Sensitive: No
10. Paid Search — Commonly known as Pay Per Click (PPC) or Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising, popularised by Google AdWords and Google AdSense. Websites that utilise these will display an advertisement when a keyword query matches an advertiser’s keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to or above organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere on a content site.
    • Filter Type: Custom include
    • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
    • Filter Pattern: ppc|cpc
    • Case Sensitive: No
11. Organic and Paid Search — This is a sanity check profile to include all search engine traffic.
    • Filter Type: Custom include
    • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
    • Filter Pattern: ppc|cpc|organic
    • Case Sensitive: No
12. Social Networks — A late addition to my analytics profiles, but an important one nonetheless. The ubiquity of social networks as a communications medium and understanding traffic from such sources is as important as understanding visits from search engines. Social networks such as Facebook and more recently Twitter, include their own advertising platforms and as such understanding the traffic from these sources is important for marketing more effectively.
    • Filter Type: Custom include
    • Filter Field: Campaign Source
    • Filter Pattern: bebo|facebook|friendfeed|friendster|hi5|imeem|linkedin|meebo|myspace|orkut|plaxo|twitter
    • Case Sensitive: No
13. Social Bookmarks — This is largely the same as the social network filter, albeit I have chosen to separate out social bookmarking sites specifically.
    • Filter Type: Custom include
    • Filter Field: Campaign Source
    • Filter Pattern: del\.icio\.us|delicious|digg|reddit|stumbleupon
    • Case Sensitive: No

If there are inaccuracies in the above list, just give me a shout, otherwise, I’m happy to hear your own tips and experiences.

For a beginner, Google AdWords can be a little daunting to start with, so below I list some tips and tricks that have served and continue to serve me well whenever I setup and manage a campaign.

1. Don’t use broad keyword matching — At least not to start off with. What’s broad matching? “If you include general keyword or keyword phrases-such as tennis shoes-in your keyword list, your adverts will appear when users search for tennis and shoes, in any order, and possibly along with other terms.” With expanded matching it becomes even harder to know when your keywords will show, because Google will pick them algorithmically. Broad match is usually used by experienced advertisers looking to save time (usually with a long list of negative keywords) or by lazy advertisers, who may not have the time or the inclination to target their campaigns. Broad matching can also be the right way to go for parts of certain kinds of campaign, but wading straight into it can be dangerous.
2. Use dynamic titles in your adverts — Dynamic titles are easy, they don’t cost anything and they usually have a good effect on CTR and conversion rates. The phrase that the searcher uses in their search will come up as the the title of your advert. This saves you having to create an individual advert for each keyword and means that your ad will be more targeted. In the title field of your ad simply put {keyword:your default title here}. The default title is in case the search phrase is too long for the title field or if AdWords can’t display the search for some other reason.
3. Use global negatives to prevent advert duplication — If you’re selling something, you don’t want people finding your advert if they’re searching for free stuff. This sounds obvious, but do some searches and you’ll see it happening. Use the word ‘free’ in your campaign global negatives. You can also use this for other words you don’t want to turn up for. Using negative keywords is especially important if you’re using broad matching.
4. Turn off content targeting and search network — Do you know where to look at these adverts? If the answer is a resounding “no”, leave them alone until you feel confident that you know where they’ll be showing and that you can make them work — get comfortable with Google SERPs first. Conversion rates and CTR‘s change dramatically for each search property, not to mention content targeted adverts. Get acquainted with Google before you move on to the others.
5. Test different advert-copy and positions — How much of a difference will being in the first position, as opposed to the second, third or sixth position make, for your net profit? The answer is that it depends on your creative, industry and who else is bidding on your keywords. The bottom line is that you should know. Test your creative in each position and work out where it will be most effective, from an ROI point of view. Remember also that the AdWords ranking algo works on a CPC x CTR basis (it’s actually more complicated than that, but that gives an idea as to why out of two adverts with similar CPC‘s, one will be higher because of a higher CTR.) You can also test your creatives. Write several different adverts and set them to run evenly (Google will run the one which preforms best by default, but you can set them to run evenly in your campaign settings). The creative which gives you the highest ROI is the one you should go with. You should probably run this kind of test for more than just a day.
6. Optimise your destination URLs and landing pages — The landing page is the page which the person who clicked on your advert will see when they come through to your site. Don’t use your homepage as your landing page unless it deals only with selling the product you’re advertising. For example, if you’re selling widgets, optimise a page on your website with information regarding that widget, this could be a product page on your website, or a specific page for the advertising campaign.
7. Track conversion and ROI — Track everything. Google will track impressions, clicks and click through rate. Just because an advert has a high CTR doesn’t mean that it is making you money. Use Google’s own conversion tracking codes and link AdWords with Analytics. If you don’t know how each keyword is preforming, then you won’t be able to optimise your campaigns. Turn off the keywords that aren’t working well and invest more in the keywords which are.
8. Work out your CPA — How much is each sale costing you? Are your Google AdWords listings preforming as well as your Yahoo! listings? Your Bing listings? Your offline marketing? You should know how much you’re paying for each order, sale, download or enquiry on each channel — only then will you be able to set CPA targets to work towards and know which channel is best for you.
9. Don’t enter into bidding wars with your competitors, find a niche — It is easy to get into bidding wars with your competitors. You want to be number one and so does your competitor. The best thing to do is to take a step back, ten deep breaths and consider how important it really is to be in the number one spot. If you can justify it, fine but otherwise: let your competitor be number one, slot into the number two slot and wait. If you have a better product, your click-through rate will get you to the top – and you’ll still be paying the same as you were in the second position. More and more people are using automated bidding software. This software will update at a set interval to keep the ad in the desired position. Doing battle with this kind of software is even more frustrating and less rewarding than trying to outbid a competitor.
10. Set a weekly budget and stick to it — When you’re first starting out this is really important. AdWords is addictive, and like anything else addictive, it can quickly get out of hand. A keyword may convert like nobody’s business one day and die the next. Make sure you know a keyword is working — more importantly, know why it is working — before you invest more.
11. Geo-target your adverts — Geo-target your adverts to the relevant audience. It can be done when you set up a new campaign and in your campaign settings. If you want to show on google.com that’s fine, but remember that you can geo-target to individual countries and even cities (you can target regions in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and the Netherlands). The more targeted users feels that your ad is, the more likely they are to click on it.
12. Organise your adverts into logical groups — This will make it easier for you to know what is doing well and what isn’t — especially a year later. If you’re selling widgets have a campaign not just for widgets, but for each brand of widget, and then an ad-group for each widget model.
13. Keep a close eye on what your competitors are doing — Is your competitor doing something better than you? What keywords do you share with your competitors? Can you discern their strategy? Do they use automated bidding software? Do their landing pages have some magic which you should be emulating? This is the sort of information you can find out and the kind of information that you need to know.

If there are inaccuracies in the above list, just give me a shout, otherwise, I’m happy to hear your own tips and experiences.

As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy. Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality. We look forward to make it globally available to our users in the coming weeks.

This was an unexpected move, but possibly a very smart one by Google, which aspires to turn its Analytics product into an “enterprise-class web analytics solution.” Many analysts will see the creation of a browser plugin to opt-out of Analytics counterintuitive. Rationalising web analytics is already hard enough, but if you now need to factor in a proportion of people who may have opted-out, it will create a minefield of doubt. Furthermore, if people are able to opt-out of Google Analytics, will enterprises want to use it as an analytics solution?

It is safe to assume that Google do not want to kill one of their key products, which sits neatly between their search and advertising businesses. Indeed Google aren’t the first to create and opt-out, with Omniture and Webtrends having already created a cookie-based solution.

So why shouldn’t you be too worried about Google’s plugin?

• Opt-out does not signal a death knell for data gathering. Although some people will undoubtedly be concerned about tracking and therefore download the plugin, the vast majority of users will not. Furthermore, it is the trends in analytics that are important rather than absolute numbers. Analysts will simply need to study, manage and quantify the resulting bias. Such issues are analagous with a user deleting cookies or disabling JavaScript in their browser.
• Good privacy management reinforces trust in a brand that has been under attack over the amount of data it collects on its users. This in turn will drive long-term acceptance of Google products and enhance its earning potential. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, this move shows good faith to regulators and sets the stage for Google Analytics to operate safely within the containts of more stringent privacy regulations in the United States and more importantly Europe. If Google Analytics is allowed to operate freely on this basis, it may boost usage and advertising revenues, which in turn will maintain it as an important product for Google.
• Opt-in customers are better customers because they provide an accurate picture of how they use your website and therefore are key in helping you improve the user experience. Focusing your efforts on those who are willing to be measured may enhance the achievement of site goals.

How should you prepare for the launch of the plugin?

• Benchmark your data (traffic, visitors etc) before and after the release of the opt-out plugin. That way, you will be able to determine the potential bias between the figures and adjust the reports accordingly.
• Understand how to accommodate the opt-out bias in your reports and determine which reports may need recalibration.
• Understand how the change in your Google Analytics metrics may compare to or impact upon 3rd party metrics, for example those used to calculate advertising revenue.
• Determine whether announcing the possibility of your users opting out will enhance the trust of your website, with the view to potentially alerting to your users that they have such an opportunity.

This move by Google is likely to set the trend amongst Analytics providers since online privacy is a major issue. Most modern browsers include an “incognito” setting, which allows for private browsing, therefore it stands to reason that the analytics providers will follow Google’s lead, even if it is only a cynical attempt to reassure users and maintain market share.

]]> http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/google-announces-plans-to-offer-a-google-analytics-opt-out/feed 0 http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/great-adobe-air-applications-to-check-out http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/great-adobe-air-applications-to-check-out#comments Wed, 19 Mar 2008 09:43:25 +0000 Simon http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/?p=472 Since the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) was released at the end of February, we now have a stable platform on which to build desktop applications with our existing web skills. A number of people have already started and the Adobe AIR Marketplace is filling with AIR applications by the day.

So what is the big deal? The Adobe marketing team state that:

The Adobe AIR runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems. Adobe AIR offers an exciting new way to engage customers with innovative, branded desktop applications, without requiring changes to existing technology, people, or processes.

What AIR applications should you check out?

What is intriguing is that all the tools I have chosen are generally useful tools for the developer or designer, with the exception of twhirl, which is a social-interaction tool. I’m looking forward to when other, less developer-centric tools become freely available. AgileAgenda has taken the lead with this respect, albeit not freely available, as has eBay desktop, but I would like to see examples from the BBC in the form of a desktop BBC iPlayer or maybe a Flickr image browser, del.icio.us bookmark reader, RSS aggregator and a Picnik image editor.

Analytics Reporting Suite

The Analytics Reporting Suite, by Nicolas Lierman, brings Google Analytics to the desktop. It uses it’s own custom API to interact with Google and nearly implements all the features of Analytics.

For website owners this is a must-have application. Like the twhirl AIR application below, it is a fantastic example of what can be achieved with Flex and AIR. Measuring visitor trends and traffic are essential tasks to managing and improving a websites performance. The Analytics Reporting Suite allows you to configure multiple Google’s Analytics accounts and access the web-based suite’s plethora of features via a desktop application. The application displays integrated graphs and animations via a tabbed interface, which allows you switch between a number of reports. These reports can then be saved as a PDF, Excel or XMLdocument, or printed.

You can download and install the application from the About Nico website.

twhirl twitter Client

twhirl, by Marco Kaiser, is probably the most popular desktop client for the twitter micro-blogging service. Most of the features available on the twitter website are accessible through twhirl, plus, a lot of usability enhancements have been added to make it easier to manage multiple accounts. This is great for those who want to separate business and personal accounts they may have.

The twhirl application is a great example of how AIR can bring web applications to the desktop; it can dock to the system tray, display message alerts and you can configure the applications opacity when not focused (great if you like Mac and Vista-styled themes). The application allows you to search twitter users, view their timelines, add friends, view followers, delete tweets and much much more. Twhirl automatically fetches your friends’ status updates, direct messages and replies, whilst also colour coding different types of messages and alerting you to messages both audibly and visually.

The twhirl application is skinnable and comes with several built in skins with which you can customise the application. All-in-all twhirl is not only one of the best twitter clients, but AIR applications.

You can download and install the application from the twhirl website.

Kuler Desktop

Adobe kuler is the first web-hosted application from Adobe Labs designed both to stand alone and to complement Adobe Creative Suite software. Built using Adobe Flash and ActionScript 3.0, kuler is all about colour: colour for exploration, inspiration, experimentation and sharing. Kuler is clearly targeted at the designer, but anyone interested in colour will benefit from its use.

You can download and install the application from the Adobe Labs website.

WebKut

WebKut is a web screenshot tool that allows you to capture web pages, or parts of them in a very simple way. It provides you with 3 capture options: the entire page, the current view, or only a selection. This little application proves particularly handy for those presentations or projects that need great visuals from the web.

You can download and install the application from the WebKut website.

RichFLV

RichFLV, by Benjamin Dobler, lets you edit FLV files. The key features include reading FLV metadata, read and edit cuepoints, cut FLV files, convert the sound from an FLV to MP3 format, convert an FLV to an SWF … and much more.

You can download and install the application from the Adobe AIR Marketplace website.

SearchCoders Dashboard

This Flex-based chat widget is designed with programmers in mind. The code input feature allows developers to chat about code without disrupting the conversation.

You can download and install the application from the SearchCoders website.

Pownce

Much like twhirl in look, feel and ease-of-use, but with a slant towards productivity rather than micro-blogging, Pownce is a way to keep in touch and share things with your friends or colleagues. You can send people files, links, events, and messages and then have real conversations with the recipients. This is a great collaboration tool and was one of the first services to really embrace AIR as an application architecture, which could realise their service as a desktop client. Everything that is available via the Pownce website is also available via the client application, except and possibly importantly, the ability for the user to amend their account settings and add friends to your network; this still has to be done via the website.

For a small annual amount, Pownce offers a paid-for service which will eliminate adverts from your profile and allow you to send huge file sizes (100MB) and customise the theme of your Pownce.

Pownce also offers Drupal integration and a mobile application, which works with the iPhone, BlackBerries and many more ‘internet-ready’ mobile devices.

You can download and install the application from the Pownce website.

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