iPads and the like

One of the things I willingly gave up upon choosing the life I have was access to the latest, greatest gadgets. If you know me, you probably know I enjoy gadgets of all types, particularly computer related, and especially the high quality type produced by Apple. My wife and I had iPhones in the states, and I considered other gadgets whenever I could (and because of my job then I had access to a lot).

Moving to South Africa changed that though. I’m fortunate to be in a position where, because of my role as Director of Technology Services, I need to stay up to a certain degree on what’s happening in tech land but I don’t have quite the freedom to explore. And certainly not the budget.

I was really blessed though when, because of some of the work I have done, someone blessed me with an iPad 2. This is an amazing little device (and one I wouldn’t have been able to get under other circumstances)! It can literally do at least 90% of what I did on my computer, and it’s much easier to tote around to meetings (I unfortunately find myself in too many of those) and the like. In the two weeks I’ve had it, I’ve already found myself reaching for it more than my computer (certainly more than I expected). For many people now I think it could be a viable replacement.

I’m also looking forward to testing it on the road. In a few weeks my wife and I and a few others are going on an exploratory trip in rural, southern Africa, and I’m working with them to develop a plan and process for remote data collection. Because of it’s price compared with similar solutions, it could be the perfect fit for this sort of work (having built in 3G is certainly a plus).

Anyways, I thought I’d share about a recent blessing and how we hope to see it used.

Timely: Reviewed

One of the things that our organization is looking into with increased interest is the importance of social media marketing. As a starting point, this primarily involves focusing on our facebook and twitter presence. There are a lot of tools out there designed to help you manage one or the other (or both!) and I’ve been looking at a lot of them.

The first I’m going to review is a lovely service from Flowtown called Timely. Timely focuses on one thing, and does so extremely well: scheduling tweets.

When first going to the site you have a simple page asking for a twitter username. After inputing your username, it does some “processing” and then tells you when it thinks your optimum tweet time is.

 

 

They don’t tell you exactly what formula they use to figure this out and instead just say:

We analyze all your tweets and figure out what times of day you get the best engagement, then we define these best times as “buckets”. Every account is unique.

My guess is that they look at (a) what time you typically get responses from followers, (b) where you live, (c) where your followers live, and (d) when your followers typically tweet. That’s all entirely conjecture though (but seems to make since). I’d be curious to know the algorithm though.

Anyways, what it is doesn’t necessarily matter. What does is whether it works or not. From my testing I’d say a resounding “Yes!” particularly for personal accounts. How it works is worth going into now.

After presenting you with optimum tweet times, you have the option of signing up. After this, you can start using the service to schedule tweets.

You have two basic pages to deal with: the scheduling page and the published page.

 

 

The scheduling page is above. Primary focus is given to composing tweets. You have the typical character countdown readily visible and then a large “Schedule” button and a slightly smaller “Post within 30 minutes” button. It’s easy enough as is, but there is one nice feature built in that you don’t even have to worry about — any link added in the tweet box is automatically shortened and, if you have a bit.ly account, it uses that so you can keep track of all of your tweet stats. You also get a simple stat box here as well as a look at your upcoming schedule. It’s all clean, simple and very easy to use.

 

 

The “Published” page is just as clean, simple and easy to use as well, with one annoyance: the giant suggested tweet advertising Timely. I hoped it’d go away after scheduling it once but no dice on that one. This page does though list your klout score, previous tweets and the stats associated with them. I enjoy seeing the “Reach” stat: it’s neat seeing how many others got your tweet in their stream.

Conclusion

I must say I really enjoy using Timely thus far. I like how easy it is. I like that it doesn’t have a heavy image focused layout — the page loads fast even on slow internet. I like that it focuses on a single thing and that it focuses on doing it well.

I also like that they limit scheduled tweets to 3 a day. At first I didn’t think I would but it makes sense. You don’t want to bombard your followers with an obscene amount of tweets after all. And if you are focusing on certain times of day, it makes sense to put your best thoughts forward then.

Besides the giant “advertise me” tweet box, there wasn’t much I don’t like. It’s already made its way into my daily routine.

BUT, I don’t think I’d use it at the organizational level. You can add multiple twitter accounts (a plus if you are tweeting for your organization) but I think there are tools out there that incorporate the scheduling piece as well as a host of other features that I don’t necessarily care about at the personal level but would at the organizational level. We are looking for something with a bit more “oomph” — something that actually shows your feed, that has built in re-tweeting and quoting capabilities, something that keeps more in depth stats and lets you easily expand your audience. There are tools out there like this, some of which I’ll review, so having another site to go to isn’t really appealing.

For personal use though, it definitely gets 5 out of 5 stars.

SaaS for Small Non-Profits in Africa

My “new” job (I guess it’s not super new…I’ve been at it for a little under a year now) has afforded me a lot more time to explore web apps and the “software as a service” (SaaS) model. I’ve come into an office making use of very little in the way of technology and am doing my best to explore the possibilities of tools that would (a) increase our efficiency, (b) improve the quality of our interactions with people locally and abroad, (c) provide cost effective solutions to tedious problems and (d) do this all in a manner not over taxing to people who may not enjoy or be used to using software.

To give examples of what I mean, before I stepped into my role there was little in the way of a data backup plan (this still needs work), contacts are stored in an old physical book that is following apart, and any time a mass email is sent out everyone scrambles to find all of the addresses to send to.

There are other issues that need dealing with as well — this is just a sampling — but it (hopefully) gives you an idea of why SaaS is a serious consideration.

In the search for tools to use I’ve gotten to experiment with a lot and so thought I’d start a series reviewing them from the perspective of a small non-profit working in Africa. This might give a bit of a different review than typically written as multiple factors will come into play:

  • Ease of use for non-westerners and those for whom English is not their primary language.
  • Price, which is very important for a non-profit with little operating budget.
  • Access speed locally in Africa (and along with this, reliance on bandwidth heavy images).
  • Does it solve an issue we have in a way that we would (does the tool fit our needs or are we trying to fit the tool to our needs?)?

These are a smattering of the questions that I have to ask before considering presenting a tool to our leadership. Hopefully you’ll find these reviews interesting and, if you are the developer(s) or owner(s), you won’t take offense if we don’t like your app due to our unique circumstances.