Hello everyone! Scott here!

Every day I say I’m going to post what we have learned and what bumps we have hit here on this blog. But every day I don’t get quite that far down my To-Do list.

And guess what!? We’re shooting tomorrow! Yep, we’re just that crazy that we’ve started round two of our production cycle in early December in Canada. Lucky for us, Toronto is barely Canada on the best of days so weather wise we should be okay.

So wish us luck, but what I wanted to talk a bit about today was the tools we are using to run our transmedia. We’ve been pushing hard to add more and more live transmedia experience to our show, whether twitter or Facebook or whatever. And what we have discovered is… it’s hard.

And there aren’t many tools out there designed to do what we do – tell a story in real time using Social Media. And so through trial and error we are slowly figuring out what works for us. Here’s a list with some pros and cons…

TweetChat

http://tweetchat.com/room/tightsandfights

TweetChat takes your hashtag and uses it to make a chatroom that updates in real time. It’s pretty neat. We’re trying to use it for our live twitter performances. Sadly, the two times we have tried to make use of it, it hasn’t worked so well. The first time, all use of hashtags in Toronto didn’t work and we had to cancel our performance. The second time, it sucked in all the posts well enough, but it didn’t post them if you wrote them through the TweetChat. Very disappointing, but at least we kept going. We’re going to do some tests, but it still seems like the best way to have all the posts and a way for people to jump in all in one place.

HootSuite

http://www.hootsuite.com

Sure, I’m not cracking any secrets of the web by mentioning Hootsuite, but you what – Hootsuite is the only twitter client that doesn’t slow, stall or crash my computer.

The biggest problem is keeping an eye on our 16 twitter feeds, as well as 6 Facebook pages, 7 blogs, 8 YouTube channels and one website. It can be overwhelming. But let’s just stick to twitter for now. Hootsuite was doing well at first, even through I hadn’t quite figured out how to best organize it to see in a glance everything I need to see. But then they went to a paid model, so I went in search of a free client that replaced HootSuite. None of them did. To me, HootSuite’s killer feature is it’s easy to use scheduled tweets. And, oh yeah, it doesn’t crash.

I’ve gone back to the free version, which only allows you have 5 social networks. This limitation turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as it led me to try having two accounts. Nothing has made my life easier than using the two accounts to organize all those feeds. Character feeds go into one account, all other feeds into the other. It means lots less clicking around in slow loading tabs to see who is interacting to whom, and who is saying what. But that’s not all I use…

Seesmic Desktop

http://www.seesmic.com

Seesmic filled in for Hootsuite for a short time, and I fell in love with the one thing Hootsuite doesn’t have – having all your accounts updates dhow up in one column. So I can glance at it and see if anyone is talking to me (or my characters) and then I can dig into the individual account to talk back.

One of the smaller things I don’t like about it, there’s not much way to control what shows up in the constant visual twitter updates in the corner of my screen. Why can’t a twitter client realize there are some tweets I consider important and others I don’t need to know about?

The big drawback on Seesmic? Add too many columns and it drags your computer to a halt. Granted, some of the problems I thought I was having with it I traced to another program, so I’ll keep playing with it and if it turns out it wasn’t at all effecting my computer’s performance, I’ll let you know.

But without a way to schedule tweets, it can never be the only twitter client I use.

But the one thing that is the biggest (and most surprising help) is…

Yoono

http://www.yoono.com

It’s main purpose is be a twitter client type interface for YouTube, IM, Facebook and others, including twitter. It doesn’t really do that very well, in my opinion. It is its secondary function that has turned my life around.

Since Google and YouTube is now one, every time I need to log into a character’s YouTube page, it logs me out of gmail, google docs, etc. And it is a pain to go through the five steps required to log in to YouTube from a different account. With Yoono in my Firefox browser, there’s a drop down menu that not only lets me switch between YouTube account with a single click – each tab can be logged into a Google/YouTube account of its own! I can be logged into my Gmail and multiple character’s YouTube pages simultaneously. I can’t stress enough how this has simplified my daily work flow.

The same thing works for twitter. Before, to be logged into multiple Twitter accounts at once, I needed to use multiple browsers and even multiple computers! Now, with Yoono’s Firefox extension, I can log in to different Twitter accounts in each tab.

It doesn’t work flawlessly. Sometimes it seems to get confused over which account I want it to use. And you must remember to switch back to the global profile before logging out. But those minor problems don’t even begin to stack up against the added ease that Yoono has given me.

Those are the big tools that I’m using to help navigate all the networks we’re using. My system is continuing to develop, so I’ll post more here if something big gets added to my arsenal.

Gotta go! We’re shooting at first light (short days in December!) and the club music from downstairs is getting louder. I can’t decided which of those are better reasons to go home.