When I first heard about Commun.it I didn't believe all the good things that I was told about it. But now, after I've been using it for a couple months, I can definitely say that it is a useful tool.First of all, let's look at Commun.it website. It says that this service:
1) helps you have meaningful personal relationships that help you achieve your business goals;
2) helps you focus on your highest level relationships. It helps you define your influencers and see who supports you.
3) helps you to be productive without adding extra stress. It's not a secret that sometimes social web can feel overwhelming, so Commun.it helps to minimize stress and gain the necessary control over your network.
When you log in to Commun.it you will see that your screen is divided into three parts. The first part has the following menu:
1. Build relationships:
The High value members category divides into three subcategories: most engaged members, supporters and influencers. It also has starred members category (in case you have starred anybody. Some of the info I get about these members is pretty obvious, but it helps me remember about these people and thank them for impact upon me, my networking, my freelance career and my life! I can send tweets to them right from the app which is very comfortable.
2. Manage:
The categories are: consider to follow, consider to unfollow, new followers and new unfollowers. I really like this part, though I don't agree with all the suggestions of the system. When you see a suggestion that you definitely don't agree with you can hide it. If you hide somebody's account, you won't see it in any other lists.
3. Monitor engagement.
Here you can add items (hashtags, keywords) that you'd like to monitor. The system finds the tweets with these hashtags and if you click on a hashtag you can see the profiles that tweeted about it. I really like this part because it helps me monitor retweets of my blog posts when there's no mention of my profile in the tweet. That way I get a better picture of how the content I create is shared and find new relevant Twitterers to follow ;-)
4. Discover new leads. Here you can add keywords to search for relevant people based on their profile, interests and conversations in Twitter.
The second part of the screen has pictures and brief details of the accounts in each category and in the third part you can see a full profile of a chosen person, his or her latest tweets, mentions, retweets and you can tweet to the people right in the app. What I like most about this third part of the screen is that the information about a person also includes hashtags that he or she uses most often. So I can decide whether the stuff this person shares is interesting to me or not.
Speaking about supporters and influencers: it might seem close to what Klout is doing. But there's no such thing as rating that you or anybody else can influence. This system is objective, so you don't have to worry that you may get a tweet from somebody which says "I gave you +K in ... , so would you please give me +K in ...?" I know that it's natural for people to do something nice in return when somebody does something good to them. But I hate when somebody does something for me BECAUSE they want something back. I am generally a kind person and if I like what a person is doing and the content they share I spread the word about them (like this time I am spreading the word about Commun.it though nobody asked me to do it). If you are like me in this respect, you will surely like Commun.it and its objectiveness. But as I said sometimes the info it presents is just obvious, especially if you have an analytical mind :) However I find this issue not too serious as this service already helped me make a few very good connections.
Oh, I forgot to say that there's a free and a paid version of Commun.it. I spoke about the free option as I haven't tested the paid one yet (seems like I don't need it so far).
You can find out more about Commun.it founders here.
You can read another great review of Commun.it here: http://sharp-end-training.co.uk/commun-it-review/
Thank you Olga for this great post. I loved the way you gave a general review of the app, but also gave your own "feeling" of using it - what you found useful, what you liked.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you find "most-used hashtags" in member profile useful. We are going to improve member-profile significantly. Our goal is to give you the maximum knowledge (not just information) about the person, so that you can make more informed decisions about the person.
What kind of insights would you love to see there? We thought of adding Klout score, user's social profiles (facebook, linked_in, etc), a section to add notes. Maybe also some analysis of his tweets?
Hi Mike! Thanks for your kind words about my review. I tried my best :)
ReplyDeleteI think you have a great idea about giving us all the possible knowledge about the person. Personally, I am not a big fan of Klout because it's too subjective, users can influence their score themselves which to me seems not exactly an honest behaviour.
However, I think adding Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn accounts is a good idea. Maybe also adding Facebook pages? I use my Facebook account for personal communication, but I have Facebook page for business purposes. As for the most used hashtags, maybe it would be good to rank them somehow so users could see which of those hashtags are used most often. "Analysis of the tweets" - that sounds interesting, but not very clear. Whata kind of analysis do you mean?
For example, what people he talks with lately, what people the person retweets, what links he mentiones, etc. Would that be valuable?
ReplyDeleteHm, that sounds definitely interesting to me. Yes, I think all three components (conversations, RTs and mentions) would make a valuable addition to the user profiles.
ReplyDeleteThis is my first to hear about commun.it. Sounds interesting to me. Thanks for sharing those information.
ReplyDeleteCassy, thanks for your comment! I do hope you find this review useful. That's the reason why this blog exists :)
ReplyDelete