4 Simple Programs for Managing Employee Goals

1. Lifetick Coach

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The manager component to the Lifetick independent goal setting app, Lifetick Coach, is intended for life coaches or mentors to track their mentees’ progress. Features such as mentee-mentor messaging, group communication, SMART goal planning and core value-based goals also make it a viable option for small businesses. Unlike other goal-tracking programs, employees using Lifetick Coach set up their own goals and designate tasks that might help reach those goals. This process empowers employees to organize their goals while giving managers full visibility of their progress.

Price: $29 per month for up to eight employees

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2. CreateSmartGoals

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CreateSmartGoals is another hosted solution to managing employee goals. Managers can set goals for the entire organization, a specific department, or specific employees, who note their progress in a results journal. They can also designate the status of goals and what percentage of each goal is complete. But without the ability to break goals into smaller tasks, the platform becomes more of a task manager than a large-lens goal-setting mechanism.

Price: $30 per month for up to 10 employees

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3. Goalscape

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Goalscape is the ultimate tool for visualizing goals. Your company’s main goal (i.e. “make more money”) goes in the middle circle of the interactive infographic, and subgoals go around it. Each subgoal can be broken down into more subgoals by adding further layers to the infographics. The space each goal takes up can be adjusted to signify its relative importance, and shading signifies progress on each goal.

You can invite as many collaborators as you want into the infographic as well as share it with all of your employees. A helpful feature that allows you to designate who is responsible for the completion of each subgoal, as well as attach notes and files, makes it helpful for managing projects, and the infographic is slick enough to include in presentations.

Price: About $12 per month

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4. WorkSimple

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With WorkSimple, you can assign departments, employees and yourself goals, which are either visible to the entire company or to only the employee and manager. Employees report their own progress and check in on goals that are aligned with their own. When it comes time to give employee evaluations, the platform automatically compiles a report based on goal performance and asks employees to self-evaluate.

Price: $60 per year

Image courtesy of Flickr, xJasonRogersx

Via: mashable.com

Raven Tools, Social Media, Timely, Twitter, Twoolr

We’re always trying to point out a few new tools that you might not have heard of or tried yet. These three definitely worth a shot. I highly recommend that you take some time poking around with them this week.

Timely

Timely helps you schedule Tweets for maximum impact. You load up your Tweets intoTimely, and by analyzing the activity of your followers and the impact of your last 199 Tweets, Timely will select a time to send that Tweet when it will get the most ReTweets, @replies and click-throughs. This is a good tool to consider if you are looking for a way to drive traffic for your blog posts, to an event sign-up page or maybe to a survey. Right now you can track reach and ReTweets. It’d be cool to watch how they develop out the analytics on this even further, maybe offering even more conversion tracking.

Track the performance of your Tweets with Timely

Raven Tools

Raven Tools combines your SEO and social media efforts. It’s social search time baby, that’s just the way it should be. Manage your Twitter account, Facebook page and blog content from Raven Tools, plus track your keyword research and AdWords campaigns. This is truly an internet marketing tool that is suitable for many different types of businesses – startups, agencies, small businesses, independent SEOs. It’s just a great product for a great price. I love the clean interface, too. For more information about this great tool see onefortyer @KristinEDziadul’s great blog post about why she chose Raven Tools above other social media software.

Twoolr

Do you like TweetStats? You’ll love Twoolr. This tool offers a nice quick analysis of your Twitter account. If you’re at an agency and looking for a free or cheap tool to use for a client, I’d check this one out. You’ll get:

• Word cloud: This is some light keyword analysis. It’ll show you which words are used in conjunction with your most ReTweeted Tweets, which is helpful.
• Account growth: Graphs offer general trends on your progress. You can customize these graphs by date.
• Usage: These graphs compare the types of Tweets you are using, how much you are broadcasting your own content versus ReTweeting and @replying your community

This is good for a beginner look at a company Twitter account. You can also subscribe to receive your Twoolr report by email which I could see as being helpful. Check it out!

Facebook Gives App Developers a Cool New Tool

Facebook has announced a new feature for app developers. Starting today, you’ll be able to create and use “Test User” accounts for testing your Facebook applications.

With the new, API-controlled accounts, you’ll be able to create ample test users without violating the TOS, and Facebook won’t disable the profile for being fake or for being a spam account.

Devs can create one test user, or an application can make up to 50 test accounts. Any test account can be accessed by any developer associated with that application. To create an test user account, just use the Graph API with the application access token.

With the API, you can make friend connections between various test user accounts without having to login as one particular user and manually accept friend requests. This nicety should make testing app actions among groups of friends a lot easier.

Once you’re done with the test accounts, they can be easily deleted.

Also, as Facebook developer relations head Douglas Purdy noted in the comments on Facebook’s blog post on the subject, test users will be helpful to Facebook engineers working on platform stability.

“This feature is absolutely key for us to be able to work on stability and bugs,” he wrote. “Our hope is that this lets folks build automated tests to give us an early warning into any breaking changes we miss… This should help people give us narrowed repro of bugs they encounter in their test suites.”

There are a few limits as to what you can do with a test user. Test accounts can’t interact with real users, and they can’t interact with public content, such as a post on a Page. Test users will only have test privileges for the app, and they can’t be converted to non-test accounts.

Given these improvements in how Facebook handles app testing, the company plans to disable all old test accounts and its developer test network by the end of the year.

What do you think of Facebook’s new test user tools? Will they make developing apps easier for you?

11 Twitter & Social Media Tools To Try In 2011

It's hard to keep up with all the tools available to help maximise Twitter and other social media platforms.

But, over the last few months I've been testing some of the new ones I've stumbled across, getting a feel for the ones that have the potential to be the most useful.

Here are the ones I'll probably use more over the next 12 months and perhaps you might give 'em a whirl too...

Note: Most of these tools are free to use or have adopted the 'freemium' model.

11 Twitter & Social Media Tools To Try In 2011

1. Twoolr - complete Twitter statistics

If you are familiar with TweetStats.com you'll think that this is quite similar, but Twoolr provides some additional metrics and insights that TweetStats doesn't.

Twoolr will tell you how your account is being used, when you are most active, what you are tweeting about and which links you are sharing most frequently.

Best bit

The network tab tells you who you are communicating with the most and in what context i.e. @ replies, RT's and #FF's

Invites

I have ten invites to Twoolr in BETA available if you'd like to give it a go.

2. MentionMap - conversation visualisation tool

I think PR people will really like this one.

MentionMap provides a 'live' analysis of what a particular person is talking about on Twitter and who they are talking to.

When you take a look at a blogger or journalist's MentionMap you can get a really clear idea of what they have been tweeting about of late.

Best bit

It's physical output allows you to get a feel for that person at a glance as opposed to trawling through a bunch of bland raw data.

3. The Archivist - tweet library and analysis

The Archivist does what is says, but also provides some really useful insights and data visualisations around the Twitter activity for a specific subject / search term.

Hashtag analysis is really handy with this tool, especially if you want to keep a running tab on how many mentions it is getting over a period of time.

You can also download all the data in an excel file and use as you wish.

Best bit

The data dashboard is really handy, giving you information like the most used associated words and weekly frequency mapping.

4. Qwerly - people search for the social web

This was launched recently and has been billed as the best people searching tool yet if you want to get a feel of someone's social media presence.

It is also handy as a reference guide for your own contacts, listing the contact details you have for everyone you are following and the networks they are using.

Best bit

The most popular users is pretty cool, showing who has been searched for the most.

5. Hash Tracking - hashtag tracking and analytics

What I immediately liked about this tool is the quantifiable value it represents.

While most Twitter tools profiled here are free (or adopt a freemium model), this one is priced in a way that makes it an easy sell internally if you did need to obtain deeper results.

You can try Hash Tracking out now but you'll have to wait a bit until the paid options go live.

Best bit

I assume the best bit will be the reporting, especially as it can feature 100,000 tweets associated with the hashtag in question.

6. TLists - Twitter List search engine

This allows you to search public twitter lists by keyword / topic, bringing up the most relevant results.

The associated stats TLists provide are great, giving you an idea for how frequent each list pushes tweets outs and what sub-topics they mention.

Best bit

It is really simple to use.

7. TouchGraph - visualise the connections between related websites

This will give you a picture of the sites connected to you, your brand and your website giving you a visual representation of what a google search for that term might look like.

This is useful if you want to get a picture of where else you are being mentioned outside your 'owned' web properties.

Best bit

The Facebook specific search option does the same job for you and your friends and who has the most photos toegther which is pretty nifty.

8. FeedLooks - Google reader on steroids

It is always hard to imagine anyone out-googling google, and while I don't think this will get anywhere near achieving this, FeedLooks functionality will probably be borrowed by google at some point.

The interface is clean, items are sorted into 'old' and 'new' as opposed to 'read' and 'unread' and Twitter feeds can be integrated into the dashboard too.

Best bit

A rating next to each post gives an indication of its popularity / hotness, helping you browse and identify content more efficiently.

9. Address Book One - bringing all your contacts together

The amount of ways you can communicate with your contacts only gets bigger and bigger, and consequently more difficult to manage.

This tool is worth a look if you want to centrally manage all of your contacts across all the platforms they are involved in.

It will import address books from Facebook, LinkedIn etc and arrange them on a snazzy dashboard.

Best bit

I've only just started using this one, but the search option seems especially useful if you need to track down someone's contact detail

10. StatPlanet - the infographic creator's best friend

Want to create maps and graphs? Then this is well worth a look.

The best explanation of how this works is via the demo video and these example here also help tell the story more.

Best bit

The interactive graphs breathe life into what would normally be quite static slides.

11. Citrify - web-based photo editing

This is a great tool for bloggers who need to adjust images for posts.

It is also incredibly simple to use and comes without the hefty price associated with Photoshop.

Best bit

The wrinkle removal feature is a god send!

Have you spotted any other tools that you think might be handy in 2011?

If so, I'd love to hear from you.