My 14 top tools for thought leaders

It’s always interesting to go back and see where you were a year or so ago thoughtwise and what you may have learned since then. My ‘old post promoter’ randomly brings up old posts and this one, looking back on 2009 is very interesting to me. In it we find the genesis of what I now call the ‘e1evation workflow’ which now consists of 10.5 tools — many of which have stood the test of time since 2009. The mainstays of this process have been working for me for over 18 months now and continue to produce consistent results across a wide variety of industry verticals. What follows is the original post…

LOL! Here I sit looking back over the past decade, thinking that it seems like only yesterday that we were sitting in fear of Y2K. Now I’m making a living using tools that for the most part didn’t exist back then. It’s a wonderful [tech] life, eh?!

Wrapping up 2009, here’s the list of my favorite social media tools, organized according to their position and role within the e1evation system. This may look like a simple list but it took over a year to develop and that’s not because I’m a slow learner — it’s because I use rigorous filters for inclusion in my social media toolkit. I also am constantly using Einstein’s Razor [“Things must be as simple as possible but no simpler.”] to keep the toolset small. With that intro, here they are…

Perception

• Google Reader
• Feedly
• iTunes [for sme podcasts, silly!]

Publishing

• Posterous
• ScribeFire
• Shareaholic
• FriendFeed
• Facebook Page [along with key applications]
• WordPress

Propagation

• Facebook Page
• Twitter [along with Hootsuite]
• LinkedIn
• Feedblitz
• Tumblr

Preferences [other favorites tools]

• Delicious
• Evernote
• Instapaper
• Scribd
• SlideShare
• YouTube

Effectively using these tools together has elevated my business blog to #474,040 in the United States and #1,612,683 in the world in just 6 months according to Alexa. Imagine what you could do if you added one of these tools to your toolkit every month or so next year!

Questions? Feedback? Leave a comment or use the contact page. And, have a great 2010!

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