Tools covered in yesterday's social media discussion:

With so many tools available to businesses and so many ways to effectively use them, I know I moved fast through the discussion. So below you'll find a list of tools and uses you can peruse at your leisure. (click on images to view resource)

Pitch engine is a social media PR platform. Create social media friendly sharable press releases. Include media like photos, video, and audio. Add your twitter pitch, news facts, and links back to your own site and your partners. Tag your releases for increased searchability. Users can send out press releases which receivers can share easily using a variety of platforms like twitter, facebook, friendfeed, yahoo, google bookmarks, technorati, digg, and delicious. Free accounts are available, releases expire after 30 days. Premium accounts are $35 per month, include RSS fees, and release via google news (not guaranteed). A customized newsroom account is $50 per month which includes hosting, increased brand identity customization, and interaction between pitch engine and your or your client's website.

TweetDeck is a free real-time 3rd party Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn desktop client which allows you to set up multiple searches within those mediums. Use TweetDeck to listen to what's being said within your industry by setting up keyword searches, find followers, competitors, and partners. 

bit.ly is a free resource which allows you to shorten and share links to your resources in all social media outlets includes sidebar bookmarklet to send links directly from the webpage you are viewing, browser extensions, allows you to automatically track auto-shortened links from tools like TweetDeck, Twitterfeed, and Seesmic Desktop and includes mobile options as well. Also connects to your google docs account to create spreadsheet for sharing data.

Flickr allows you to share and photos and create groups around your brand. Create automatically updated slideshows using tags, create groups for you, your employees, and your clients to share photos, screenshots, and creative materials. Groups and accounts can be open or closed. Allows you to decide on the level of restriction around sharing of your photos on a photo by photo basis. Track views and top referrers to your photos.

Create fan pages and groups which clients and partners can join. Post photos, videos, and links to content on your site. Allows you to create ad campaigns which are highly targeted and cost-effective to find activity and individuals in your sector.

Get extremely cost-effective branded email, shared documents, shared calendaring, groups, and sites. Personal accounts using gmail include google reader, a RSS aggregator and sharing application and Feedburner which allows you to aggregate and publish your RSS feeds into newsletter and other formats. Google creates a powerful platform for managing your business hosted in the cloud, accessible anywhere.

Contact us for more information on implementing these tools within your business. Other collaboration tools are available - examples here.