On Friday afternoon we headed down the street to the offices of Google Chicago for the Community Manager UNconference, a participant-driven meeting focusing on the community management role. We attended some great sessions, met some interesting fellow community managers and ate some tasty Domino’s pizza. But best of all, we learned about countless social media and community management tools you may not know about, ten of which we’ll share in this post.
1. UserVoice
website: http://www.uservoice.com
Cost: 4 options ranging from a basic free version to $125/month
What is it? UserVoice is a feedback and helpdesk tool
How it works: UserVoice helps brands stay in touch with their customers. When you add UserVoice to your website, visitors are allowed to post their feedback on your product, service or site. They can also vote up preexisting feedback to send it to the top of the list. Brands can then review suggestions and see what their audience thinks.
UserVoice also has a helpdesk feature so visitors can submit “tickets” when there’s an issue with the product or service. Brands can instantly respond to customer inquiries or problems and track support tickets. A “Kudos” system also exists to collect user praise.
2. list.ly
website: http://list.ly
Cost: Free
What is it? list.ly is a list making tool
How it works: list.ly is a way to create and share lists, as well as integrate collaborative lists into your own blog posts. Think of a crowdsourced version of Twitter lists – plus, whereas Twitter lists only cover Twitter, with list.ly you can embed lists on your blog as well as share via Facebook or Twitter. When you create a list you can decide if you want the list to be commented on, modifiable or allow guest participation.
3. Shoutlet
website: http://www.shoutlet.com
Cost: Pricing and demos available upon request
What is it? Shoutlet is a publishing, engagement and measurement tool.
How it works:
- Social CRM for Facebook, Twitter and Youtube
- Social Canvas to create professional-level designs for Facebook tabs, HTML 5 pages and web apps with no coding required
- Social Switchboard is a “trigger-based” social scheduling tool that launces content when certain milestones are reached
- Social Profiles automatically gathers social data into individual profiles for data acquisition
- Web Apps & Contests to create promotions, sweepstakes and web apps
- Social Analytics is a dashboard with analytics and custom reports
- Social Enterprise provides tools to scale and manage social media efforts across locations, branches and teams
4. Thismoment 
website: http://www.thismoment.com
Cost: Pricing and demos available upon request. Thismoment comes in Basic, Advanced and Premium versions.
What is it? Thismoment is a social media monitoring and engagement platform.
How it works:
- Monitor conversation
- Track brands across the web
- Get daily alerts of mentions
- Filter conversation from noise
- Identify influencers talking about your brand
- Track analytics
5. MentionMapp
website: http://mentionmapp.com
Cost: Free
What is it? MentionMapp is a Twitter visualization tool.
How it works: Each user is connected to the people and hashtags mentioned in most recent tweets. When you arrive at the site, type in the user that you want to map and then click on specific people, brands or topics to highlight their connections.
6. Boxcar
website: http://boxcar.io
Cost: Free
What is it? Boxcar is a mobile notification app for all of your social feeds.
How it works: Featured platforms include Facebook, Twitter, RSS, Growl, Github, Google Voice and more. Boxcar can be used for multiple client accounts, and you can also set time constraints on alerts. For example, limit your time to receive notifications only between the hours of 8am and 7pm.
7. SocialBro
website: http://www.socialbro.com
Cost: Free
What is it? SocialBro is a tool for managing and analyzing your Twitter community.
How it works:
- Visualize statistical info about your followers
- Find your best time to post
- Find your community’s interests
- See who recently unfollowed you or who you’re not following back
- Find your target social media community
- Find influential followers, spammers or new followers
- Track and analyze your competition
- Add multiple accounts
8. eCairn
website: http://ecairn.com
Cost: Pricing and demos available upon request
What is it? eCairn is a social media management and engagement tool
How it works:
- Find community and identify influencers and view as a mindmap sort by social network or geographic location
- Aggregate conversations, trending topics and insights, then see common language in a word cloud to identify the most popular topics in a given community
- Build and manage your enagement campaign by taking notes on conversation, sharing correspondence with your team, or viewing campaign history of your engagement with specific users/topics
- Analyze results
9. Crowdbooster
website: https://crowdbooster.com
Cost: Free
What is it? Crowdbooster is a socia media monitoring tool
How it works:
- See targeted recommendations to help you reach important influencers, create content that resonates with your audience, and send content at the most effective times
- See insights about individual messages to help you understand what is or isn’t working
- Track progress based on your entire social presence or a one-time campaign to find out what helps grow your community
- Identify users that engage the most, as well as key influencers
- Manage multiple accounts
10. Commun.it
website: http://commun.it
Cost: Currently in private beta mode. Request an invite on the Commun.it site.
What is it? Commun.it community management tool for Twitter
How it works:
- See top influencers and supporters
- See relationship context with all DMs and retweets from a user in one thread
- Get specific insights on users
- Find people who have shared links to your website
- Monitor keywords and retweets
Thanks to all the Community Manager UNconference participants for sharing these tools. Do you have a tool to add to our list? Hit us up on Twitter or Google+ with suggestions.
