It’s also Fun at Work Day, National Blueberry Pancake Day, National Kazoo Day and Thank a Plugin Developer Day. So, thanks to the developer of previous Cool Tool Edit Flow plugin… I guess?

OK, so maybe today’s weren’t the most useful, but things like National Pie Day (January 23), National Beer Can Appreciation Day (January 24), and National Bloody Mary Day (January 1) CAN be useful social media content when they’re applicable to your industry.

That’s why one of the first things we do everyday is visit checkiday.com to see what weird holidays whoever-it-is-who-declares-holidays has declared that day to be. Just in case!

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So I’m going to tell you about an RSS reader now.

That’s what Feedly is. An RSS reader aggregates all of the sites you want to read in one place, bringing the newest content to the top. You can sort the feeds into folders (I have one for marketing, one for Columbus, one for the drinks industry, one for humor, and one for news) so that, when you’re short on time, you can only read the content that is most important to you. (For me, that’s usually humor. Hey, we all need a laugh.)

When you see the little orange RSS icon on a site, you can click it and Feedly will know what to do with it – or, you can click “Add Content” within Feedly to paste an RSS feed or search for a site.

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Want to see what photos people are sharing on Instagram at your venue?

Type the name of your venue and your city into the search box.

BAM.

(There’s also an iOS app)

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Canva is an extremely easy-to-use… graphic design program? Stock photography website? I really don’t know what to call it, because it combines a lot of great features to create one tool that community managers should have in their toolbox to knock out compelling visual content.

Pick one of their templates or start from scratch, add in cool text elements and upload your own photos, or buy one of millions of images from their library for only a dollar a piece. A dollar!

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Then one day I published this directory of growler fill spots in Columbus, and Andy from The Salt Mines co-working space here in Columbus offered out of the blue to make me a map if I sent him a spreadsheet of addresses. No more than three minutes later he shot back an embed code for a map.

HE’S A WIZARD, I thought… but it turns out he just used BatchGeo, which is an AWESOME free resource if you need to make a map of a few different locations and you’re maybe a little bit technically challenged. Put the business name in column one, the address in column 2, copy/paste into the website, and you have a map, which you can go back and edit as needed. There’s also a paid version if you want to do more with it.

I made these three maps in less than five minutes total. AWESOME.

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The free WordPress plugin Edit Flow has a TON of tools that make group blogging easy and efficient. Custom statuses allow you to define key stages of your workflow – for Drink Up Columbus, it’s Pitch, Assigned, In Progress and Pending Review. The Editorial Comments allow the Editor to send messages to writers about their posts (particularly useful for the “Pitch” and “Pending Review” stages.) Notification emails instantly alert the writer/editor when a post changes status – telling the editor when a post is now in progress or is ready for review, and telling the writer when their content is live.

Other features of Edit Flow include a convenient month-by-month calendar look at your content, editorial metadata to keep track of the important details and user groups to keep users organized by department or functional role.

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Remember the Milk is a great, simple solution for task tracking.. Typing “Client Z proposal due in 3 weeks” schedules the task for three weeks out. Keyboard shortcuts let you postpone, prioritize and tag tasks quickly, and a mobile version lets you update/add tasks on the go.

Best of all, it’s free – they DO have a paid version ($25 a year, still crazy cheap) but the additional features, which are mostly related to the mobile apps, aren’t enough to entice me.

Also, look how cute that cow is. D’awwa.

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It’s proven to boost creativity and, for me at least, productivity.

Coffitivity.com loops that coffee shop sound to produce the same effect – without the five-bucks-a-cup price tag or the spotty wifi.

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The Noun Project delivers just that: simple, beautiful iconography for just about anything. The black-on-white images, though created by hundreds of different designers, all have the same feel so they “fit” together. In fact, the icons on our “Services” page came from The Noun Project.

All of the images are available for free with attribution, or can be purchased outright for an absurdly affordable $2.

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