As you prepare to launch your own social experience for a project or organization, there are fantastic and FREE tools to help make your job faster, simpler and smarter. Let them do the heavy lifting for you so you can concentrate on the concept and flow of what you are doing, not the technical execution of it!

Browser. Firefox. You’ve heard about it but may not yet have made the switch. Just so you know, Internet Explorer is not the only or even necessarily the best way to browse the Internet. It’s just the default setting due to vendor agreements with Microsoft. Check out Firefox for a zippy way to browse that’s incredibly customizable (which you want down the road as you get more comfortable online). Plus, hackers aren’t always trying to attack it, so you won’t spend a lot of time processing updates.

Mobile Browser. Opera Mini (of Safari for an iPhone). Again, there isn’t only one way to access the Internet from your cell phone with a data plan! The default browser is set, but you can always download another! Opera Mini can handle scripts that many browsers can’t, letting you log into and launch pages that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to access. Also a nice, zippy browsing experience.

Website Builder. You simply cannot beat Wordpress for an easy way to build a professional Website and easily customize it with plug-n-play functionality, from instant PayPal shopping carts to linking to your Twitter, Facebook and even Constant Contact accounts. If you want a free site where all of the files live on Wordpress’s servers, go to Wordpress.com. You’ll have dozens of templates to choose from, and for small fees, you can point the site to your own custom URL or get under the hood and futz with the styles. If you are more advanced and want an incredibly powerful constant management system hosted on your own servers, then grab the free full install at Wordpress.org. Thousands of templates and plug-ins to create exactly what you want with just a few clicks.

Graphics and Image Editor. I’m a Photoshopper, for certain, but there’s an extraordinary freeware called Paint.Net that also is layer-based. It’s wildly customizable, too; like many open source applications, programmers around the world love to dig into the code and come up with nifty plug-ins to add functionality.

Sticky Notes. As you hunt for information for your site, like facts, quotes and site links to add to your blogroll, the easiest place to paste and save on the fly is a great sticky note program. I like MoRUN.net’s Sticker Lite because the notes always stay visible, even as I switch pages and programs. It’s a truly “sticky” notes program - and you can change note colors, which may matter only to me…

Interactive Tools. Your Web presence will be more social as soon as your audience can actively interact with you. That means polls, surveys, games and more. You don’t have to build those; just grab a widget someone else has made and go! PollDaddy is integrated into loads of social platforms, and it lets you make interactive polls in seconds (though editing them afterward can be a pain - just make a new one and embed it again). Nothing so far beats Google Forms for surveys that actually capture the results in a spreadsheet (Google Docs) for you - and let you see gorgeous graph results with one-click (no skip logic yet, fyi). If you really want to go on a journey, visit WidgetBox and see all of the incredible, portable mini-apps waiting for you to explore and add to your social presence.

Online Back-Up. I believe in triple back-ups, desktop/local external drive/remote server. I like Mozy for the remote “cloud” offering; once you set up and run the first back-up, you can schedule a nightly update that runs automatically! They have a free level, but the annual fee for a lot of space is abot $60. Being able to access files remotely will save you every time you travel.

Music. It takes a lot of time to brainstorm and get creative and build sites and plan Facebook events and launch YouTube channels! You’re going to want to listen to good music from your favorite artists - and other artists that share the same musical genomes (haha). I recommend immediately creating a Coldplay and a Marvin Gaye station on Pandora and hearing everyone else who enters the mix.

If you have tools you love - or already love these tools - leave your thoughts below!

I had an incredible (as in “not to be believed”) experience a short time ago doing outreach for The CLIC. A frustrated school rep sent an email insisting that the site did not work: the video did not play, the links were all dead, what gives? Knowing that the site works perfectly, I asked what browser she was viewing the site with, and it turned out she was using Internet Explorer 6. Which was released in 2001. And wholly retired more than two years ago by Internet Explorer 7. Naturally, that little wrinkle in time has led me to this impassioned post.

Update. Your.  Browser.

To make things simpler and faster for you, as of the date of this post, the current browser versions are:

Firefox 3.05
Internet Explorer 7 (IE8 is in beta - seriously, ditch IE5 and IE6!)
Safari 1.2
Opera 9.63

Why you should keep your browser current. I’m going to start here to get you on the “latest version train,” then I will walk you through how to make it happen.

Computer Safety/Security. This is a huge issue for users of Internet Explorer (IE), which, by virtue of being a Microsoft product, is constantly attacked by the nefarious nerds of the world.  The vulnerabilities these coders expose put all of the contents of your computer at risk, jeopardize every person’s computer in your address book and, most visibly, cause your computer to bug out when browsing, booting up, sipping non-fat lattes or whatever other mayhem they can wreak.  Meanwhile, all of us Firefox-heads and you Mac users need to let go of our false sense of security - every browser has the potential to be hit!  So update automatically or when prompted because it is so much easier than BUYING A NEW COMPUTER.  Or paying a less nefarious but costly nerd to rid your drive of spyware, viruses, trojans, etc.

Using the Internet. This may surprise you (that is a serious statement, not a snark): Web sites are built and maintained based on the latest version of browsers, and as browsers evolve, their functionality changes.  If you find yourself clicking dead links, hearing video but not seeing it, and in general feeling rage at your machine…consider the possibility that your browser may be 2-3 years out of date and the web site may have been built last month.  (Not to mention if you have disabled javascript and pop-ups - you’re seeing a whole lotta nothing in 2009.)

It is really generous of some organizations to spend extra time and money to make their sites “backwards compatible” for old browsers.  We are not one of those organizations.  Using out-of-date software is, in truth, the opposite of working “faster, simpler, smarter.”  We did, however, join Pushup so you’ll get a nifty little message when you visit Planet DMA if your browser needs updating.  The fact that you may not be able to use our site at all is less nifty, but is a message, as well.

Maximizing the Internet. Some of you knew this was coming.  If you are using an old version of any browser, or a browser other than Firefox, you might be living in a digital cave, waiting for Gnthwx, your fellow dweller, to bring home some fresh brontosaurus meat.  (Yes, I know they did not co-exist; work with me.)  Firefox is the leading browser for the digitocracy because:

• Code friendliness. It doesn’t add a bunch of stuff to clean site code as you build and test a web site.  What you code is what you see, for the most part, unlike other browsers, which pad and margin and disable you to death.
• Preferred browser for developers. The code friendliness is why many sites say “this site optimized for Firefox.”  As in, to borrow from Pres. Obama, if you are not using Firefox, “You’re on your own.”  Or, “It is not our fault that your browser doesn’t understand basic CSS which has been around since your last dinner with Gnthwx.”  On the other hand, some things built with Windows-developed tools are locked to only being viewed with IE. Grrrr.
• Customized browsing experience. Firefox has thousands of awesome free “plugins,” so you can add neat functionalities while you’re surfing the web (and given how much time we all spend online now, who wouldn’t want that?).  Wanna encrypt your keystrokes?  Grab an add-on!  Want your toolbars to look like polished wood or replace those dull icons with cute kittens?  Add on!  Just search Tools/Add-ons for anything that pops into your head; you’ll be amazed.

Update your browser. I hope now you’re sold on getting updated!  So here’s the simple part: 1) Check what version of your browser you are using, and 2) If it is not current, update it.  Here’s how.

Check your browser version. On PCs, the version number of pretty much any software is under the “Help” link of your main toolbar. It will say “About [application name].” Click on that to see a pop-up with your latest version. (If you cannot find your Help link anymore in IE, you probably already are on IE7; they have hidden “Help” in the collapsed list to the right of your links for “Page” and “Tools.”  See the images below for both.  On Macs, your main toolbar usually has a menu option named for the application you are using. Click that to see the link for “About Application.”

Firefox

IE7 (IE6 looks more like FF)

Download and install the latest version of your browser. PC users, I recommend doing a system restore before making changes to your computer, so you can reset it if anything goes wrong.

IE

Firefox

Safari

Opera

Google Chrome

One last tip - I strongly recommend you have at least two browsers on your computer so you can use pretty much any site. One of those may need to be IE since some sites are IE-compliant only. You may want the other to be Firefox so you can customize, and it works equally well on Mac and PCs. And while I think Google Chrome is really delicious design, the main reason I use it is when I need to log into the same web site with different user ids at once - each new tab in Google is an independent browser experience! But that’s a different post.