In my earlier post, "Is Shoutlet Overselling Itself," I took a look at the Shoutlet website after their product launch announcement and wondered aloud, basically, "What is this thing? Does it work? Or is it hype?"
Jason Weaver, CEO of Sway, the company that developed Shoutlet, was listening and last week offered a couple of us from the Ignite Social Media team a demo of the technology conducted by him and Jason Konz.
Here's what I thought after that demo:
Shoutlet is an evolving product that has good featurestoday and a well-thought out plan for additional features goingforward. The Sway/Shoutlet team understands the space, is realisticand are putting together a product that will save social media agenciesand social media practitioners a lot of time. It may not allow you todo anything that you couldn't do before, but it does seem like it willallow you to do much more of it, much more easily, more quickly, andwith one place to go to measure your efforts.
Basically, what it does is helps you distribute your content moreeasily, via email, via podcast, via RSS, across multiple socialnetworks and multiple content distribution platforms and more. Here'sone easy example: You've got a video you'd like to have on 5 differentsites. Upload it each time and your done. Or upload it once viaShoutlet and your done faster and you can track it in one place. Which one is easier?
They also have pretty easy widget creation toolsthat can work either embedded on websites or on a desktop. You canthen send updated content to these widgets as you wish. Simple. Cool.
What I like about it too is a coming feature that will allow you totake a campaign of a lot of different pieces and shout them outsimultaneously across email, podcast, RSS, video, widget updates, etc.etc.
So, Jason/Jason, and the rest of the Shoutlet team, I said in thefirst post that: "I may yet be their biggest fan and biggest client." We'll work on the last part, but I can say at this point that I thinkyou're on to something that may well end up as an essential tool for asocial media agency like Ignite.