Sprout Builder is now integrated with the leader in community-powered support, Get Satisfaction, to give our users a channel into the Sprout feedback cycle.  Users can share an idea, ask a question, report a problem and/or (if you like what we’re doing) give us praise. We have integrated Get Satisfaction widgets across our support section.

If you look at the articles in our support section, you’ll see that we have embedded Get Satisfaction widgets.  These widgets provide our users with a direct line to our support team and the Sprout: Get Satisfaction community. Whenever you see a widget that looks like this, feel free to fill it out and connect with us!

You can also use our Get Satisfaction company page to browse popular ideas, questions and see what other users have asked.  This is a great resource to see if someone else has the same concern or feedback that you have.  If it already exists, you can vote on that item to raise its importance. (see image below)

As always, we truly value your feedback and look forward to the on-going conversation around our products.

Jing is a lot like Twitter at first: when you try it you might think, “Interesting, but when would I ever use it?” Then you start playing around with it, see how others are using it and you’re hooked.

This is a guest blog post by Michael Britt, host of The Psych Files podcast.

Essentially, Jing allows you to take a quick (5 minute max) screen capture (still or video) of whatever you’re doing on your computer. If you take a video screencast you can:

• save the video to your computer as a .swf or .mp4 file (.mp4 is only available if you have a Jing Pro account),
• save the video to Jing’s servers (Jing is owned by TechSmith, the makers of SnagIt and Camtasia). Jing will send you a URL to the video which you can share however you like, or
• send the video to your YouTube account.

If you’re having a problem doing something with a program on your computer for example, you could take a quick Jing video and then when Jing sends you the URL (takes about 2-3 minutes), you email/IM the link to someone who can see exactly what you’re doing.

Here’s how you might use Jing with your Sprout: in my previous post I showed how a teacher could use a Sprout to handle all those annoying writing errors (like confusing “then” and “than”) which crop up every year in students’ papers. A teacher could create a Sprout with buttons for each typical writing error, and then link the buttons to a page that contains written examples of how to write properly or links to YouTube videos in which someone else explains how to avoid the writing error.

You could also use Jing to explain things to your students yourself and then embed that video into your Sprout.

To embed a Jing video into a Sprout, get yourself a free Jing account and play around with Jing. Make a video and either:

• save the video to your YouTube account, or
• save your Jing videos to your computer in .swf format.

In your Sprout, open Assets, click “Add Assets” and then upload the .swf from your computer. At that point you can just drag the Jing .swf file to your Sprout or just click the green plus sign below the Jing file and it will be added to your open Sprout.

Couple of things to note:

• When you make your Jing video you’ll probably want to make it small. Hold down the shift key when you’re determining the size of your Jing video and you’ll get some options you’ll probably want to use.
• The Jing video will play find, but it will use its own controls in your Sprout – it won’t work within the Sprout video component unless you upload it to YouTube and embed it from the YouTube URL.

Give it a try. Here’s a quick  video that shows how I combined Sprouts with Jings:

Works great.

- Michael Britt

In our third Sprout Conversations, I had the opportunity to chat with Mark Delville, the co-founder of TxtMovieClub.  Mark is an entrepreneur and Sprout power-user who is constantly leveraging social tools to grow his companies.  Listen to our conversation to learn more about how Mark uses Sprout.

Links and content referenced in the interview:

Txt Movie Club – http://www.txtmovieclub.com/

My guest for this episode is Gavin Conaty.  Gavin is the founder and owner of Evalation and one of the very first Sprout customer.  His team was working on Ben Harper’s web site and promotions when we initially launched Sprout Builder.  We partnered with Gavin and the Ben Harper web team to create one of the very first sprouts.  You can see that particular sprout in our launch video from DEMO08. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Play Sprout Conversations #1 – Gavin Conaty

Ingrid Michaelson sprout

Links:

Evalation – http://www.evalation.com

Ingrid Michaelson – http://www.ingridmichaelson.com

Sprout Builder – http://sproutbuilder.com

Secret Road – http://www.secretroad.com

Here are some photos from the summit:

The Twitter hashtag for the event was #sproutsummit.  Here is a sprout displaying those tweets, click the tweets to RT:

Please leave any comments with your thoughts and opinions on our LA Social Media Summit.

Due to its very nature, I am able to embed it right here in our blog to show you a living example.  Here is what I am calling the PR 2.0 sprout:

As you can see this PR 2.0 Sprout contains six components:

• Press Release: This tab contains the full press release with the ability to select the text.  There is a link to download the full PDF version as well.
• Quotes: This tab contains key quotes from the involved parties.
• Pricing: This tab is optional but was a key component of this release so we gave pricing its own tab.
• Video:  This tab has an embedded video which plays within the sprout.
• Customers:  This tab includes logos of the customers who Sprout has worked with.
• About:  This tab has basic company information with links to our company web site and twitter page.

But how does this integrate with a campaign?  Here is an example of a Press Release 2.0 sprout posted on a Mashable blog post:

As you can see, the PR sprout is embedded right into the post.  This is great for the blog because it provides their readers with additional information. It is also great for the the company or organization who provided the release because they are able to update the information using one interface and publish to everywhere the sprout is posted.  For example, if a quote in the press release changes, they could go into Sprout Builder and update the quotes and then click publish, with one click, it will be updated everywhere.

Takeaways:

• Your press room needs to be engaging and travel with your release in a way that is easily accessible
• We need to cut down on the back-and-forth between journalists and PR teams for things like images, quotes and other media.
• This method is extremely cost effective and can be done by someone on your team, very quickly and easily.

Build your PR 2.0 sprout today with a Free Sprout Builder account.

Here is a tips and tricks video of the PR 2.0 sprout that we @sprout used for a release a couple months ago:
(It is available as a template within Sprout Builder)

Message me on twitter or leave a comment below with your thoughts on social media releases and PR sprouts.

Sproutbuilder: #SWAT Summit was great. A lot of exciting fervor around the companies who build apps and social media marketing tools. 9:07 PM Jul 18th 2008

I have realized that we’ve come a long way in the Twittersphere. As of June 23rd, 2009, we have reached 1800 followers and are at the tipping point where our followers will soon exceed the number of people we are following.  I have constantly tried to keep my tweets conversational and representative of Sprout as a personable start-up, sophisticated software company and a business with clear goals.  There have been customers who’ve raised concerns, given praise and started conversations with us on Twitter.  I have always been there to answer their questions and respond in a timely manner.   It is this transparency and willingness to openly communicate that separates us from many organizations out there who aren’t embracing social media.

Having just attended the #140Conf put on by Jeff Pulver, my passion and understanding of twitter, as it pertains to business and the community, is much stronger.  Teaching a super model how to tweet while I was there certainly didn’t weaken my passion towards Twitter.  A lot of great minds came together and discussed the power of a platform that is so effective at addressing communication in the “now.”  Jeff Pulver goes into more depth about what the #140Conf meant to him and the community in this post and you can see all the panels/speakers here.

Yesterday marked another huge milestone in our presence on Twitter.  I had been spending the last couple months working to secure a new username for our Twitter account.  Since my first tweet, we have been using the username: Sproutbuilder.  This made a lot of sense when the only product we were promoting was Sprout Builder.  Sprout is our company name, not Sprout Builder.  I am very proud to announce that we now have the Twitter username: Sprout.

I need your help to ensure this transistion is smooth and efficient. When replying, linking or telling your friends about us on Twitter, all you need to tell them is @sprout or twitter.com/sprout I also encourage you to open up the conversation and send your tweets my way!

Photo credit: jenconsalvo

So you have a Facebook page and you have a sprout.  This blog post will show you how to get a sprout with a custom tab on your Facebook Fan Page.

I had previously written out each step-by-step but decided to re-do it as a video and only include the crucial code to make this easier.

Here is the code I used for this specific example:

WordPress was treating the single quotes very weirdly so you will need to manually type in the code above.

What you will learn:

• Create a Sprout and use it as your Myspace header
• Create a custom size slate for your Sprout
• Add assets to your Sprout’s pages
• Create a transparent timer
• Insert into your Myspace code and place at the top of your layout

Lets Begin

1. Once logged into Sprout, click the red text in the top right hand corner of the screen that says “Launch Sprout Builder.”

2. Choose Blank Slate for your page template

3. Add a title, project description and choose your canvas size. Choose any predefined size from the drop down list or set the width and height to whatever size you need. In my case it will be 800px wide and 600px high.

4. Open your asset manager to either upload or add a url to any piece of content you plan on using like pictures, video, graphics etc then hit save. In this case I used 2 pieces of content. The first is a countdown timer .swf movie I downloaded from http://www.istockphoto.com and the second is a video from http://www.youtube.com. I uploaded the timer as a file and copied and pasted the URL of the YouTube video and uploaded to the asset manager.

5. Once your content is added to the asset manager, drag and drop it onto your page. I created 2 pages; one for the timer and the second page for the video. Close your asset manager tray, re size the timer movie and video to 800×600 and position both to X=0 and Y=0 on each page.

6. On page 1 which contains the flash timer countdown movie, you need to create a real timer to tell page 1 that when the timer reaches zero to go to page 2 and begin playing the YouTube video. You can do that by selecting the timer component from the general tab inside the components module.

Now that the real timer is added to page 1 you should click the timer object to select it and set it as transparent. Then use the drop down settings to select how many seconds the timer should run before navigating to the next page of your sprout.

7. Now you have a sprout that is 800×600 with a timer and a video that can be used as your Myspace header. Click the green button in the upper right hand corner named publish. Copy the HTML code that is given to you.

8. Paste the code into a text editor like notepad, word or an email body. Find the URL that contains the piece of flash you need to paste into your Myspace code. The URL ends with an .swf extension, contains a hexadecimal code after load/ and looks like http://farm.sproutbuilder.com/load/nABWy2gIFEhiMSI9. This is the URL snippet you need to paste into your Myspace code.

9. Log into your Myspace profile and click edit profile. You can generate code like this using a site like www.mygen.co.uk. The images below will show you where to place the Sprout .swf URL, how to re size your header table and how to push the body of your Myspace layout down the page to make room for your header at the top.

Appendix. Click the images to enlarge:

Paste your Sprout .swf URL and edit the size of your header

Push the body of your myspace page down. *This is important. It creates room at the top of your layout for your Sprout to live!

This was a guest post by Sprout user, Adam Gershenbaum. Follow him on Twitter.